Chapter 48 Tilley - Butterfly
TILLEY Butterfly
It was official: Tilley was in love with Dolly Levi.
With her character, her words, her voice, her song, and, today of all days, she found herself practically swooning over what must be the very best part: the costumes.
As she ran her hands down the sides of the gold beaded dress, Kate, her costumer (okay, so that was a fancy word for a girl from the community college with an aptitude for thrifting, but Tilley could be grand if she wanted to be), said, “Tilley. You look like a million bucks in that dress. No, ten million.”
She turned to look at herself from another angle.
Tilley was a nearly sixty-year-old proper Southern woman.
She would never be caught dead in a getup like this that was formfitting and showed her quite ample cleavage.
But, then again, wasn’t that part of the joy of acting as someone else?
She thought, briefly, naughtily, that she couldn’t wait for George to see her in this dress.
“Do you think I have the figure to carry this off?” Tilley asked demurely.
“Well, I think that’s for others to decide,” Kate quipped.
They both laughed, as they were parroting a scene from the show. “But, darling,” Kate said grandly, “you are not carrying it off. You are rocking it.”
Kate placed the stunning feather headdress on Tilley’s head. “Kate, dearest, you are a woman who can make a twenty-dollar thrift-store find look like the finest fashions on Fifth Avenue.”
Tilley had always had a penchant for the big city.
Kate smiled. “Well, that’s the job, I suppose. It’s both of our jobs, really. Making things into something they are not.”
As Tilley stared at herself in the mirror, the light flashing off her gold dress, glinting in the reflection, the headdress standing at least twelve inches off her head, she realized that what Kate was saying was true.
Here, on the stage, she was Dolly Levi. Outside, were she wearing this, she would be Crazy Aunt Tilley having another one of her episodes.
And that’s what gave Tilley the idea. “Kate, could I take this home? Just for the night?”
Kate looked confused. “Well, Tilley, it’s sort of against protocol…”
Tilley touched Kate’s hand. “Kate, darling. It’s community theater. I’m not sure how pressing our protocol really is.”
“Well, I mean, I guess it would be all right. But why?”
Tilley smiled self-assuredly as she lied through her teeth. “ ‘Hello, Dolly!’ is obviously the most important song and dance in the musical. I want to practice it at home in the dress to make sure I get the steps just right. How embarrassing would it be to trip onstage?”
Kate nodded. “Very.”
The young woman seemed convinced. She handed Tilley a garment bag. “Just don’t let Tony see. He would kill me for letting you take the most important costume in the show out of the theater.”
“You’re a doll,” Tilley whispered. “This will be our little secret.” She added, quite seriously, “And the show will be all the better for it.”
She wasn’t sure if that part was true or not.
What she had in mind had nothing to do with the show whatsoever.
But if a butterfly could flap its wings across the world and make it rain in another part, anything was possible, really.
Today, Tilley was that butterfly. Beautiful, elegant, quietly powerful.
And, she hoped, distracting enough that her little plan just might work.