365 Days, Day 191

Sweet darling, you can leave your hat on

You can leave your hat on

Baby, you can leave your hat on

You can leave your hat on

You can leave your hat on

You can leave your hat on

(Joe Cocker)

Cock your hat - angles are attitudes (Frank Sinatra)

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, With a red hat which doesn't go and doesn't suit me (Jenny Joseph)

When I put on a hat, I see a whole world inside my head. A scenario plays out in colour with sound, in my imagination… I love hats. They don’t particularly suit me, but I love trying them on and wearing them to be different characters.

The Joe Cocker song above has always been a favourite of mine; it reminds me of one my favourite movies: Full Monty. It also reminds me of the performance we did on stage behind a screen, where we did a bit of a ‘strip-dance’ (this was part of the staff plays at Aurora!) to this song. Back in the good-old-days… We had hats, obviously, which we kept on… To be honest, we kept on our leotards and tights too.

I wore a hat to Nicki’s 50^th party – a black one with a black-and-white leopard print brim. I wore it at an angle with the right attitude! I bought this hat in Cape Town some years ago, and have now brought it to the UK with me.

My red hat (above), which I bought here and took to South Africa, I wore to the high tea with the book club girls. I wanted to wear this hat as part of the red-hot-chilli-pepper-genie costume, but it was voted out in favour of the ridiculous toilet-seat ‘genie’ hat which I fashioned from bits found in the Barn Wardrobe… I think my red hat would have made the genie less ‘obvious’ and more trendy. I have read that Johnny Depp (my favourite male actor) builds his characters around the costume that he creates from digging around in the Wardrobe!

We wore hats for the various dances that we did for the Pub Evenings at Silverfields. I remember the dance where we wore fishnet stockings, a tail coat, high heels and a bowler hat. Ros and I did a dance for the African theme Pub Evening with huge masks rather than hats, which we made from papier maché – we even had little LED lights in the eye sockets.

When I put on a hat, mask or wig I enter a whole new world.