“My job is not just to put a costume on a performer. A lot of my job is to be calm, making the person I’m dressing totally relaxed, so they can go onstage and give a really good performance,” says dresser Jackie George. “Getting nervous and having sweaty palms is not going to help in a quick change. I think the calmer I am, the better off everybody is.”
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George dresses opera stars for Lyric Opera of Chicago–puts their costumes on them, mends small rips in emergencies (“large safety pins are the jewels of the Lyric”), fixes their tea, intercedes with stage managers, blocks off air-conditioning ducts, holds their hands, and in general makes their lives backstage as painless as she can. “I’m a fetcher. I’m a gofer. I remember props. If they like tea, I make sure I have the kind of tea they like–I carry my own supply of tea bags and honey. A lot of the job is knowing where to get certain things, who to see–which of the technicians onstage to talk to if they want something changed. It’s important to know who to talk to.” On the short side, with champagne-colored hair, George started in 1961 at the age of 31; at the time, her husband was a stagehand at the Civic Opera House. “They needed extra dressers; we needed extra money for Christmas. I’ve been there ever since.”
George started out dressing the men’s chorus, on the fourth floor–“As they’ve repeatedly told me, I’ve been demoted gradually to the main floor.” Today she usually dresses mezzo-sopranos–her favorites–or baritones. “When you’re doing principal sopranos, you really have to be on call every minute, and being the union rep, I’m sometimes required to leave the floor to hand out checks and things. But whether I’m dressing a star or anybody else, if I have to leave the floor, I make sure somebody’s aware of it.
If there are any that she doesn’t like, you figure it out mostly from what George doesn’t say about them–you won’t get any of the gory details of diva fits from her. “What goes on in the dressing room should be confidential. A good dresser knows how to keep her mouth shut.”
