“Mama, you know we aren’t supposed to wear this junk to class!” I yell down the hall. No response.
I march into her workroom, the tutu flopping up and down like it’s trying to take off. There are moving boxes everywhere, but instead of unpacking, Mama’s gluing huge feathers onto what was once probably a nice hat. She mostly makes costumes, but she’s been on a hat kick lately. I know Mama is very talented—lots of people have said so—but to me, that hat looks like an ostrich’s backside. Loose sequins in a rainbow of colors shimmer on the floor.
Mama doesn’t notice me come in. Normal people hang out in jeans at home, but not her. She’s wearing one of her creations; she calls it the Gold Mine Dress. She got the idea for it from a book about the California gold rush. The skirt of the dress is supposed to look like a mountain, so it flares out at the bottom. When Mama’s standing still, the only colors you see are chocolate brown and gray, like soil and rocks, but when she moves you can see flashes of gold from the shiny threads and beads she’s sewn deep into the creases. She loves it, but says it doesn’t read well onstage. That means it looks good close up, but from far away you’d miss the interesting details. (“Interesting details” are things that make clothes special. I wish my tutu did not have so many of them.)
The hat she’s working on would read well onstage even if the stage were on Mars and you were looking at it from Earth. “Fabulous . . . mm-mmm, perfect; maybe one more orange . . .” she says to herself as she chooses feathers and holds them up to the hat to see how they look.
