Naturally, with a salary of but three dollars a week, we turned to the management for our costumes. I wonder what the danseuse of to-day would think of the costume worn by her sister of the "sixties"? Now her few gauzy limb-betraying skirts reach but to the middle of the thigh; her scrap of a bodice, cut far below the shoulder blades at the back, being absolutely sleeveless, is precariously held in place by a string or two of beads. To be sure, she is apt to wear a collar of blazing diamonds, instead of the simple band of black velvet that used to be sufficient ornament for the peerless Bonfanti and the beautiful and modest Betty Rigl, who in their graceful ignorance of "splits" and athletic "tours de force," managed in their voluminous and knee-long skirts to whirl, to glide, to poise and float, to show, in fact, the poetry of motion.
But we, this untrained ballet, were not Bonfantis nor Morlachis, and we wore our dancing clothes with a difference. In one dance we were supposed to be fairies. We wore flesh-colored slippers and tights. It took one full week of our two weeks' engagement to learn how to secure these treacherous articles, so that they would remain smooth and not wrinkle down somewhere or twist about. One girl never learned, and to the last added to the happiness of the public by ambling about on a pair of legs that looked as if they had been done up in curl papers the night before.
We each had seven white tarlatan skirts, as full as they could be gathered—long enough to come a little below the knee. Our waists were also flesh-colored, and were cut fully two or three inches below our collar-bones, so you see there was plenty of cloth at our backs to hook our very immature wings to. We had wreaths of white roses on our heads—Blanche, who was very frank, said they looked like wreaths of turnips—and garlands of white roses to wave in the dance. I remember the girl with the curled legs was loathed by all because she lassoed everyone she came near with her garland—so you see we were very decorous fairies, whether we were decorative or not.
Of course we were rather substantial, and our wings did seem too thin and small to sustain us satisfactorily. One girl took hers off in the dressing-room and remarked contemptuously that "they couldn't lift her cat even!"
But another, who was dictatorial and also of a suspicious nature, answered savagely: "You don't know nothing about wings—and you haven't got no cat, nohow, and you know it—so shut up!" and the conversation closed.
In our second costume we were frankly human. We still wore dancing skirts, but we were in colors, and we had, of course, shed our wings—nasty, scratchy things they were, I remember. Then for the drill and march we wore the regular Fire Zouave uniform.
It was all great fun for me—you remember I was not stage-struck. Dramatically speaking, I was not yet born—I had neither ambition nor fear—I was simply happy because I was going to earn that, to me, great sum of money, and was going to give it to my mother, and planned only what I should say to her, and had no thought at all of the theatre or anything or any person in it.
The donning of fleshings for the first time is an occasion of anxiety to anyone, man or woman. I, however, approached the subject of tights with an open mind, and Blanche freely gave me both information and advice. She chilled my blood by describing the mortifying mishaps, the dread disasters these garments had brought to those who failed to understand them. She declared them to be tricky, unreliable, and malicious in the extreme.
"There's just one way to succeed with 'em," she said, "and that's by bullying 'em. Show you're afraid and they will slip and twist and wrinkle down and make you a perfect laughing-stock. You must take your time, you know, at first, and fit 'em on very carefully and smoothly over your feet and ankles and up over your knees. See that they are nice and straight or you'll look as if you were walking on corkscrews, but after that bully 'em—yank and pull and drag 'em, and when you have 'em drawn up as tight as you can draw 'em, go at 'em and pull 'em up another inch at least. They'll creak and snap and pretend they're going to tear, but don't you ever leave your dressing-room satisfied, unless you feel you can't possibly get down-stairs without going sideways."
"But," I remonstrated, "they'll break and let my knees through!"