Evora ad: My mother oiled movie stars' arms in 1954

Movie stars in 1954 had a wardrobe girl whose only job before a sleeveless scene was their arms. ⠀ That girl was my mother. ⠀ I found the ledger two weeks after we buried her, in the bottom drawer of her sewing cabinet, under forty years of pattern envelopes. ⠀ It's a green cloth account book, the kind they sold at Woolworth's, with the corners worn round. On the first page, in my mother's careful schoolgirl handwriting, it says Wardrobe, Stage 9, 1954. Then my mother's name, Rosa Benedetti, and her age, nineteen. ⠀ I knew she'd worked at a movie studio when she was young. It was family legend. But she never talked about it much, and when I asked, she'd wave her hand and say, "Pins and hems, Gloria. It was pins and hems." ⠀ My brother Sal and I spent a whole weekend clearing out her apartment. Sal took the furniture and the recipes. ⠀ I took the sewing room, because nobody else would know what half of it was. Bias tape from 1968. A tomato pincushion so old the tomato had faded pink. ⠀ Her good shears, wrapped in a flannel cloth, sharper than mine. ⠀ And at the bottom of the bottom drawer, that green ledger. ⠀ It wasn't only pins and hems. ⠀ My mother came over from a village outside Naples when she was fifteen, and by nineteen she had a job in the wardrobe department of one of the big studios in Los Angeles. ⠀ She started as what they called a wardrobe girl. She fetched and pressed, and she did whatever the head costumer told her to. ⠀ And one of the things the head costumer told her to do, before every sleeveless scene, was the arms. ⠀ The ledger lists every fitting she worked that year, with the actress's initials only. My mother was discreet her whole life, and she was discreet even in a notebook nobody was ever supposed to read. Gown, color, alterations, date. Page after page of it. ⠀ Some entries are just a line. Others go on. One, in May, says only: Miss C.L., ivory satin, bias cut, no sleeves, arms first, 7 a.m. call. ⠀ I've read that one more times than I can tell you. Arms first. Before the gown, before the hair, before anything. ⠀ And on the inside of the back cover, written in pencil and underlined twice, there's a note to herself. ⠀ Warm oil on the arms before the sleeveless. Never the cold cream. It sweats off under the lights. ⠀ I read that sitting on the floor of her sewing room, and I put my hand over my mouth. ⠀ I'm a seamstress too. I ran an alterations shop in Glendale for thirty-eight years. ⠀ I've hemmed ten thousand pairs of pants and taken in more wedding dresses than I can count. ⠀ And for the last ten years, I've been doing something none of my customers ever noticed. ⠀ I've been adding sleeves to my own clothes. ⠀ When I buy a sleeveless dress pattern, I draft a sleeve for it. ⠀ When I find a sleeveless blouse I like, I take it home and set in a three-quarter sleeve from matching fabric. I'm good enough at it that nobody can tell. ⠀ I have a closet full of dresses that were never meant to have sleeves. ⠀ It started a little after sixty. ⠀ My upper arms went thin, then loose, and then they creased every time I reached for the shears, like silk organza crushed in a box. My chest went papery. ⠀ And my arms were dry all the time, in Glendale, where it's dry anyway. ⠀ Lotion felt good for an hour, and then it was gone, and my arms were tight again. ⠀ I'd tried drugstore lotions and the expensive creams from the department store counter. I spent good money, and none of it lasted until supper. ⠀ My mother, at ninety-one, had better arms than I did at seventy-one. I'd noticed that for years and never once asked her why. ⠀ I remember her at the kitchen sink every night of my childhood, after her bath, with a little brown bottle on the windowsill. ⠀ She'd rub something into her arms and her elbows while the kettle came up, humming, and I thought it was just one of her habits, like saying a Hail Mary when an ambulance went by. ⠀ At ninety-one, at her last birthday, she wore a sleeveless dress and held her great-grandson on her hip, and everyone at the party remarked on how she looked. I sat at the end of the table in a dress I'd sewn sleeves into myself. ⠀ I never asked her. I don't know why. Maybe I thought it was too late for me. ⠀ And here she'd written it down in 1954. ⠀ Of course, I'm a practical woman, so the first thing I did was figure out what she meant about the lights. ⠀ The lights on those old sound stages were enormous, and they were hot. My mother used to say the actresses sweated through their dress shields in an hour. ⠀ Cold cream has water in it; that's what makes it feel cold. Under those lights, the water went in minutes, and whatever was left ran. ⠀ Oil stayed where you put it. ⠀ And the more I read, the more I understood that my bathroom was a sound stage too, just a slower one. ⠀ Lotion today is still mostly water, seventy to eighty percent of it. ⠀ Skin keeps water out by design, so most of it sits on the surface, and within an hour it has evaporated, the way cold cream did under the lights. ⠀ And after menopause, the skin stops making the oil it used to make on its own. That's why it goes thin and crinkly. ⠀ I had been treating a shortage of oil with water for ten years. ⠀ My mother's note didn't say which oil. Studios had their own supply, I suppose. And I wasn't going to start rubbing my arms with whatever was in the pantry. ⠀ The answer, in the end, walked into my shop. ⠀ I still take in a few alterations from old customers, at my kitchen table now. In April, Mrs. Feld came by with a sleeveless sheath dress in navy linen. She's seventy-nine. She wanted it shortened two inches for a cruise. ⠀ When I pinned the hem, she stood with her arms out to her sides, the way customers do, and I looked at her arms, and I couldn't stop myself. ⠀ "Mrs. Feld," I said, with three pins in my mouth, "what do you put on your arms?" ⠀ She laughed. "Not cream, I'll tell you that." ⠀ I took the pins out of my mouth. ⠀ "My daughter put me onto an oil," she said. "It's called Evora, and there's no water in it, just six oils. ⠀ I put two pumps on after my shower while I'm still wet, and that's the whole routine. ⠀ It took a couple of weeks before I noticed, and then I stopped buying sweaters." ⠀ I told her about my mother's ledger. She made me get it out and show her the back cover, and she read the line out loud in my kitchen. ⠀ "Well," she said. "Your mother would have saved me a fortune." ⠀ I ordered a bottle that night. ⠀ It goes in fast. I was worried about oil on my fabric, because a seamstress can't afford a spot on a customer's silk, but there was nothing on my blouse and nothing on my hands after a minute. ⠀ The first week, I didn't feel much of anything, and I'll admit I wondered if my mother's ledger had made me a little sentimental. ⠀ Two weeks in, I was threading a needle at my cutting table with my sleeves pushed up, and my forearm was resting on a bolt of cotton lawn. ⠀ When I moved it, I felt my own skin slide over the cloth, soft as the lawn itself. I sat there with the needle half threaded and just felt it. ⠀ By early summer my arms looked firmer in my sewing mirror, which is a very honest mirror, and the creasing at the elbow had softened. ⠀ In July, I took my favorite dress out of the closet. A sleeveless navy cotton I'd bought in 2014 and set sleeves into the same week. ⠀ I laid it on my cutting table, picked up my mother's shears, and took the sleeves off. ⠀ It was the easiest alteration I've ever done. I finished the armholes with a narrow facing, pressed it, and wore it that same evening to my niece's for dinner. ⠀ My niece looked at me twice before she said anything, and then she said, "Aunt Gloria, you look like Nonna in her wedding picture." ⠀ That's the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a long time. ⠀ The next week Mrs. Feld came back from her cruise to pick up a second dress she'd left with me, a sleeveless red one she wanted taken in at the waist. ⠀ I answered the door in the navy dress with no sleeves. ⠀ She put her purse down on my kitchen table and looked at me the way a seamstress looks at a hem, very carefully, from one side and then the other. ⠀ "Well," she said. "Your mother would be proud of that alteration." ⠀ I didn't charge her for the red dress. She tried to pay me twice. I told her she'd already paid, back in April, with three words and a bottle of oil. ⠀ So if you're the woman who's been adding sleeves to your life, one way or another, here's what I learned from a green ledger and a customer with a navy dress. ⠀ Read the back of your lotion. If water leads the list, you're putting cold cream under hot lights. ⠀ The oil is Evora. Buy it from Evora's website only. Mrs. Feld's daughter told her the imitations floating around are a single cheap oil in a bottle that looks just like it. ⠀ And you have ninety days to send it back for a refund if it does nothing, even after you've used it up. ⠀ My mother wrote it down in 1954. It took me until seventy-one to read it. ⠀ Gloria, 71, Glendale ⠀ P.S. I've put my mother's ledger in a frame box with the back cover facing out. Customers ask about the gowns. I tell them to read the pencil.