From puppets to Krampus, costumer Marilyn Hardy is a masterful creator

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This article was published 23/12/2023 (740 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Marilyn Hardy has a lot of heads mounted on her walls — animal heads, people heads, cartoon heads. The local costumer has a vivid imagination and an amazing ability to transform her vision into convincing characters. The heads hanging on her walls are masks of prior costumes she has made for local theatre groups, her children and grandchildren, friends and herself.

She also loves to make puppets and an incredible realistic “Fizzgig” — the beloved dog-type character from the Jim Henson movie “The Dark Crystal” — sits on her coffee table. In her dining room she has racks of costumes she is working on and her basement is devoted to storing and displaying, as she can, the beloved and outstanding costumes she has made over the years. She still has the replica Michael Jackson red leather jacket from the singer’s 1983 “Thriller” music video; she made it for her daughter when she was younger, and the quality and craftsmanship is so amazing you think she took it right off Jackson’s back. It hangs on a rack quite close to a giant green head/mask of a Gremlin. It’s so real, it’s spooky.

“I remember the first costume I ever made. I made puppets before I made costumes,” Hardy said. “When I was a little kid I made Kermit the Frog when I was about eight or 10 years old. And I made Suzie the mouse and I know that a lot of people won’t remember Suzie the mouse. It was from a CBC kid show (‘Chez Helene’). There was my little mouse, and I begged my family to cut a hole in the kitchen table so that we could put the mouse up through the hole.”

Did her parents cut the hole for the mouse?

“No.”

“The first costume I ever made was probably a fairy costume when I started going to school. My parents didn’t celebrate any of this stuff. So we didn’t know there was a Christmas or Halloween or any of that stuff till we started school. Then when I started school, well I got sent home with papers to colour that have all this stuff on it. And I thought that was really cool,” Hardy said, adding by the time she was a parent herself, she celebrated all occasions in a big way.

“We went over the top. It got out of hand sometimes. The kids would always say, ‘Oh, it smells like Halloween in here.’ And what they mean is it smells like contact cement. Because for about a month before Halloween every year, everything would smell like contact cement in the house because that’s what you put everything together with,” she said.

Hardy claims she is retired, but her version of retired looks like a lot of work. She is always working on something for someone. She has stacks and stacks of materials, waiting for her busy fingers to craft it into something fabulous.

“Well, I’m retired. So, I get I make costumes and props and puppets, whatever the theater companies need I ended up figuring out how to do it for them usually … I just like making stuff and I’ve got endless supplies here. I’ve been stocking up for 60 years. And I like to be busy,” Hardy said, admitting she doesn’t like to relax or vacation much. “I have one daughter in Victoria. I go out there about every five years and that’s as much as I like to travel. I like to be home.”

Hardy first trained as a commercial artist at Assiniboine Community College and then moved to Edmonton to hone her skills.

“I worked at a display shop there. And, at a place that used to be called Scheme a Dream. It was a place where they needed big mascot costumes. And they also went out on little gigs where they would spoof people and stuff like that,” Hardy said.

When she returned to Brandon, a Brandon University professor discovered her skills and Hardy says her costume and prop making seems to have “exploded” since.

“It started back in the ’90s with (former and now retired drama professor) Jim Forsythe at Brandon University. He got me doing stuff first for him. I did Midsummer Night’s Dream and some stuff for a werewolf show he was doing there. And then they all figured it out! ‘Oh yeah. She knows how to make big animals’ or whatever kind of weird props they needed. So that’s when it kind of started. Jim I had worked in Edmonton too together, back in the day,” Hardy said.

And while Forsythe might have got Hardy started, she’s still up to her eyeballs in costume making for local theatre groups or themed parties for her friends, Halloween costumes for her grandchildren and flash mob costumes for her daughter.

“When Brian Sutherland still had Grim Acres, my daughter and I used to organize a flash mob every year there. They did “Thriller” and they had Michael Jackson and all the zombies and then they did Ghostbusters and we did all the Ghostbusters costumes and Slimer the ghost. Every (Halloween) there is just an endless amount of stuff,” Hardy laughed.

So is Halloween Hardy’s favourite season?

“I like Halloween. The kids always ask for something cool for Halloween. I always made my kids costumes and then now it’s the grandkids getting the costumes. But my friends are pretty goofy too and they like doing stuff that’s over the top usually,” Hardy said.

Sometimes, Hardy explained, she just makes costumes and masks for a little extra fun. In Christmas of 2020, she made three Krampus costumes for herself and two friends. (A Krampus is a horned mythical creature, who visits and scares children that have misbehaved during the holiday season.) Hardy and her friends donned the Krampus costumes and visited a local bar, intriguing and delighting people as they passed. Her Krampus creations made an appearance again this year during the Brandon Santa Claus Parade and stopped by Keywest Photo to pose with children for some fun holiday photos.

“Last year we just had Krampus and the kids on the float. And the kids were taunting Krampus and he was dunking them in a barrel and there was two Krampuses running around,” Hardy laughed. “This year we had all the villains of Christmas in a jail. The peppermint prison. We had Stripe from Gremlins, the Grinch, Scrooge, Oogie Boogie from Nightmare Before Christmas, Jack Skellington and Krampus all in this cage. Then Nutcracker guards guarding them in the cage.”

Some of her favourite creations, she says, are her puppets. For Mecca Productions one year she made the dragon from Shrek. Although perhaps a little too enthusiastically the first time, as it was so big, she said, it didn’t fit on the stage.

“The first one was 36 feet long and was way too big. I didn’t realize it as it was the first time I’d made one. And so I think they kept the head for it. But the bodies had probably been dismantled because it was too big. It was too big for people to operate. Then I made another one that was probably only 15 or 16 feet long, which worked a lot better. And I made another one for here. Anyway, I’ve made three of them. They’ve been getting smaller each time,” Hardy said. “I like puppets. I like making puppets and I’ve made a lot of them. I mean I made them for nonsense and back in the day I made puppet nuns for Jim. The Madagascar bunch I made was fun!”

Hardy said she was just finishing up a set of props and costumes for the fall musicals and then she planned to start on her Christmas gifts, which she makes herself.

“I don’t buy Christmas presents and I haven’t for 15 years. I make everything for the kids for Christmas. So I usually make them pajamas, slippers or purses or leather tooled stuff — belts, bags,” she said. Hardy also just recently finished a large order of leather mitts for Assiniboine Community College using recycled leather coats for the college’s Indigenous Elders.

So while Hardy likes making regular things, she will happily put that aside to work on her next fun project.

» khenderson@brandonsun.com