On the importance of looking one's best.

One day last week we worked for ages on just one dance. It's a song which, prior to Panto, I really liked. I liked it so much that I used to occasionally look it up on YouTube to watch. However if I hear it one more time, I just may commit a crime.

In this accursed number, the boys and the girls dance separately the whole time, which is unusual for us. The nice thing is that while the boys were being drilled mercilessly by Miss Alison, us girls got some girl time.

Talk turned to looking one's best on stage, as some of us don't have much experience and were asking questions.

At MADC there's always people available to apply make-up onto actors (even during the One-Acts when there's three plays a night!) But because there's so many people in the cast of the Panto, the chorus has to apply its own make-up as it would take too long to do everyone. So during our girl time last week, we got advice from someone who often does make-up for stage productions. She told us what to put on our faces, and very nicely agreed to hold a tutorial session for us girls, like the one usually held for the boys. Yes, girls wear make-up on a daily basis anyway, but some of us, like me, wear little or no make-up and therefore don't really know what to do - and even people who do wear make-up regularly presumably don't go out in 'stage make-up' (Directions: apply twice as much as normal).

I do actually own a basic set of make-up which I barely use but I'm lacking blusher so I had better go buy some.

After the make-up advice, we got some some of a different sort. Being on stage is fun, fun, fun, if you like performing, but the down-side is that... well... thousands of people will be LOOKING at you. And if you're a girl, you have skirts and dresses as costumes, which means that your legs will be on display, which means that all those people will be LOOKING at your legs. There's not much you can do about the shape of your legs, but there is something you can do about their colour. This is a subject of special concern to those of us whose limbs don't get out in the sun much, pasty-white appendages on stage, yuck. So we sat and listened avidly as our Panto veteran inducted us into the secrets of... tights!

Consequence of which, I bought four pairs of tights today. It took me ages to figure out all the ones that M&S have, I mean honestly. The lady at the counter was very helpful in explaining the difference between 'light support' tights and 'body shaper' tights (one pulls your tummy and thighs in a little, the other pulls your tummy and thighs in a lot, three guesses as to which I got). Still took me a while to figure out the handy-dandy size-and-weight charts on the back of the box. Also, did you know that the denier is 'a unit of measure for the linear mass density of fibres'? Neither did I. I love wikipedia.

Well, now I am all set in the tights department, and I'm all ready to learn how to apply stage make-up. I am very bad at doing eyeliner because I hate having stuff near my eyeballs, but I can do mascara now like nobody's business. Let me know if you have suggestions re: blusher.