OverDressed for Life

Day Two of The Twelve Days of Brooches is a vintage 1950s rhinestone flower and it has an interesting story.

This brooch ended up with me by mistake.

The year was 1993 and I was working as an extra on the film Golden Gate starring Matt Dillon and Joan Chen. It’s the story of an FBI agent (Dillon) in 1950s San Francisco and a young Chinese woman (Chen). The filming took place in SF and around the Bay Area. I was called in to work as an extra for a nightclub scene in downtown Oakland. What a blast that night was!

We were told to bring our own clothing – anything dressy that would work for the 1950s. Given my vintage collection that was easy for me. I brought a simple column knit dress in black (my mother’s) and a black faux fur coat (luckily, as we worked outside until the wee hours of the morning and it was cold). They gave me shoes, did my makeup and hair, plopped a hat on my head and added this rhinestone brooch to my coat. There were probably thirty or so other extras, mostly men who were cast as FBI agents. The funny part about that was that all the guys had long hair and one by one they got their hair chopped off because whoever heard of an FBI agent with long hippie hair? (Apparently some of the guys, who didn’t have long hair, were found by the film’s producers hanging out at a Frank Sinatra club in the Haight in SF.) It was a lighthearted gathering of extras and we had fun together.

My “part” was a woman hanging off the arm of a well-dressed gentleman. We were in a crowd of people finding our way down a dark alley with FBI agents hiding behind every nook and cranny. I decided to play it drunk and that allowed me to make a lot of noise and stumble around a bit. I’m pretty sure you can hear my laugh echoing into the night at the very end of the scene as we went down a few steps and into the nightclub.

There were maybe a half a dozen takes and when we were released at around 3am all of us were eager to go home. No one remembered the brooch on my coat. I discovered it a few days later and even though it’s not something I’d choose to wear, I keep it for the memories of that unique evening.