Sock monkeys, Opera and Der Ring des Nibelungen

Wotan from Der Ring des Nibielungen (photo by Barry Sturgill)

I make sock monkeys. Some people tell me I’m making art, but I think I’m just having fun and learning how to sew better.

For the last several years, I’ve worked as a dresser in theatre venues around Seattle, but my main gig has been at Seattle Opera in the wardrobe department where I’m the dresser for the principal male artist. In the summer or 2009, we were doing another production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, or to non-opera goers, the dreaded “Ring Cycle”. The cycle is made up of four separate operas that tell the “Ring” story, and each one of them is riduclously long – I mean really long – the whole cycle is spread over four nights and is 18+ hours long, so it’s not exactly what you call an “intro to loving opera” thing. You’ve gotta be hard core to want to sit through this. One of the operas in the cycle, Siegfired, is so long, that other operas we produced are over and done with in less time than it takes to sit through just Act I of it. This means there is lots of time where my artist is on stage singing and I am waiting for hours before he comes back for a change. How does one fill that time? Sock monkeys.

So I’m getting long-winded about this, but during this particular production I was dressing an amazing singer named Greer Grimsley (check him out here). I’m not an opera lover, but really appreciate the gifted artists I work with who are at the top of their field, and Greer is an opera superstar. I’d been his dresser on several other operas, and wanted to give him something to commemorate the shows we’d done together. About the same time, I came across pair of vintage red heel socks in a thrift store, so I thought of doing a sock monkey dressed in a smaller version of the role Greer was singing – Wotan, King of the Norse gods.

The costume shop usually has scraps left over from making the costumes, and we keep them in wardrobe for costume repairs, so I rummaged around and found what I needed to replicate Wotan’s costume. A very cool thing about this production, is the costumes were designed by Martin Paklidenaz, who has won a bunch of TONY awards and designs a lot for opera and Broadway, and these costumes were gorgeous. At this point in time, I wasn’t much of a sewer, so my really talented boss Ron helped me make a pattern and assemble it for the sock monkey. Some more help from hair and makeup department for the hairstyle, and props department for a “spear” and Wotan was complete and ready to give to Greer. He loved it, and that’s my long story of how I started making sock monkeys.

The green coat Wotan wears is what we referred to as his “God coat” (sometimes in the cycle he is “the Wanderer” and doesn’t wear the coat) – it is quilted and has hand-applied metal tags and applique. I pieced the coat together from several scraps, so had to reattach the metal tags and applique after it was done. you can’t see it in the picture, but I did give him one of those cartoon “X” eyes under his eye patch. I love the photo Barry did of this with Wotan’s home, Valhalla, up in the clouds.