LACED UP

You may recall that on several occasions I asked for prayers for my daughter who is looking for a job. She is a teacher, but she has not worked for a number of years and has had no luck finding a teaching job, but she is open to other positions. She's interviewed for several jobs in other fields, but the employers want a person with experience, and all of her experience is in teaching and in baby-sitting and selling snoballs when she was a teen-ager.

Anyway, Alison's found work as an extra in movie and TV films on a number of occasions. On her first job, an older woman who's worked as an extra for a good while, gave my daughter pointers on how to perform well so that she would be called for other jobs. Basically, the advice is, "Pay attention!" Don't be focused on your phone or other device, because when the boss calls, she/he expects a prompt response. As you can imagine, the extras do a lot of sitting around waiting, but Alison says she's met some interesting people, and she enjoys talking to them.

It's amazing how much filming is done in the New Orleans area. Alison has worked in several episodes of the TV series "Treme" and on a string of movies. She doesn't earn a great deal of money, about $100 a day or a little more, but a little money coming in is better than none, and she enjoys herself on the sets. She was a vagrant in her last film, and she will be a poor vendor in the next movie, which is "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter". It's a period movie (Surprise!), and all the women must wear lace-up corsets, even the poor vendor.

Before Alison went to be fitted for her costume, a friend she met through her time on the sets told her what would happen. The women must strip down to their panties and line up bare-breasted. She had to brace herself against the wall while the dresser laced her up tightly in the corset and then free her breasts from the contraption. I thought of the scene in "Gone With the Wind", in which Mammy pulls on the laces of Scarlett's corset to get her waist back to 17" after she gives birth to Bonnie Blue - without success, as we all know. Daughter said she didn't get near 17" or even 21", which was Scarlett's measurement after Mammy's efforts. She also wondered why a poor vendor had to be laced up in a corset.

Grandpère and I nearly died laughing as Alison gave us the account of her fitting, so I was quite pleased when she gave me permission to retell the story at Wounded Bird. On my side of the family we will do almost anything for a good story.

Image from Wikipedia.

Note: The corset pictured is not back-laced, but I could not find a picture that I could use of a back-laced corset.