I could have said something to them, I suppose. Hey, I miss you. Hey, are you going to come back and hang with us, ever? But I preferred to stew, which probably wasn’t the most mature response (my mom would have called it extremely passive aggressive). Besides stewing, I started spending more time in the costume shop. Benna and Phoebe were knee-deep in designing the costume for the yeti, while the rest of us handled the costumes for The Trojan Women. Phoebe claimed she didn’t need the extra help, but after her injury, it didn’t seem fair that I didn’t pitch in more. Plus, it was fun to watch her work through the yeti costume with Benna. It was coming along well—she was making changes, trying out different fabrics, and the coat seemed clumsier, more haphazard than it had in the beginning, in a way that worked for the character. I loved not just Phoebe’s ideas but the way she worked—her focus, the way she slipped her earbuds in and disappeared into her drawings, or the way she tacked fabrics to the wall and stood back and squinted at them, turning her head slightly to consider them.

“It’s looking good,” Benna assured Phoebe, eyeing her sketches. It was Monday morning, and we were all exhausted from the opening of The Trojan Women—all of us except for Benna, who seemed to come more alive the busier the theater got. “I had a thought. Something I wanted to show you.”

She typed something into one of the desktop computers that lined the room.

“Phoebe, have you ever seen Beauty and the Beast? The black-and-white one? By Jean Cocteau?”

Phoebe shook her head.

“Do you know who Cocteau is?” Benna asked.

Again, Phoebe shook her head.

“Does anyone know who Cocteau is?” Benna asked, calling around the room. Her question was met with resounding silence by the other costumers. “If you’re working in costumes, you’d benefit from looking at his work. Personally, I think everyone would benefit from looking at his work. Cocteau called himself a poet, but he was, among other things, a French filmmaker working in the first half of the 1900s. He was a gay man and one of the early surrealists. Lots of movie magic. His version of Beauty and the Beast is, in my opinion, the best adaptation there is. Look.”

She stepped back from the desktop, and we watched as a fearsome creature—the Beast—stepped out from behind a rosebush. His eyes literally flashed, like two small supernovas. It was no Power Jam, but the Beast took my breath away.

“Cocteau made that flashing effect by pricking holes in the film,” Benna said. “Isn’t it incredible?” She turned back to the computer, hitting pause on the scene. “Tell me what you notice about his costume.”