A Party Piece 

First published Sydney Morning Herald , January 2006 as 'Dressed for distress' 

My parents were Beauty and the Beast at the fancy-dress party that sparked their 1950s shipboard romance. In a photograph my mother smiles, elegant in a sheath dress and drop earrings; my father is grotesque and scowling, the handsome Beast at her side. They did not know then that this image, taken as soon as they met, would echo through the rest of their lives.

In our small town my father was a favourite at the local amateur theatre for his intricate props and costumes. He himself always played the fool, the beast, the hunchback - but he transformed the bare town hall into a candlelit ballroom for the Rotary Club dinner dance and show, and on the theatre stage, from sheets of silver roof insulation, he made a glittering lake for Ophelia to drown in, night after night. Once, after constructing a perfect drawing room for an Agatha Christie manor house, he made a dead body out of pink latex and dressed it in our lounge room. It was thrilling, that a suited corpse with real hair lay murdered and bleeding on our living room floor. 

When we children were occasionally allowed to visit the theatre or the parties, the scraps we’d seen in our garage – the jigsawed plywood shapes, the hanks of fabric and cardboard coils – had become the furniture of weird new worlds, peopled by elegant strangers with turbans and jewels and jagged, beautiful voices.

When you’re a sallow, bookish country girl and you’ve had a glimpse of transformation, the yearning for it is difficult to kick. In 1978 I was twelve, and my father’s quirks and homegrown fame only filled me with an endless, scorching shame, and I wished fervently for a normal family. One that drank beer and scotch instead of flagon wine, and owned a full set of Funk and Wagnall encyclopaedias. A family like my best friend Joni’s. 

That summer I went to an adults’ fancy-dress party with Joni and her parents. I was still flat-chested while Joni was growing breasts; I had a long nose where hers was a perfect snub. She knew about boys and had let one touch her beneath her T-shirt while she smoked with him under his parents’ house. When she told me about this I felt sick, but she was elated. 

Joni was going to the party as Kitty Sullivan from the TV show. I, though, had seen young women dressed in gauzy wisps of muslin in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I had seen vast Victorian dresses balancing like soft rustling boats at the sides of a stage, and watched Fairy Patience in powdery wings and white stockings take flight up into the rafters. 

But these were my father’s creations. And for this party I was certain, with a brutal new instinct for severing, that my father must have nothing to do with my metamorphosis.

With Joni I had watched countless midday movies from the slippery luxury of her gold velour lounge. Perhaps it was Hollywood, and my own contradictory longings for disguise and womanhood that led me – in a breathaking example of reaching beyond my potential - to choose Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra as my muse.

There’s a photo of the two of us squinting into the afternoon sun in Joni’s parents’ driveway. She stands grinning with hands on hips, her long plaits curling at the ends, and the skirt of Kitty’s school uniform high on her tanned thighs. I stand stiffly beside her, a fawn batik sarong wrapped tight around my board-flat torso, my puffy dull brown fringe plastered down in a hopeless attempt at glossy black bangs. I even fashioned a lumpy asp from tinfoil, leaving it sticking up in the place where my cleavage would never develop.

At the party Joni was befriended by some older girls too cool to have dressed up at all. They wore skin-tight Wrangler jeans and boob tubes, their shoulders smooth and glossy. They declared that Joni looked tops. At last, one of them lit a cigarette and turned to me, appraising me up and down, grinning. Until now unacknowledged, I smiled awkwardly back. She took a drag of her cigarette, narrowed her eyes and asked, ‘Do you feel stupid?’

I could manage only a sickly grimace.

‘No offence,’ she said, exhaling smoke all over me, ‘but you look it.’

When our father died, it left a wound in our world so deep I remember thinking it would be best if my mother died too. The transformation required now to keep on living was an act of magicianship not even our father could have managed. 

One night I dreamt of the tall Camelot Castle hat, with its staircases and turrets and tiny silver flags, that he’d made for my sister’s school Easter bonnet parade. In the dream, I could see him though one of the fingernail-sized windows, dancing inside the castle with our mother. 

A few months after his death our mum was invited to a fancy-dress party at the theatre. She’d never spent much time there, preferring the solitude of her garden to the frenzied partying of the local dramatic society set. But perhaps it was time, she thought, to push herself through the wall of her grief, to crawl back into a space among the living. And the theatre was his space, after all – perhaps the place, outside our family, where he was loved most of all. So she accepted her invitation to A Night with the Stars – Come as your Favourite Film or TV Character.

She arrived at the party alone. She walked across the cold bitumen carpark to the entrance where bright light and music slid from the cracks around the door. She opened it and stood there unnoticed, staring around the room as the breath rushed out of her. The party was full of Marilyn lookalikes in white satin halter dresses; there were a couple of Audrey Hepburns, a Lawrence of Arabia. Then someone called out and the faces began to turn towards her.

In her first outing as a forty-eight-year-old widow, our mother had gone to the party as Kermit the Frog. She stood in the doorway clutching her handbag, wearing a stretchy, lime-green, high-cut jumpsuit leftover from my sister’s adolescence. She wore bottle-green tights, a green balaclava and halved ping-pong balls with drawn-on eyes stuck to her head. In the final terrible flourish, she had put green washing-up gloves on her hands and feet.

She stood in the doorway while the Marilyns and Audreys, the Scarlett O’Haras and the Rhett Butlers stared. 

She nearly fainted, she said later. But someone stepped towards her with a glass, and she accepted it in her green rubber flipper. And then something of our father’s gift for transformation came to her, and she took a deep breath. She sipped the drink, and after a pause, she straightened and walked on into the room.

© Charlotte Wood 2006