Honey, They Shrunk Oakdale

AS THE WORLD TURNS celebrates the holidays on Dec. 21 with a very special stand-alone episode, featuring the entire cast as they might have looked in Victorian times. The episode begins with Faith, Natalie and Lucinda having just seen a performance of The Nutcracker. As they walk through Old Town, they stop and see a dollhouse in a window. The camera zooms in to the dollhouse, and the figures come alive, bearing more than a passing resemblance to current residents of Oakdale. In addition to being wonderfully scripted, the episode’s costumes and settings are breathtaking. We talked to costume designer Margarita Delgado about going back in time.

Soap Opera Weekly: How did you approach the project?
Margarita Delgado: It was a nice, well-written script that was really descriptive and gave us a real visual sense of what they wanted it to look like.

Weekly: Did you have a personal favorite dress?
Delgado: They were all individual and so much fun. Everyone really had their own identity, their own personality. We did everything from Lily being the perfect Christmas card mother in her beautiful, velvet green gown — which was a rental, but we did the whole beading front — to somebody like Barbara, who is not high-class [in the dollhouse world]. I said to Colleen (Zenk Pinter, Barbara), “I think you probably stole everything you’re wearing. You’ve been sleeping with it on for years and the makeup that you’ve applied is 10 years of makeup. You don’t really wash your face that often.” It’s having that kind of fun with these characters. That’s another extreme. Faith’s dress was totally from scratch. We were actually able to find her little shoes, little booties with the buttons on the side. Those are modern-day and in the children’s department stores. There was really a range. Most of the men wore rentals with a lot of added-on decoration.

Weekly: What can you tell us about Emily’s dress?
Delgado: Emily’s dress is a bright red, rented dress. We took a lot of things off of it and then applied a lot of things onto it.

Weekly: And Katie’s gown?
Delgado: Her dress was made here and we added lots of beading.
Weekly: Did you look for vintage dress patterns?
Delgado: The little dress that Faith has is a vintage pattern, which we then changed around. Carly’s red cape, we just cut here.

Weekly: She looks beautiful.
Delgado: She does. That is a very enhanced combination of many things. We added sleeves from a period piece. We did so many things to that bodice.

Weekly: A real period piece? Where does one find clothes that are 100 years old?
Delgado: We had some things here that have been around for a long time. They were probably bought 40 years ago. This show has been around for a long time. The nicer pieces have been saved throughout the years and some pieces are really falling apart. So we just cut off the sleeves from one of those.

Weekly: There’s some kind of recycling.
Delgado: Absolutely. We always recycle. Are you kidding? That’s how we survive.

Weekly: Gwen looks lovely.
Delgado: That one we made from an existing garment from a store. Then, we totally enhanced it and pretty much changed it, but we liked some of the beading that was on the dress.
Weekly: Cady McClain‘s Rosanna looks rather pale and weak.
Delgado: She is. She is dying in bed. Rosanna has been going into these comas.

Weekly: As is her dollhouse alter ego.
Delgado: That’s right. She sees herself and she says, “Oh, look that poor woman in bed. She looks so sad.”

Weekly: She looks like a gothic heroine.
Delgado: That we made out of something contemporary, and then we enhanced that completely.

Weekly: How is it decided that Margo would be a servant?
Delgado: That was all in the script. She’s our Irish maid. She’s really cute. Lucinda, of course, is the cook. The richest person on our campus ends up being the cook, which is kind of fun. She loved playing that.

Weekly: Iris looks pretty fancy.
Delgado: Basically, what happened there was the writer changed the two characters. All of a sudden, Barbara is the lower class, like Iris, and Iris becomes the upper class in that scene.

Weekly: And Holden, is he back to his stable boy roots?
Delgado: He’s our stable guy.

Weekly: Was it a long day of taping?
Delgado: It was not that long a day. It’s like clockwork here; it took a long time to get them into their hair and makeup, and into their clothes, because most of the ladies did have to wear their corsets.

Yes, she said corsets — Delgado went so far as to rent authentic corsets for the episode. Remember to catch ATWT on Dec. 21, and pick up Soap Opera Weekly that day to see a lovely photo spread on the dollhouse and its inhabitants.