Iridescent Wings

Bob and I drove up to Inverness to visit our friend Barbara, which is always a treat. Barbara lives in a gorgeous house at the top of a steep hill "at the end of nowhere" as one of her grandchildren put it. The house is surrounded by wooden decks that look out over a spectacular view of forest and gardens. The forests are provided by nature, the gardens by Barbara. On one side of the house, she's planted her vegetable garden and what she calls her "Latino garden," a bright array of scarlet and orange flowers. On the other side of the house, she has her more demure English garden filled with old-fashioned roses and flowers in hues of lavender, blue and white.

Surrounded by this blaze of color, Barbara herself dresses quietly, but well. "Casual elegance" is the appropriate term. When I first met her, she was a wardrobe consultant and I was a Tarot-tossing bohemian. She endeared herself to me by telling me that "Clothes are luminescent with memory, like Tarot cards." Sadly, I have no fashion sense, as most of you know. My daily uniform consists of a Tee shirt and a pair of corduroy pants, but that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate clothes. I haven't the knack for dressing well, but I admire those who do and I love costumes so I loved hearing about Barbara's latest project, which was to design the costumes for a community theater production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe.

"It's full of fairies, you know," she told us over a salad she'd picked from her garden, "But the director didn't want wings and I agreed. So I came up with the idea of feathers. I found an easy way to attach them so I put them in the fairies' hair and adorned their costumes with feathers. We had feathers everywhere. The men were dressed soberly in suits and ties as businessmen. At the end of the play, the fairies marry the businessmen so we had them fasten feathers on the men to symbolize the union. It was lots of fun, feathers flying everywhere, in their hair and on their suit lapels."

Later, when we were sitting out on the deck, she demonstrated the effect with a tuft of brightly colored feathers in her blonde-brown hair. The talk of theatrical costumes made me think of Ellen Terry's famous costume for Macbeth. John Singer Sargent painted a portrait of her in it: "a green gown shimmering with the iridescent wings of 1,000 beetles."