Thankfully the next aisle over was chock-full of various religious costumes, so I managed to cool off amid the miters and the nun habits long enough to focus on my job. The list was supposed to address last-minute costuming for the Into the Woods cast: several different lace-up shoe options for the actor playing the Baker (he evidently had a sixth toe that needed a wider toe box); various grungy-looking linen shirts for the actor playing Jack (which were actually quite cool—I thought Ros would’ve liked one); and then, of course, three new dresses for the actor playing Cinderella.

The first dress was pretty standard princess fare: cream colored and poofy sleeved, heavily bejeweled, a skirt so huge I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get the trunk of my car closed.

The second dress was even bigger and shinier.

But the third dress—

I’ll start by saying that I don’t normally go for dresses. People claim they’re comfortable and easy—one and done!—but whenever I put one on I just feel overdressed, like I’m trying too hard. Ros and I called my wardrobe sheep-farmer chic—slip-on boots, thick woolen sweaters, lots of overalls, long in the winter and short in the summer, and the occasional jumper thrown over a T-shirt (as Touchstone once said to me, “Do you own anything that doesn’t have some sort of bib?”). On the rare occasion when I had to get dressed up, I owned a few floor-length floral-print dresses with a row of buttons down the front that weren’t horribly offensive to my sensibility. I still wore my boots with them, and sometimes I even managed to think that I looked cute.

This dress in my arms was like nothing I’d ever owned, and yet.

It caused something inside me to shift.

I could tell right away that it would be too big for the actor who played Cinderella. It was cut completely different than the other princess dresses: This was a stretchy gown straight up and down like a column, with a high neckline and long sleeves. It was heavily beaded but somehow managed to be light, almost liquid in my arms. The most stunning thing about it was its color: a fiery-orange-red beaded base sprinkled through with yellow and gold and hot-pink beads. The best approximation of a sunset in a dress that I had ever seen.

As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to have it. It was more than a dress. It felt like a sartorial embodiment of a plot twist, like the sort of dress that could make things happen.

“Whoa,” Oliver said. He’d reappeared wearing a floor-length white fur coat, a pink 1950s poodle skirt, and a loose-fitting, blousy pirate shirt. Somehow he managed to pull off this wild mishmash—just another unfair advantage of the extremely attractive. “You have to try that on.”