We sat in uncomfortable folding chairs around the dressing room , each one directly in front of a mirror , each mirror delineating a single student/actor’s dressing room space, just so many inches wide and deep (out in the professional world, the Union even has such requirements in its rule book, inch to inch, preventing dressing room squabbles), and today, each of us was a student in the thorny Theater Department of Northwestern University, neophytes to theatrical makeup , all.
Up until college, my idea of stage makeup was simply to go to the drug store, buy all the prettiest
colors i could afford and destroy my young face with garish effects I thought would make the audience notice me in whatever role i was cast in…or steal from my mothers makeup drawer ….id not yet discovered false eyelashes…thank the theater gods.
Now: Make-Up Class 101….led by Professor Hilda Bourgeoise, who held the revered and much used Richard Corson book on Stage MakeUp, open to our first dive into how to skillfully disappear our own faces and transforming it into another’s.
In front of each of us were not a lot of bright garish colors, but rather a set of tones, grey, white, tan, brown, a bit of black….a different world…but then again, we were there to learn how to take an audience into different worlds, and it looked like that journey didn’t need bright garish reds and pinks after all , unless of course all you ever were destined to portray were prostitutes and call girls. We freshmen had so much to learn.
The very first thing we were instructed to do was seemingly simple: sit quietly alone with you and your unadorned face in the mirror…do nothing but look at your face, then look at it some more, then look and study it even more intensely, going from forehead, to nose, to cheeks , to chin, to that space in front of your ears, and of course, study your ears as well…etc…study what your face truly is, what it actually looks like, how its shaped, what its shadows and curves and angles are…study your plain visage …take stock, become familiar with your own bare face, the face that is the canvas upon which you are about to paint.
We had to do that facial study for 30 whole minutes, and it seemed like 12 hours.
Then, we were given blank sheets of drawing paper and soft pencils and told to draw our own faces, while still looking in the mirror, making sure to record your face as you saw it, with all the shadings, angles, curves, blemishes, bumps, angles, unique features you could possibly draw. Draw YOU.
That of course was very daunting.
I could’t decide if I was pretty or the ugliest person ever born.
All I became was a conglomeration of pencil lines.
Abstract art.
Unfamiliar. Alien.
But it was onto that sketch that we would learn and record the physics of color and line, shape and highlight and shade, that would truly make our own faces disappear.
Turns out, it was a pretty miraculous class.
We each became magicians.
And I became a 50-year old woman right before my very eyes.