Bellini Ball

Yesterday I started putting makeup on my face at 3:30PM. I finished putting makeup on my face at 5:45PM. I am now out of makeup.

When you get to sing in a stadium, you see, you get to draw outside of the lines of your lips- preferably with red Sharpie. You get to attach whole tarantulas to your upper eyelids. If you are like me, you get to have a lot of creative license with your eyebrow pencil and try to make yourself look like Count Chocula.

To explain- The Bellini Sisters received the opportunity to sing the National Anthem at the Flying Squirrels game last night. (For those of you who don’t know, the Bellini Sisters are neither sisters nor cocktails and are in fact just three women who like to dress up like the Andrews Sisters and walk in a clump around the Greater Richmond area trying to induce passerby into thinking they have either time-traveled or are hallucinating.) The Bellini Sisters also sing and bevel and wear very smart fitted little dresses. You should hire them.

So, go-time for singing was 6:35. Those of you who know me and know my facility with makeup application will understand that 3:30PM was a perfectly reasonable hour at which to begin the process.

I take several deep breaths. I put on my yellow rubber shoes and walk to the green convenience store four blocks from my apartment for a Monster energy drink to get me through what I know is coming. I pull Queen Latifah’s “Last Holiday” up on Netflix and plug in my curling iron. I’m ready to begin.

[Sidenote: the curling iron is not for makeup application- I’m not that inexperienced. I also have to curl my hair.]

I have a lot of hair. I have hair like the under-conditioned tail of a Budweiser Clydesdale. And it’s coarse. One could cut oneself. So curling ALL of it is a daunting task. It takes me until about the part in the movie when Queen Latifah is winning big at roulette at the casino in Switzerland or wherever she is to finish. Then- I cannot find my snood. A common problem, I know, but a problem nonetheless. I try to substitute my wig cap from “Little Shop” which was stuck to my mascara and therefore accidentally taken home with me from the theater. That doesn’t work. So I stick it all up in an elaborate top knot/hairy beach ball and decide to deal with it later.

Makeup. Foundation- easy. Tan lipstick for covering dots and shadows- easy. Eye shadow- more challenging, but as I don’t really have eye sockets to speak of, hard to tell if I’m doing it right or not. Eyebrows- we’ve already been over this. Blush- blush is for some reason a dream to apply to my left cheek. A very clear “apple” and smoothly up and into my ear canal, as I’ve been led to believe is the way. But my right cheek. No sir. I apply with the same exact motions but never fails to looks splotchy and scattered, like if you were trying to rouge up the asphalt.

EYELINER. I would like to take this moment to thank Robyn O’Neill, The Debra Wagoner, Ashlee Heyward, Hannah Zold Story, Mr. Paul Major, Maggie Roop, Eva DeVirgilis, Matt Shofner, Nicole Oberleitner, Liz Blake-White, McLean Jesse, and I’m sure countless others for contributing to the 15-year eyeliner tutorial session which has been my theater career thus far. I’m pleased to report that I am finally starting to get a grip on it. I know now, thanks to Ashlee’s advice during “Shrek,” to yank my eyelid skin sideways toward my ear as hard as I can until my eye is nothing but a wrinkle-free, impenetrable slit and to start with the eyeliner tool of choice drawing from the outside in. Or inside out. Either way works. I am better able to accomplish Amy Winehouse when I work from the outside in. You have to be very thorough though, because if you aren’t, when you let the skin go and it lashes back into place, the liner on the natural bumps and wrinkles of the lid can resemble a lie detector print-out. False eyelashes: these are sort of fun- mostly if you get the kind with blue feathers and studded with tiny rhinestones for when you are playing a spider- but a task to apply. Hannah Zold Story is brilliant at it. I am getting better and have been made aware only in the past week that you do not, as I had been, glue the false lash midway down your upper eyelid, but in fact to the lash line itself. This is one of many invaluable life lessons I have learned sharing a dressing room with Ashlee Heyward, Katrinah Carol Lewis, and Jessi Johnson. Another being- don’t get snatched bald eating corn off a drill or four ladies in Colonial Heights will play “Hamilton” music in the background while they watch you do it and potentially miss their entrances.

Anyway- I did it. Got lashes on. Applied Bellini under-pinnings (which we won’t go into as I wouldn’t want to make anyone cry), shoes, earrings. Nicole graciously wound my hair into something reasonable. We used a lot of hairspray, which got me through the night, but resulted in my standing under the shower head for no fewer than four minutes today before the water could infiltrate the charred burlap my hair had become.

We go to the stadium. I smile using all my teeth and charm my way into dandy parking spaces for the three of us. I am not permitted to either go into the dugout, hit a baseball, or put on Nutzy’s squirrel head. But we stand in a row with Nutzy and Nutette or whatever the gray (is it a ferret?) girl mascot is called and smile for photos. I become privately irate that they will not speak and consider pinching their lower backs where my arms are around their waists for the photo to see if I can elicit a verbal reaction. Probably not. Mascots are well trained. My cousin (who shall remain nameless for security mascot protocol reasons) was the Hokie Bird for years and was so good at it he is now allowed to be in charge of the entire Cirque de Soleil.

After we sang, I made sure the stack of business cards stuffed into the front of my dress was secure, donned my hoodie and found my brother and sister-in-law in the gold seats aka the thermosphere. We eat all the sauces at the ball field - they have honey mustard and barbecue sauce in giant squirt bottles which I really think would fit in my pizza backpack. We have the opportunity to catch no fewer than 30 fly balls. I feel the Squirrels should have a rehearsal for hitting the ball forwards. I think about how much I liked the San Francisco Giants before Tim Lincecum cut his hair.

So- a good night. I think we get to do it again. Brace yourself, Nutzy.