COSTUME FITTING
S02E26. All Pink.
PREVIOUSLY — The date of the Blue But Happy performance draws closer, and BBH keeps producing words — just not the ones belonging to the novel HAPPY DREAM. Collages, scripts, and new writing experiments disperse the narrative into a constellation of alternative forms. Complicating matters further is Great Mother, who has grown unexpectedly fond of illustrating Pretty Swanling, the short fairy tale BBH once wrote almost by accident. Her sketches of ducks, geese, and other waterfowl transform the little story into something unforeseen, planting the suspicion that the web-footed heroine might carry greater symbolic weight than BBH is willing to admit. As the show takes shape, a deeper unease emerges: Empress has not replied to the email in which BBH invited her. Sarcasm, digressions, and new images invade the space of writing, and BBH finds herself facing a difficult truth: perhaps she is building — with great energy — everything that surrounds the story, except the story itself.
“Then BBH must wear nothing but pink.” — Great Mother declared it.
Witch silent.
Me, still.
Pages scattered across the floor.
Great Mother kept her gaze fixed on Witch, slowly uncrossing her arms — brushing the velvet of the sofa beneath her fingertips, sitting there rigid.
You see, Witch had not taken it well. She had entrusted the costumes for my performance to Great Mother, and while she (Witch)while she had been bending over backwards to ensure her gallery hosted a culturally coherent show, what does Great Mother do? She grows lazy about costume planning.
Is she joking? Mocking her? Trying to sabotage us?
She (Great Mother) might as well keep her sly theories that I should enter the stage exactly as I am — worn jeans and a T-shirt — because “the real work will be done by those cotton-candy pink hairs“ of mine.
Let’s unmask her then: Great Mother is neglecting her one assignment in order to sabotage me, sabotage Witch, and nourish her precious narcissism — selling us her… pusillanimity… as a “cultured aesthetic choice.”
You’ll have to take my word for this: Great Mother had fallen silent.
Steady gaze.
Lips slightly parted.
I expected a dismissive huff from her, one of her sarcastic little laughs. For a moment I feared that, just to wound Witch, she might burst into tears.
Instead Great Mother crossed her arms, sat down on the turquoise Camaleonda in Witch’s living room (she had been standing while Witch — also standing — was tossing the papers listing her stage outfits, various and sophisticated, one for each performance, into the air, while for me there wasn’t even a Post-it, as if the protagonist of the show did not require a costume designer), and answered exactly as I said. That then BBH must wear nothing but pink.
NOT TO MENTION THE OBVIOUS — Pink, intrinsically contradictory, is not only BBH’s narrative colour: it is the natural colour of her hair. Like her, that pink mane refuses to take itself too seriously — but if you look closely, it is strangely radical. And indeed, truth be told, Great Mother was right about one thing: BBH doesn’t have to do anything. Her hair already does everything. But still.
It’s not that simple. Pink is associated with a certain frivolity — another layer added to our potential discredit. And besides, creating an entire monochrome wardrobe with the first deadline fourteen days away is what one might call an undertaking.
But if there is one thing Witch does not lack, it is contacts. And the ability to use them.
Especially through the connections of her young sister-in-law: Doll.
A small aside: if I haven’t already said it (but I know I have), Doll is currently developing her high-jewellery brand, whose debut is not imminent but close. She happened to be in town while the scene described above was unfolding in Witch’s living room, and she was summoned immediately.
ANOTHER ASIDE — This week’s deviation is officially fashion. One almost misses the days when BBH quoted Better Than Luck, at least showing the intention — if not the ability — to reach HAPPY DREAM. But here we are again, lingering over what her character should wear.
Doll arrived in her own sweet time, shopping bags hooked at her elbows à la Cher Horowitz. But the idea of the pink-haired artist character dressed entirely in pink (which Great Mother had meanwhile begun sketching) struck her as the perfect demonstration of the thesis she herself wants to pursue with her jewellery: the eloquence of colour when it speaks one shade at a time.
She insisted the pink jewellery would be her department.
And she said something along the lines of a monochromatic character being memorable — that BBH is already her own branding.
BRANDING? — Here we go: the most unbearable implications of involving Doll.
Have you ever felt like a stage prop?
I have.
While Witch, Great Mother, and Doll treated me like an illogical and imperfect Barbie.
An artist shouldn’t have messy locks and dismiss fashion as superficial? Cliché!
A character shouldn’t wear a single outfit if she wants to be iconic? Cliché!
Pink is frivolous, childish, repellent, intellectually counter-intuitive? Cliché!
WELL — And what are exclamation marks? Try imagining those same sentences with a dignified full stop. Imagine if these delightful abstract speculations about colours and philosophies were serving a plot, an arc, a moral (exclamation mark).
One thing must be said.
Letting Witch, Great Mother — and finally Doll — speak about my character with such individual passion, sometimes forgetting that she was my creation and not theirs, gave me a brief, pure moment of clarity.
And so that modesty does not obstruct the truth: it gave me a brief, pure moment of joy.
Their confident pronouncements about this and that made me feel responsible for having created a material that, how shall I put it, is not only mine.
I mean — shouldn’t it not be only mine?
IS THIS THE MOMENT? — The moment when a creation stops belonging to its author? Granted, BBH still cannot write HAPPY DREAM. But she has in her hands a narrative that others treat as if it were real. If the performance is building a character, what is she waiting for to reveal it through the novel?
Now I will close this laptop and several hours of costume fittings now await me, opinions from Witch, opinions from Great Mother and — dulcis in fundo — opinions from Doll.
And make no mistake: if jeans and a T-shirt can defend a certain authority or irreverence, dressing from head — literally — to toe in pink leaves very little room for modesty.
See you next week, HAPPIDREAMERS,
— BBH
