Season 7, Episode 18: Drug Fiend - July 23, 2012

Season 3 of The Closer started up with a costume department move AGAIN!!! It was spring 2007 and we had been displaced from my beloved "loft". We were now ensconced in a inner hallway of rooms, none of them connected to each other. We had an office and fitting room divided by a window, think "principals office" in fact that's what we called it. There was a small stock room down the hall, an even smaller tailor shop and across the hall was a room we called "the Rotunda" it was oval shaped with a skylight that soared three stories upward and looked like a spaceship...this was where we had construction build the bulk of the wardrobe racks and where my shopper hung out. I had kept basically the same crew of costumers and had hired a new avant garde shopper as my muse. We were tired of moving and hoped this would be a permanent home for us.

We shot into the fall and there were threats of a strike in the industry, so we worried that we would be out of a job if the Union voted to strike, so there was a sense of urgency to Season 3. Brenda added dresses to her wardrobe, lots of dresses. I found a bunch of "dead stock" late 1950's floral dresses and matching cardigans at one of my favorite vintage stores and they became another quirky fashion look for the ever evolving Brenda Leigh Johnson. The dresses mixed well with her cashmere cardigans and vintage jackets, and our manipulation of color and playing with the color wheel added excitement to our busy and often long shooting days. Every Friday, it seemed we would turn that into a "Fraturday" meaning you start the day on Friday and end the day on Saturday!!! My costume supervisor Eric and I would always have to pull something together late into the night on Friday and would end up driving up to Sunset Blvd. and indulging in an In N Out burger like at one in the morning!

The Emmy nominations were announced while we were shooting and once again my name did not make the list of nominees. Kyra had been nominated now two years running and had won the Golden Globe after our first season. I was dumbfounded why the esteemed Television Academy could completely over look my contributions to fashion on t.v. Unfortunately the Academy is made up of several "peer groups" and I wasn't political, so I chock it up to that...it's not that the competition was so fabulous...just that this little cable show that was still number one in the ratings wasn't deemed important enough to warrant a nod to the excellent work my costume department and I did in really defining a cast of characters via the written word and what they all were wearing. C'est la vie...there'd be another season...strike or not...and yes there was a strike.