Finally got my own fedora* into a show! In past gigs it was always selected for me from "wardrobe's" closets.
It was during a summer rainstorm that my wife and I were running out of a restaurant and heading across the street to our parked car. I saw it in the middle of the street. A clump of wet material being run over by the passing cars (and trucks). It had a brown band around it (in addition to the truck-tire marks) and I immediately recognized it as a... hat. In fact it was a man's brown fedora with a small pin attached to the band. I had to rescue it! Upon close inspection I noticed that the pin read "Bailey" and the tag inside expanded on the moniker as "Bailey of Hollywood"! Oh yessss... this was meant to be MY HAT. (think: Gollum saying "My precioussss!")
Took the drenched clump home and put it in my dishwasher on top of a mixing bowl to let it have some shape when it eventually dried out from the rinse cycle. Two weeks later, it did. Then I kind of remembered my father's mannerisms from way back. He used to give his fedora a "karate chop" on the top and pinch the front crown a bit -then a slight twist to the brim ...and BAM! he was the sharpest looking guy in town! I decided to "channel him" and performed the same actions.
Back to the present:
And so, when I got the call to be an extra on GOTHAM, I just knew I could work it into my wardrobe.
Epilogue:
And now it's famous!
*Reference info from Wikipedia:
The word fedora comes from the title of an 1882 play by dramatist Victorien Sardou, Fédora, written for Sarah Bernhardt.The play was first performed in the United States in 1889. Bernhardt played Princess Fédora, the heroine of the play. During the play, Bernhardt wore a center-creased, soft brimmed hat. The hat was fashionable for women and the women's rights movement adopted it as a symbol. Fedoras have become widely associated with gangsters and Prohibition, which coincided with the height of the hat's popularity in the 1920s to early 1950s. In the second half of the 1950s, it fell out of favor due to a shift towards more informal clothing styles. Indiana Jones popularized the fedora in the Indiana Jones franchise.
