A number of my friends were in a period play last year and had to wear heavy makeup. It's funny when boys have to go to CVS hunting for things like eyelash extensions and lipstick. My roommate got off pretty easily thanks to his dark, striking complexion and his thick lashes that look like he's wearing lash extensions. Others weren't so lucky.
The thing about stage makeup is, you use a lot of strange things to make your face look different. Eyelash extensions or false eyelashes aren't the only reason you'd need eyelash adhesive glue, or even the main one. It's actually a prime material for sticking on all kinds of fake facial hair – beards, moustaches, sideburns, eyebrows, et cetera. Which there was a lot of in that show. And few guys at the age of twenty can grow the kind of beard that my boyfriend (who was incidentally also in the show) can. There were a lot of fake beards (and a lot of eyelash adhesive). Only the waiters were clean-shaven.
The thing that you don't realize if you've never acted before is how long thirty seconds is when you're onstage. It's pretty much an eternity. Think about what thirty seconds would feel like if you're hanging off the edge of a cliff, trying to cling on long enough that someone will come to the rescue. Anytime onstage that you have to be silent, do some activity, do something particularly awkward, time feels even longer. And heaven forbid something go wrong (although it usually does at some point during the run of the show). That's when a second really lasts forever.
Well, somebody I knew who was in the show, kind of a friend, you might say, couldn't really grow facial hair. Anything he could manage was patchy at best after months of effort and concentration. And he had to play an old ship's captain. So of course he wore a fake beard, probably stuck on with eyelash adhesive, shot through with gray.
The night that I saw the show, the beard and moustache were severely misbehaving – drooping, flapping loose, wriggling like desperate fish on hooks. My hapless friend kept slapping at his face like flies were swarming around it. And that's the thing. When something goes wrong, it feels like it's going so wrong and for so long that you lose your cool. Nobody would really have noticed the loose beard-moustache combo if he'd been able to just let it go.
