More than 30 years ago, a group of people in Easton decided to put on a show.
It was called Follies, a huge variety production created to benefit CASA. More than 100 people may have participated over the years, depending on who tells the story. What is clear is that it was a true community celebration. And when you have that many people onstage, you need a lot of costumes.
That need gave birth to something that would become an extraordinary resource for the Eastern Shore: Easton’s Costume Shop.
The collection grew from costumes created by Marie U’Ren, Stephanie Handy and others for Follies and the Easton Old Tyme Christmas Parade. Over the years, costumes, props and accessories were donated, and schools, theatre companies and community organizations discovered this remarkable resource.
It became the place to go when you needed to transform someone into a character.
Marie eventually handed management of the collection to Kate Levey, a professionally trained costume designer and seamstress. Kate made countless garments from scratch and meticulously maintained the collection. I had the privilege of working with her for more than a decade on community theatre productions and school plays.
It wasn’t simply a room full of old clothes.
It was infrastructure for the arts.
The collection eventually moved to the Hanson Street Professional Center, where membership fees, rentals, grants and fundraising helped sustain it. From 2014 until the beginning of the pandemic, the Costume Shop was successfully self-sustaining.
Then, in March 2020, everything stopped.
Schools stopped performing. Churches stopped performing. Theatre stopped. Community events disappeared.
The Costume Shop went into hibernation.
This past week, I received an email from Susan Betts, the former owner of Actors Attic in Dover, Delaware. Susan founded the business in 1980, and for decades it was the largest theatrical supply and rental house south of Philadelphia and east of Towson. She closed the costume, sound and lighting portions of the business in 2020. Yet she still has much of the inventory.
Her email was essentially a message from one community arts survivor to another: I have all of this stuff. Do you need it?
One line from her story stayed with me:
“It takes a village.”
I think that is the story of our Costume Shop, too.
Over the years, the collection served an astonishing number of local organizations, including the Avalon Foundation, Tred Avon Players, Talbot County Public Schools, The Country School, Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, Shore Shakespeare, Church Hill Theatre, Crash Box Theatre, Groove Theatre and countless others.
Thousands of people benefited from this collection without necessarily knowing where it came from.
That is often how community infrastructure works.
We notice it when it is gone.
I became the steward of the collection several years ago, and I became emotionally attached to it almost immediately. There was something magical about opening a garment bag and finding exactly what a production needed: a Victorian coat, a ridiculous hat, a pair of shoes, something strange and wonderful that could suddenly become essential.
I think what made it personal was that I’ve worn these garments myself. I’ve dressed my friends and family in them. I’ve seen people receive standing ovations. I witnessed my community make true art in these costumes.
At one point, we almost made it work.
We were fortunate enough to have roughly 7,000 square feet in the Brookletts Building, with many thanks to Jaime Windon for underwriting our rent in those early days, at an extraordinarily affordable rent. For the first time, I could imagine the Costume Shop not just surviving, but thriving.
Then my circumstances changed. I became a single mother and the sole income earner in my household. I could no longer devote hundreds of unpaid hours to running the shop.
Then the Brookletts Building caught fire.
The Costume Shop, and the artists sharing that building, lost their home.
And there simply isn’t another affordable space of that size and scale available to us.
So here is the difficult part:
The Costume Shop is dead.
Not struggling. Not hanging on. Not waiting for someone to save it.
It’s gone.
Half of the collection has been culled, and the best of what remains is going into storage.
For six years, I tried to figure out how to make it work. I wanted desperately to build a sustainable version of what Marie, Kate and all of the people before us had created.
I failed.
There is a particular kind of grief that comes with losing something that doesn’t have a funeral. No final performance. No ceremony. It simply stops.
And that is why Susan’s story has stayed with me.
How many things like this can a community lose before we realize what we had?
It is easy to say the arts are important. It is harder to pay the rent for the warehouse that makes those arts possible.
The Costume Shop was never just about costumes. It was about reuse instead of disposal. Expertise instead of convenience. Community instead of isolation.
A dress could be worn by one performer, altered for another, and eventually become part of another production entirely. A child could step onto a stage wearing something made decades earlier. A small theatre company could create a period piece without spending its entire budget on costumes.
That’s how community resources are built.
And, apparently, that’s how they disappear, too.
I don’t know what happens next. I don’t have a building, a business plan or the hundreds of unpaid hours required to resurrect the shop as it once existed.
I’m not writing this to ask someone to save it. That chapter is over.
But I do have a small kernel of hope that someday someone will look at what remains and understand what it was. Maybe the collection will find a new purpose. Maybe another generation will build something completely different.
For now, though, I think it is worth saying goodbye.
The women who started this didn’t know they were creating an institution. They just needed costumes for a show. Thirty years later, I hope we can recognize what they actually built.
Something doesn’t have to last forever to have mattered.
The Costume Shop mattered. And now it’s gone.
Cece Davis is an Eastern Shore filmmaker and arts advocate who works with the Avalon Foundation as media manager and the Creative Director of Groove/Factory
