In 'the stinky room,' USU theatrical costume designer finds her Candyland

December 12, 2000

By Marcie Young
Hard News Cafe

Melinda Kay McDermott struggles with the key. The door is locked tight, and even with the right key she has to turn the handle just so to get the door open. She jiggles the silver key around in the lock, and with a pop the door swings open to a world of pink taffeta, golden masks and Canadian Mountie uniforms.

"This is our playground," the 21-year-old costume design major says with a grin. "Costume Storage Land."

The room is packed from ceiling to floor --a height of more than 10 feet --with 1970s disco dresses ("Double knit polyester, and it's ribbed. Oh my gawd.") mobster pinstriped suits and black lace bodices, among other things.

"Pants, eehhh. Suits, eehhh. Kind of boring, but they're men -- what are you going to do?" McDermott says of the first row, which is filled with business suits, jackets and slacks.

She runs to the end of one of the well-packed rows and yells across the room. Her normally ear-piercing screams are barely audible as she giggles at what she calls the "stereophonic effect" of the nearly soundproof room.

"I want to stack all this stuff around my building," she says of the costumes, "so I don't have to hear my neighbors."

Show after show and year after year, the Utah State University theatre arts department squeezes more floral print dresses, more floor-length leather jackets and more bellbottoms into the already overcrowded storage room. The four-car-garage-sized room now holds hundreds and hundreds of costumes from every era and time known to humans. The oldest costume, McDermott says, probably goes back more than 50 years.

"It is so anally retentive organized, you couldn't fit a fly between the garments," McDermott says as she points toward the back of the room to a door buried in a corner. She walks over to the corner -- her eyes light up like a kid watching a trapeze artist as she unlocks the second door. The aroma of mothballs escapes.

"It's actually 'the wool room' or 'the stinky room,'" McDermott says of the walk-in closet sized room. "But I call it the Candyland room because it makes me happy."

Masks, hats and furs line the built-in shelves and clothing racks. The sun god, with golden flames erupting from its papier-mache helmet, is perched on the highest shelf. The mask was one of six McDermott created for USU's 1999 production of Ming Lee and the Magic Tree. In addition to the sun god, she brought the rain god to life with a mask of sparkling silver paint and allowed the mountain god to become real with Mount Fuji painted across his masked face.

Although McDermott said the gods allowed her creative side to really get going, the fun part and the "biggest pain in the butt" was creating the masks and make-up for the animal characters. The actors would transform into the beasts McDermott created with make-up and fur.
"It was so much fun to make them come alive," McDermott says of her creations. "[One actor] would scratch the fur on her head, and it was so delightful to look at."

The animal masks were composed of mostly papier-mache, face paint and fake fur, which McDermott glued to the masks in chunks, she explains as she locks up the costume storage room.

"I would walk home with clumps of fur stuck to me," she says. "I got a lot of funny looks."

Less to less
But the Brigham City-bred and Salt Lake City-born theatre arts major didn't jump into college life thinking she would put gluing fur onto painted faces. Nor did she think she would end up building and designing costumes for the Charles Schulz-inspired play, You're a Good Man Charlie Brown. McDermott, the head student costume designer for the show, graduated from Box Elder High School in 1997 and began her freshman year as an art major at USU. Although she planned to get out of Utah, she stuck close to home because she couldn't afford the high tuition of out-of-states schools.

McDermott's father thought his daughter was making a bad decision when she said she told him her initial plan was to major in art. When she told him she switched to costume design, he thought she was really stepping down.

"Like going from less to less," McDermott said.

But McDermott's dad was just concerned about his daughter's welfare -- would she be able to provide for herself? Would she be happy?

"He just didn't want me to be a bum," she said. Regardless of what her dad was thinking about her career choice, McDermott knew she wanted to get into the costume design business after she took a make-up class and a sewing class.

"By sheer luck and accident I happened across such a great theatre department," McDermott says as she watches a fellow costume designer put the fishing touches on a baby blue, Napoleon-style hat.

During the show, pastel Charlie Brown prop will be transformed into a hat from Linus' blanket. McDermott compliments the way the fabric pops out on each side of the hat, and claps her hands joyfully as the novice designer plops the blankie-inspired hat on her head.

Hats for the world
McDermott, however, isn't the only one in the costume design room giving tips.

The costume design faculty supervisor, Nancy Hills -- "like many small mountains," she says -- watches students sew and create hats for another upcoming production, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. A dozen or so students fill the costume design room, piecing together hats with buckram, a fabric that has been woven together with glue. Hills stretches the material, forming the hat into a bonnet shape.

"These are great stock hats," Hills says of the dozen or so hats the students helped create. "We just doubled our bonnet collection."

Brandy Jenks, another costume design student, laughs, "We can rent hats to half the world now."

The Saturday morning and afternoon hat workshop allowed Hills to get her accessories for her spring show in order. Although McDermott has been working on her designs for Charlie Brown and his gang, she has also shared her time with Hills in the hat-making workshop.

McDermott says no one can pull the costumes for a big show together single-handedly. Hills, who is in charge of making 35 dresses, dozens of military uniforms, suits and accessories knows she could never do it by herself, just as McDermott knows she could have never pulled off the Charlie Brown costumes alone.

"There's a certain loyalty between shows," Hills says as she pauses to reach for a misplaced zipper. "You gotta pay your dues and help other people."

With all the work researching time periods, dyeing cloths, drawing costumes, actually piecing the clothing together and making all the post-dress rehearsal fixes, it seems like "we work on a show for-EV-er," McDermott says.

Hills tries on her half-completed bonnet, and says, "It's hundreds and hundreds of man hours for one show."

Baptism by fire
McDermott has spent more than 45 hours making a dress for just one of the cartoon-like characters. But Lucy's skirt is finally doing what it's supposed to, she says of the way the waffle-textured, blue material pops up in the regular Peanuts comic strip fashion.

"It's a lot of baptism by fire," she said. "If you're weak of soul, you're not gonna make it."

McDermott says her friends can't believe how much time she spends in the costume design shop, Room 229 of the Chase Fine Arts Building. But she loves what she does, especially when she can see results of her nine-hour daily shifts.

"I'd rather make the sacrifice and do my work than be a business major and have time to hang out," she says as she clips around the pattern of Lucy's short dress.

Although McDermott, says she has spent more than 100 hours on the comic strip inspired show, she was worried about the amount of freedom she was going to have in creating the characters through th "I thought, 'This will suck,'" McDermott says.

But that was before she starting thinking about how she could create human qualities without being too "cartoon cheesy." The director, department professor Kevin Doyle, didn't want Charlie, Snoopy, Lucy and the other characters to be too artsy and seemingly drawn. Instead he wanted McDermott to create costumes that would allow the audience to see the qualities of the famous cartoon children.

"They all look a little bit fuzzy," McDermott says. "It's cheesy, but not like Star Trek Convention cheesy."

Although McDermott says she wasn't sure about Doyle's vision for the costumes, she also said applying his ideas was critical to the show's success. And with all the time she puts into a show, McDermott says it's hard to step back and not take too much credit. When costume artists look for that type pf recognition, they are looking for their work to stand out among all of the other work put into the play. The direction, the acting, the scenery and the lighting all need to complement each other, she says, because if they don't, the show won't seem real.

"It's a double-edged sword," McDermott says. "People don't realize what the costumes mean to a show, but if they do, they realize it is just a show."

When all of the pieces don't fit together, McDermott said a show becomes "chaos on stage."

Death and rebirth
"We have all this stuff," McDermott says pointing to random pieces of mismatched fabric, hair bows, shoes and multipurpose glue.

The glue, she says, is what costume designers refer to as "ambiguous glue" because it is used for everything, and not one specific thing, in the design shop.

"We hate hot glue, because we hate getting burned," she says. "We're picky."

It's stuff like the glue, hard work and dedication of the costume design students and professors that allow rooms like "costume storage land" to stay well packed. Each costume brought a character to life for a couple of weeks, but with the closing of a show, the character dies, Jenks says as she puts finishing touches on a light pink bonnet.

The characters, however, don't just drop out of minds, Hills adds.

"The characters live in other people's memories," she says.

Jenks agrees, but says the costumes they create are able to rise from the dead over and over.

"They live and die and live again," Jenks says as she walks downstairs to the place McDermott deemed "Costume Storage Land" to add an old dress to the collection.

Photos by Marcie Young