The Wrong Dress

By R. M. Hamilton

“You’re sure I won’t have to be involved?” Mum eyeballed me sternly. In her hand she held the small flyer that I had brought to her attention. The local homeschooling group was putting on a play and I had decided to become an actress.

“No Mum, you won’t have to be involved at all.”

Mum narrowed her eyes, “hmmm. Well, it does rehearse for six weeks, and you’ll be able to get yourself there. You’d be away for an afternoon once a week…” a brief, blissful smile blossomed onto her mouth. Then it passed, and she glared suspiciously down at the flyer, “but you’re sure I won’t have to be involved?”

“No Mum.”

“No painting horrible little sets?”

“No Mum.”

“No costume designing?”

“No Mum.”

“And they don’t expect me to show up to the rehearsals?”

“No Mum.”

Mum brightened. “Then of course you can go, it’ll be nice for me, err, you, to have something to leave the house for. As a matter of fact, I think it would do Rachel a lot of good to be in a play.” She looked hopefully at the flyer. “Do you suppose they’d like the boys as well?”

“Aw Mum, the boys are kids! They don’t want kids!”

“I suppose not,” said Mum gloomily, regretfully relinquishing the glorious vision of peace that would fill her home without us in it.

The play was held at the local hall. It was a complicated plot, involving a despotic king with a lust for gold and a rabble of downtrodden masses. The downtrodden masses hummed soulfully and mournfully in the background in an attempt to imply extreme despair and a lack of proper nourishment. In reality, it sounded more like a group attack of acute indigestion, brought on by overindulgence at a pizza party.

I managed to bag a speaking role. I had wanted to be the beautiful maiden.

This simpering role of patient endurance appealed strongly to me. Also, there was the very sad scene in the dungeon where the girl had to spend the night and turn hay into gold. If she didn’t, the king had promised to cheer himself up by cutting off all the heads of his downtrodden masses. Naturally, this made the simpering saintly maiden stop simpering and fling herself out on the dungeon floor and howl about the unfairness of it all. 

I tried out for the role, but it was no good. The king was played by a boy I was secretly harbouring a pretty big crush on. This crush was debilitating enough when he was going about in ordinary clothes, but faced with him resplendent in an orange, velveteen curtain as a robe and a spikey golden crown of plastic from Arthur’s Emporium (the deluxe model, $7.50), I was reduced to a giggling jelly. I received his grisly threat of mass decapitation with a hilarity that caused the director of the play to shoot me a rather hateful glance.

After that performance, it was by share willpower that I avoided being dumped into the ranks of the background, humming downtrodden masses. I was to be one of the speaking representatives who had to offer an alternative to the expected taxes. The role was small, but it involved abject grovelling and loud weeping. Even as she gave me the role, the director appeared to wish she hadn’t.

To start with, I did alright. I was to fall at the king’s feet and say we had no money and then offer him a scarf in the colours of the local football team.

Unfortunately, the king was a very good actor. “I only back the winning team,” he sneered, flinging my offering back at me. He curled his lip with distain. “I only accept gold. Begone, worm!”

I jerked up from the floor. My eyes flashed. No boy was going to speak to me like that. Not even a boy bedecked in an orange velveteen curtain and a $7.50 plastic crown. I grabbed the scarf and made a convincing show of blowing my nose into its folds. Then I hurled it into the king’s face, “there’s your gold!” I boomed.

The king recoiled in disgust. Behind me a chorus of giggling, peppered with little gasps of repulsion and horror broke out from the downtrodden masses.

 I smiled proudly.

That had been pretty good, I thought.

The director didn’t agree, “stick to the script,” she snapped.

Later, before she sent us home, the director gathered us around. “Next week, I want you to bring a costume. This shouldn’t be hard to do. Remember, you’re all poor, downtrodden peasants. All you need is a few ragged clothes, OK?”

I was pleased. I liked dressing up.

As soon as we got home, I went to the dress up basket and collected a costume.

It was a shiny, synthetic ball gown of a lurid shade of green. It had overly ruched sleeves and huge, glittering diamond plastic buttons.

 I slipped into it. It hung on my small frame like a huge sack and dragged all over the floor. I had to hitch up the front of it to walk.  I took a deep breath of delight. It was perfect.

I swaggered off to find Rachel. She looked up from the baby doll she was gently rocking.

“What do you think of my costume?”

“Um, well, you look really fancy, Ruth.”

I smirked.

“But Ruth,” continued Rachel, “didn’t the lady say we needed to look poor?”

I stopped smirking.

“You’ll look a lot richer than all the other children,” continued Rachel. “You’ll stand out a lot.”

I hadn’t considered that. And now that I did consider it, I found that I liked the idea. “That’s good,” I said firmly. Then, in a burst of generosity, “would you like me to find you a costume too? We’ve got a gold brocade dress.”

“No thank you, Ruth.”

 🎭

Rachel had been right. I did look a lot fancier than the other children. Except for Rachel, who hadn’t found a costume and the king, all the other children wore rags in various shades of grey and mustard. The director was moving down the hall looking over their rags. She was taking her time and I began to drift off into my own little world.

I was all grown up. I was a dazzlingly beautiful woman. A crown prince thought so too. He begged me to marry him. He gave me diamonds. Lots of diamonds. And horses.

Definitely horses.

We were driving by crowds of commoners, they were cheering, I was waving, our castle loomed in the distance, fire works were going off---

“RUTH!”

I was back in the real world and the director was towering over me and glaring down at my dress. “You’re supposed to be a downtrodden peasant wearing rags! I explained to you ever so carefully what you were to wear!”

I gave the director one of my ‘hard stares’. It produced immediate and excellent results. She withdrew with a slight shudder.

I was pleased. That, I felt, was the way to handle bossy ladies who tried to make me wear rags.

“I think I’d better call Wendy and have a wee chat,” muttered the director to her assistant.

I stiffened. I didn’t like the sound of that. I hadn’t found my hard stares to be effective upon Mum.

🎭

“Well, that came together faster than I thought it would!” Mum had cheered up.

I, however, was sunk in misery. I was encased in a tube of stripy brown and orange sixties curtain fabric. I looked like a tube of toothpaste, the kind guaranteed to leave your teeth three shades darker.

“Aaaw Mum, I look awful!”

“Well, you shouldn’t have turned up in a ballgown when you were told to wear rags!” Mum snapped, her nasty mood returning. “I absolutely didn’t want to have to make a costume for you, but all things considered that was less work than I expected.”

I thought bitterly of just how little work it had taken. Mum had sewed two oblong pieces of fabric together, leaving holes for arms and neck. It had taken her all of five minutes.

My irritation was increased by the fact that Rachel had been presented with a ragged dress in shell pink by a family that felt sorry for her turning up with no costume.

 So unfair.

🎭

The play was fairly successful. An angel, attracted by the loud blubbering, appeared to the weeping maiden and miraculously transformed the hay into gold. This was done by turning on a string of fairy lights, artfully draped about the hay. It wasn’t very convincing, but the audience politely gasped on cue.  

The king plunged into the dungeon of gold and danced about in glee before the angel reappeared and preached him a long and sanctimonious sermon about the wrongness of being a greedy tyrant who went about chopping people’s heads off. This resulted in the improbable instantaneous repentance of the king and he gave all the gold away to his previously downtrodden masses.

The audience of parents applauded in relief that it was finally over and they could get on with supper.

I changed into my green ball gown to the supper. Mum was busy whining to the other mothers about having to make me a costume, and that gave me a good fifteen minutes of unsupervised time with the dessert table.

And with an enormous cream donut stuffed in my mouth I had an epiphany. I didn’t want to be an actress.

The national chocolate factory was holding a writing contest. First prize was a laptop computer. I didn’t know what I would do with a laptop computer, but I absolutely knew what I would do with the runner up prize, a backpack stuffed with chocolates.  

And dreamily, almost automatically I helped myself to three chocolate eclairs.