Love, Loss and What I Wore

Tonight a friend and I went to see Love, Loss and What I Wore at the Westside Theater. I was very excited and curious to see how Delia and Nora Ephron, two of my favorite writers, had adapted the memoir by Ileen Beckerman. It’s funny that I saw The Vagina Monologues at the same theater many years ago as this play. They are comparable to me in many ways. They both have a cast of rotating well-known actors. They both interweave monologues and memories about sometimes personal topics, finding humor in each one. In Love, Loss and What I Wore, each story – there are about 30 – has a relatable factor, something in which every audience member had to also sit there and say, “Me, too! That’s happened to me.” I know I did.

We all remember bra shopping for the first time, picking out our prom dress, going through a Madonna phase, getting our period, our attachments to certain outfits and pieces of clothing. We have all dealt with weight issues. We have purses that we carry the world in some of us have a shoe fetish. We can all even remember what we wore at certain stages of our life.

When we were shown to our first row seats, my friend and I said to each other, “Oh, oh, don’t fall asleep.” That wasn’t a problem. The cast sits behind music stands thus were only about a foot from us. They were all dressed in black, which at first we weren’t sure why but it becomes apparent why further into the play in a vignette about the color (because all women wear black; it’s an innate character trait we all have). The only other prop on the stage is a clothing rack.

Shirley Knight kicked off the play with the first chapter of Gingy’s Story. Her story is broken into six chapters and serves as the play’s main story. Quite serious at times, she discusses her upbringing, and what she wore during various stages of her life into adulthood and old age – when she got married, when she found out her husband was cheating on her and when she realized her step-mother was wearing the same robe as her deceased mother. Knight utilizes the illustrations on the clothing rack to illustrate her story.

The memories and recollections that the younger women recite all are very funny. In a series of vignettes called “Clothesline,” they all recite their memories of topics we can all relate to. For example, in “What My Mother Said,” the women happily chant out a list of responses like:

-Always wear clean underpants.
-Never buy a red coat.
-Go upstairs and take it off!
-Is that what you’re wearing?
-You’re too young to wear black.
-Take that off, you look like a slut!
-Your bra strap is showing.

In “The Dressing Room”:

-Does this come in a six? Does this come in a fourteen?
-Does this make me look pregnant?
-I look like my mother!
-If you’re not buying that, can I try it on?
-My butt is falling!
-Does this make me look fat?
-I can’t decide!

And in “The Closet,” my daily gripe: “I have nothing to wear!” That’s me.

The cast rotates on a regular basis, but we were lucky to experience the following great cast of talented women: Lucy De Vito, Judy Gold, Melissa Joan Hart, Capathia Jenkins and Shirley Knight. I enjoyed seeing all of them in this production, as they all had something unique and different to bring to the production and they are all very different types of actresses.

The production ran about two hours without an intermission. For more information and to order tickets to see Love, Loss and What I Wore, go here.