What advice would you give to someone who would like to work in your position or within your organization? If you want or need to make a good income from your job, this may not be a good choice. If you want a lot of free time for a family, this is also not a good choice. You might do better to get a job that pays well and has time off that you can spend being a “hobby” costumer. There are brilliant costumers who do cutting edge work who do not do it for a living. Much of the innovation in our field is done by people who are not relying on costuming as their primary income and having different perspectives gives them great outside of the traditional working costumer’s “box” of thinking on how to make things. If you do still want a job like mine, you want to take your academic work just as seriously as your design work. Most theatrical costume design jobs (that pay enough to live on) are ones associated with academic institutions. So, the more academic degrees you have, the more articles you publish, the more conferences you present to, and the best student opinion forms you get are your ticket to reliable employment. It is possible to get promotion to full professor with design work, but it is much slower than doing it with academic work and publications which non-theatre professors understand. PUBLISH STUFF! Other academics understand it, and it enhances your reputation and job prospects. In all theatre jobs, get along, don’t gossip, get work done, always be civil, calm, and non-dramatic. That stuff belongs on stage, not backstage. Each of us needs to strive to be a calm working cog in a big artistic machine. Take pictures of everything, organize them, and maintain a good-looking portfolio online and in print.
Can you describe your career path? As an undergrad, I took classes to become a costume worker or a history teacher. I love history, but really did not want to teach it. After graduation I applied for all sorts of stuff but the jobs that picked me were pretty much all costume ones. I did a lot of “overhire” (hired as an extra costume maker when someplace was in a crunch and needed extra help) and worked as a costume crafts worker, then pattern cutter, then costume shop manager for a small college. This was very difficult because while I had good skills, I have social handicaps that make it absurdly hard to network, which is essential to this sort of grabbing work through word of mouth. I’m somewhere on the autism spectrum and really do not know even now how to do this, which is an enormous challenge that requires massive workarounds. I eventually realized I had to go back and get an MA or MFA to do this at a bigger college for a living wage. In grad school I got more fully into the design and academic parts of the thing, and quickly realized what I wanted was a university costume designer job. I watched during my time at CSU Fresno two different costumers come in and go through the hiring process and saw by the end of my MA that any job like this in California had hundreds of applicants, so an MA (which was standard in many places) was insufficient, only MFAs were even considered, but PhDs made the top of the pile even if their portfolio was not as strong. I was about to graduate with an MA, so I realized my choices were to start over for an MFA, or jump into a PhD program. So I did the latter as academic work was always my strong suit. I worked on a PhD for lots of years, partly at UGA and partly finishing the Dissertation while working at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I worked at UAF for 18 years, applied for and was promoted to full professor and bought a modest 3 bedroom house in Fairbanks. Apart from print publication, I was also an early website maker and in 1996-97 started up The Costumers Manifesto site which was the largest and most visited costume site until I had to abandon it as a project in 2004-5 to fight cancer. This also helped me with promotion, networking, and general fame. (One of my social workarounds). In 2007 my late Mom was dying, and my dad needed looking after, so I threw it all away and moved in with my parents. In 2008 I got a ½ time costume designer staff job at Diablo Valley College that I could drive to from where I was living with my parents as a caregiver. A year after my mom died, I was able to add being a PT instructor at DVC. In 2019 my dad died, and I inherited a SF Bay Area house I could never have bought on my salary at either UAF or DVC.
How has the pandemic impacted your work and career? Well, it did different stuff at different stages, but generally it added work to my two jobs. Our introduction to lockdown at DVC happened just minutes before we were about to start our first tech rehearsal of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We heard the campus would be closed to students the next day as everything was going to start and decided to let actors wear their costumes a day early, (1st Dress is the Monday after tech in our theatre) and film the rehearsal for them to watch and share with family. We madly photographed everything and the makeup, hair and costume crew which were called but not planning on that were pulled into setting up for a day early dress and then being audience. The following day the whole 7 counties of the SF Bay area went on lockdown where only grocery, hardware and big box stores were open for necessities, and it stayed that way for months (saving countless lives). Firstly, like every instructor I suddenly went from teaching face to face classes to teaching online ones (which continued till Fall 2022). The good news was I was better equipped to do this than most as I had experimented with teaching asynchronous costume classes wholly or partly online while at UAF in the early Aughts, I also had co-authored a set of DVDs on stage makeup (also at UAF) with me as talking makeup head. I had been creating and collecting tons of images for use online since 1996, so I had a lot to work with. As a result, I was able to create online Canvas classes that did not need everyone meeting for zoom lectures, and which were exciting eye-candy. My staff job was in limbo to begin with, because, of course, do you need a costume designer when you are not allowed to do live shows? We staff in our division were all encouraged by our dean to figure out jobs that needed doing in our various departments that we could do either online, or alone in our respective buildings. I started organizing and digitizing an online archive of past DVC Drama shows through Google Sites and Google Photos. The Department of Workforce Development who oversees internships and work study had worked with me as an instructor of record for our Drama students doing internships, saw some of what I was doing, and promptly hired me over the Summer of 2020 to help them with their own Canvas pages and parts of their website to make them more eye-candy and have more online stuff students could do. Also our usual drama students who sign up for internships suddenly could not get theatre internships to fulfill their requirements for our Technical Theatre Certificate, so I invented internships with a revived version of The Costumer’s Manifesto website where they would research and write up articles for it, or I’d set them out to make their own portfolio sites, because this activity did not violate the lockdown, but still was theatre career related work. I occasionally continued to have these sorts of DVC Drama Archive interns even after I could meet up with them face to face. In Fall 2020 we were allowed to film a movie of a play The Dreamer Project, adapted into a film made on campus, for which I essentially gave the students costume instructions for them to self-design their own wardrobe for the film. (They did great!) as at the beginning they were still advising us not to get close enough to touch… I was then tasked instead with designing and making a group of shadow-puppets to be used in part of the film. Meanwhile we prepped up for doing a film version of the Go-Go’s musical Head over Heels in Spring. I did all sorts of research, making, and testing of different types of masks as we lead up to that. Meanwhile, I was filming my own how-to videos of costume sewing at home in a big costume workshop/video studio I made from my late parent’s big master bedroom. In Spring 2021 the musical was cast and we were allowed to film again, but everyone had to be in masks, it was a huge undertaking with the Music, Film, Drama and Musical Production (sound recording) departments all involved from January until late May in filming, editing, etc. Many if not most of our students found it a life changing event, and we were all so careful at all points with masking and maintaining social bubbles outside of the filming itself that out of the close to 100 people involved, not one caught Covid, even though most students weren’t eligible for shots till late in the process, and even faculty (who got priority after seniors, medical and first responders did) did not have it for a couple of months. Many nights we were working with a cast of 25+ and a crew twice that. We wire filming both indoors on our stage and outdoors all over campus. While the costuming was semi normal (I pull bits and pieces, I try them on actors, I decorate and alter them till we end up with something cool. If we can’t, we make something amazing from scratch.) The set situation kept requiring more work because things had to be seen to look good up close on screen, and things had to be able to break down and move from place to place at all hours of the day and night. So I and the movie production assistants who were assigned to costumes switched to helping with set dressing both for the stage and most especially outdoors where I came up with a way to make giant Disney type flowers out of recycled plastic garbage and spray paint, and we just kept making them until we could take any outdoor space with a bit of scrubby green bushes on campus and quickly have it look like this, or spray old bed sheets and add more flowers to cover any inconveniently placed big metal utility boxes that would otherwise intrude on the vision of bucolic Disneyfied Springtime countryside. After doing this like a 4 month long indoor-outdoor tech week the images went into the hands of the editing team and I was thrown into helping a second costumer who was hired to help me part time on Head over Heels, and then I helped her on doing the first live theatre show allowed in our county, The Book of Will done outdoors with only 30 socially distanced audience members allowed per show (less than the number of cast and crew) and actors allowed to have only clear chin spit guard masks. By Fall 2021 all DVC students, staff and faculty had to be vaccinated or do daily testing. We filled out online forms daily to confirm lack of symptoms or known exposure as well. So, we were at last allowed to have actors unmasked while on stage indoors again for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, though audiences had to be at ½ capacity and masked, as well as provide proof of vaccination before buying tickets. The crew was always masked and continues to be as well as actors during non-dress rehearsals (though no longer required by local law) through Spring 2023. We finally had one person in our department test positive and have to quarantine in Spring 2022 (a SM who got an asymptomatic case from a relative) but because of our strict policies at DVC it did not spread. In Fall 2022 we cancelled a performance because a cast member tested positive, and in following days other cast members also had asymptomatic positive tests and we shut down the final weekend of shows so the spread stopped there.
Since starting your career, were there areas in your skills/yourself that you grew in? All of them, all the time. If you are not learning something new or doing something hard to figure out at least once a week you die inside. If it is not difficult in some way even theatre work stops being interesting. Despite my painfully socially awkward way of being, I can not only speak in front of my class, but can now speak before other big crowds. I have worked out lots of good tricks and tips to make my drawing better, I have learned all sorts of technical skills both with a computer and with various hand tools. I have got better and better at photography, and the technology has got better for it to make good images cheaper, better, & faster. I’ve learned to write, which while it seems like a not costume related thing, it is really important if you wish to function in academia, which is where the steady theatre jobs are in the US. While I’m still quite handicapped in many ways with my social limitations, I constantly see others like me at 17-20 who wander in with many of these same challenges and can see immediately how far I’ve been able to learn to cope and compensate for my non neurotypical aspect. I’ve learned to signal to “normal”people that while I may seem a bit like an alien, I’m not about to abduct them or probe them in a waythat is unintentionally threatening. I also have accepted that my status as a neurodiverse role model within my department means I will be needed to help shepherd people who are also odd in other ways to help them get to a place where they can more easily function within a neurotypical world without feeling like being different puts them at fault, or that they can’t learn to cope with living within such a world without succumbing to either self-blame or conversely hostility to the neurotypical. This sort of artistic/educational/technical job actually works well for people who are a bit odd. 5.
What were the most difficult obstacles you faced when you started your career ? The social aspects. So much of hiring in the commercial theatre world is word of mouth, friend of friend of friend recommendations, and the ability to speak and hustle and sell yourself, so it puts a person like me who has very few friends (all of whom befriended me not the other way around-I still don’t have any idea how to do that) at a complete disadvantage. I have trouble still connecting names and faces and people and facts about them even ones I’ve worked with or taught for years. I simply can’t chat up someone, or remember a name or phone number, or get the nerve to call even if I write it down. The breakthrough was figuring out that college teaching was the best and longest lasting costume gig anyway. I grew up in a family of K-12 & college teachers and administrators, and I knew those rules from my mother’s knee. I know the rules of what they must hire and promote, and I could force my way through that gauntlet step by step even with one MA adviser who consistently favored the other grad student in my year, a passive aggressive hostile PhD dissertation adviser who didn’t even want me assigned to him, members of tenure and promotion committees who think performance and art work is not the equal of traditional publication and presentation, all by publishing and presenting at conferences in addition to my design work. Presenting my design work with spectacular photos, and jumping through the tedious hoops of committee work, service in the academic senate and service in the teacher’s union, and lots of testimonial letters from every person I ever worked with. This is not the work of a short time, you need to start taking and gathering pictures and writing articles and doing those kinds of things as soon as you start, but academia is used to oddballs who are brilliant at their specialty and if you can make a paper trail that proves you are that, they usually have to hire you even if they might want somebody who is a friend of a friend who is not that. It gets you in the door even if you are odd, and then all you have to do is keep up with the daily insanity of the job while continuing to add to that file of paper
What is your favorite thing about your job that motivates you to continue doing what you do? The constant variety of interesting “impossible” challenges. It is rarely boring in costume (except sewing and laundry). Days do not have the same exact task as the day before. At any time, someone can wander in the door with a problem, a disaster, or a question they hope you can solve or answer. It is rarely boring.
