Lumieres Russian Dinner

On Saturday, Lumieres (our 18th century role-playing group, for lack of a better description) held a dinner at the court of Catherine the Great of Russia… or Babushka restaurant in Concord!  It’s a small restaurant out in the burbs, but perfect because the food was great, the staff were super accomodating (they even dressed up in loaner costumes!), and the decor (if you ignored the disco elements) was oldey-timey enough to look great by candlelight!

It was an absolute blast — everyone was literally resplendent in gorgeous gowns, fabulous wigs, and sparkling jewels.  There was lots of in-character banter (my favorite), nice champagne, and flirting.  Francis and I got together ahead of time and practiced the minuet, which we learned a few months back, and we performed it for the guests with only one false start!

I wore my this-old-thing black francaise.  I was itching to do a c. 1780 super powdered wig like one of these Roslin portraits, so I set to work with a blond wig I had bought a while back, hoping powdering over blond would maintain some warmth and work better on my skin tone.  Well, I can report that powdered blond hair is still blond — duller, yes, but still blond — which totally doesn’t work on me.  So that wig will get finished and sold on Etsy!  Instead I pulled out the 1760s tete de mouton wig I styled for the Vampire Ball, which actually fits the era of the dress better, and powdered that.  So nothing new, just a slight tweak.  In the candlelight, it ended up looking like this:

Although here’s a flash photo that shows the warts & all — I’m posing with Trystan’s fabulous husband Thomas:

We were welcomed by Catherine the Great herself:

And there was a LOT of scrummy scrummy costumes:

You can see the rest of my photos on Flickr!