Building a Costume Collection from Scratch

One of the production setbacks I faced when I started teaching at Lake Howell was that someone had accidentally discarded the theater department’s costume collection. All that was left were the things from the final production of the previous school year—two bright yellow wigs and a variety of tights. Coming from a school with multiple well-stocked costume rooms, I had never worried about acquiring costumes before. In the years since then, LHTC has been blessed with a very large costume collection. In today’s entry, I will give some ideas about acquiring costumes.

A photo of my classroom during my first week at Lake Howell High School (the entire costume collection is at right):

PUBLIC DONATIONS. Never underestimate the willingness of the public to donate amazing things for educational purposes. Many individuals have vintage clothing that they feel sentimental about but are glad to see used by budding actors on the high school stage: wedding dresses, military uniforms, prom dresses, etc.  All you need to do is find them, convince them to donate, and make them feel glad that they did. At the beginning of each school year, I place a donation-request flier in every staff member’s mailbox at our school, send one home with every one of my students, get it printed in the school newsletter and on the webpage, and hand it out at Parents’ Night. I place ads on free online networks like Facebook and Craigslist, and on bulletin boards at local grocery stores, and boldly ask yard sale managers if they might be willing to donate their leftovers to our school. Have your students write thank you cards to everyone, and include a note on school letterhead for tax deduction purposes. A sample flier:

RUMMAGE SALES AND RE-GIFTING. Part of my success in collecting donations is my complete willingness to take literally any type of clothing whether it would be useful to our theater department or not.  Many people who are donating clothing simply want to clean out an attic, garage or closet, and don’t necessarily want you to pick and choose what you are going to take. I have a team of students who enjoy sorting through the donations; we keep the good stuff, have a rummage sale to sell the rest for $1 an item, and send the leftovers to a local charity like Goodwill or the Salvation Army. 

BUSINESS PARTNERS. Another way to bring in donations is to contact local businesses that use uniforms and see if they might be willing to send some your way. Hotel valet uniforms can be used to make a wide variety of costumes, from Prince Charming’s somewhat generic military jacket to tunics for the Flying Monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. I was also pleasantly surprised to find several hotels had an overstock of themed costumes from past promotions  which they were glad to bestow upon a high school theater company—one hotel gave us dozens of pinstriped engineer coveralls, and another gave us a truckload of Hawaiian shirts and Tiki decorations. Theme parks, movie theaters, prom and tuxedo shops, security companies, restaurants, utility companies, and other businesses are all possible donors. I had a group of students brainstorm a list of local businesses to target, and had them take letters to the manager or owner of each business. We tracked our success so that we could hit up the same businesses again in a year or two.

YOUR SCHOOL DISTRICT. Your own school district is another resource for finding costumes. My county school system has a surplus warehouse, where old band uniforms and dance-wear go when schools buy new gear. The band jackets can easily be transformed into a variety of military and ceremonial uniforms, and much of the dance-wear that I’ve found has only been used for one season of Color Guard or Dance Team and then discarded. At the end of each school year I put another flier in all staff mailboxes requesting donations of unwanted clothing, books and furniture as they clear out their classrooms at the end of the year—more fodder for our annual rummage sale.

PARTNER WITH OTHER LOCAL SCHOOLS AND THEATERS. Another key element, in my opinion, is to build a mutually beneficial relationship with other local high school theater programs and community theaters. What is the point of four high schools each owning an identical set of Pink Ladies and T-Birds jackets? Sharing saves everyone money and storage space. Open up a dialogue with theater teachers at other schools—compare your upcoming production needs and see where you can help each other out. The same can work with community theaters as well.

INVEST IN A SEWING MACHINE. I can’t sew—not even a button onto my shirt—so I am always glad to find out that I have students and family volunteers who can. In order to take full advantage of their offers of help, I had the most experienced seamstress in the bunch pick out a sewing machine for me to buy for the classroom. On sale and with the school’s tax exemption, I got a great machine for $200. More and more of my students are learning to sew—it has been an excellent investment.

Because of my school’s generous allotment of storage space for our costumes, I have been lucky enough to go from half a rack of leftovers to a comprehensive collection that lends for free to all local schools, churches, community groups, and theaters that ask. Despite our large collection, we are still always inviting donations, running rummage sales, and actively building a better collection. If you have addition ideas for building a theatrical costume collection, please share them below. And I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of the hundreds of people who have so generously donated clothing items to Lake Howell Theater Company. Your kindness has provided a world of opportunity for my students and our community.

Some photos of one of our costume rooms today:

You Need an Assistant

In my first years as a theater teacher, I was young and had a ton of energy and a million creative ideas about all the things we could do on our stage. My ideas tended to be extremely ambitious, and my timetable for accomplishing them tended to be optimistically short. Without going into detail about my meltdown during a production of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, I'll just share with you the first and most poignant lesson I learned from a student: the kid playing Plato looked at me with a sad face and said, "You can't do it all yourself, sir. It won't work."

It hadn't occurred to me that I was trying to do everything myself, but at the moment he made the remark, I was sitting in the sound booth writing (in pen!) in someone else's prompt book, a torn costume slung over one shoulder, and wet paint across the back of my hand from the set I had been painting moments before. I had the students broken down into crews to do all this stuff, but didn't quite trust them to do it. A year later I got a similar remark from a parent who found me building Roman columns on the loading dock of our theater while the Homecoming dance was happening in the cafeteria nearby: "This looks like a heroic way of drowning yourself, James." She didn't mean it as a compliment. It was time to admit not just that I couldn't do it all myself--but that I shouldn't. I was hurting my theater company and taking opportunities away from other people.

If there's any way to avoid it, a theater instructor should never be the only adult involved in after school theater activities. I am still surprised after all these years at how many former Thespians and one-time stage crew members are hiding among the faculty of my school. I made one remark at a faculty meeting about doing GREASE as the school musical, and that afternoon I received a dozen emails from teachers who wanted to get involved. I'm admittedly paranoid about having other adults take over my program (in my auditorium, I'm a benevolent dictator) but I found that using a rotating list of volunteers, each with specific areas to monitor and jobs to oversee, allowed the adult involvement to be a blessing to my program without becoming a thorn in my side.

The parents of my students have been another amazing resource. Not to sound mercenary, but anytime a student mentions a family member who is a builder, electrician, plumber, lighting or sound technician, seamstress, hair stylist, etc., that information goes into a binder I keep on the shelf closest to my classroom telephone. While their children are still in the program, these parents often donate time and talent to helping us produce shows and maintain our facility; after their children graduate, they can generally be counted on to give a great price for any work that needs to be done. (And some still do it for free!)

Parents are also great resources for providing a more sympathetic presence than I personally present while I'm directing. A mom in our backstage hallway during a play is much more likely to provide comfort for a student who forgot his lines or just got dumped or is having a panic attack than I might provide as I power-walk from the workshop to the AV Tech booth. Parents can help keep a makeup table from turning into an invitation to shoplift; organize a backstage buffet; drive to Home Depot for more paint; call Denny's to reserve tables for fifty people; help students use power tools; enforce dress code, patrol dark corners, administer First Aid, etc. Our school district has a great volunteer registration program that screens applicants, records their donated time, and provides annual awards for the hours that are accumulated.

Members of the community have also become an indispensable part of my theater program. Before I had any budget for paying guest speakers, I found that many professionals are glad to volunteer a few hours to the school for a variety of reasons. First I contacted local voice teachers, and invited them to come to my classes to give a sample voice lesson to my acting students--in exchange, the voice teacher could hand out fliers to dozens of students she otherwise might never have met. When we bought tools from Home Depot, the general manager of the store agreed to send two workers (on the clock) to our school to train the students in how  to use them safely. Local college theater departments were more than happy to send representatives to talk to my classes and do acting exercises with my students. Cosmetology schools sent students to help with hair and makeup training before big plays. As our budget grew, we were able to hire a prosthetic makeup designer to do demonstrations, choreographers, technical trainers, and so on. Not only has this helped me to improve the education my students are receiving by filling in many of my weak areas, but it has also helped to connect my students to the community--bringing them good advice, letters of recommendation, internships, and jobs after graduation.

In addition to adult assistance, I've learned to rely on students as well. I'll write a separate entry about our student leadership program, in which each area of our theater company (Costumes, Props, etc.) has a student leader, but in additional to this Executive Board, I also have a designated assistant for each play production. My assistant can make an organized list of notes for me so that I'm not constantly writing my ideas on the nearest piece of scrap paper; she can take messages to the set crew working in a different room; he can retrieve the important item I left in my classroom when I moved to the stage.

I also establish a student assistant in each of my classes, often a senior who found herself assigned to a theater course because of a hole in her schedule, or a technician who was placed in my acting class and can't be moved to Stagecraft, or a 16-year-old community theater veteran who can probably afford to do some filing while the rest of the class rewrites a scene from Romeo and Juliet. Every time I find myself beginning a task that my student assistant could be doing instead, I stop immediately, write out instructions on a Post-It note, and place it on the assistant desk I set up across from my own. My district does have a wise policy against allowing students to grade papers--but they have no problem with a student typing up monologues, filing documents, collating papers, making a list of every athletic sponsor with a billboard on our stadium fence to find out if they might support the arts as well, etc. The student quickly assumes a certain level of ownership of the program by fulfilling these duties, and often becomes intuitive about what else they might be doing to help. And meanwhile, I stop trying to do everything myself.

I take a great pride in knowing that if I were to be incapacitated for awhile, my students, parents, and community volunteers can be counted on to keep everything going in my absence. To me, that is a more solid legacy than the hope that everyone will say, "What a guy, he did it all himself."

Producing High School Theater

I began teaching in 1994 at a high school near Reading, Pennsylvania. In my years there I taught senior  English, Yearbook, and two section of drama for grades 10-12. I quickly realized that I would be much happier if I was only teaching theater-related courses. The school was not large, however, and the Principal was not interested in seeing the drama program expand beyond two classes and a few after school performances each year, and so in 1997 I accepted a position as a full-time high school theater instructor at Lake Howell High School in Winter Park, Florida.

Although Lake Howell opened in 1975, the entire school moved to a different facility for the 1996-97 school year while major renovations were completed on the LHHS campus. The night I arrived in Florida I was given a tour of the soon-to-reopen campus. My classroom was a 1300-square-foot carpeted studio with ceilings 25 feet high and a small office and storage room in one corner. The space had been intended as a music lab, but was graciously given to me as the new theater teacher. There were six large wooden tables still in their boxes, waiting to be assembled; forty brand new blue plastic stackable chairs; a brand new teacher's desk with a rolling desk chair; and a brand new computer and printer. It seemed like heaven.

The  auditorium, however, was a different story. In Pennsylvania I was the proud custodian of a 900-seat theater with full wings, a fly system, and incredible storage space for props, costumes, and set pieces. In my new Floridian home, however, the auditorium was one of the few buildings that was left standing when the rest of the campus had been demolished and rebuilt. As such, it had been used for construction storage and then as a drop zone for all of the furniture and supplies being shipped back from the temporary school used the year before. It had no wing space--when an actor walked offstage, he would walk into a concrete block wall. The air conditioning ducts for the entire building traversed the space where a fly system ought to be located. An enormous retractable band shell was onstage with no way to remove it because there were no roll-up doors built into the facility; students moving the individual towers of the band shell around had ripped many of the stage curtains.

Then I asked where the costume room was--or the prop collection---the makeup...and no one knew. There had been some costumes, but the administrators thought that maybe the previous drama teacher had taken them with her wherever she went. With some minor investigation, I learned that she did no such thing.  All of the set pieces, costumes and other items had been sent to Seminole County Surplus instead of being moved to our refurbished campus, and with the exception of one box containing two yellow wigs and a variety of clown costumes, Lake Howell Theater Company owned nothing.

My aim in this blog is to share some experiences I had in starting a high school theater company with very few resources, in the hope that some other theater teacher somewhere might find some of these ideas useful in building a new program or jump-starting an existing one. I have been so lucky to have a supportive administration, an enthusiastic and talented student body, great friends in the theater community, and a patient and helpful group of family and friends. Maybe this will be my chance to pay all of that forward.