Theatre Guild President Mark Wygonik was finally getting around to a book someone lent him a while ago: Simon Doonan’s “Wacky Chicks: Life Lessons from Fearlessly Inappropriate and Fabulously Eccentric Women.”
In the book, the Barneys New York creative director vaunts a half-dozen break-the-mold women including comedian Amy Sedaris and ‘80s party icon Susanne Bartsch.
And right in the introduction, Isabel Garrett, longtime toy and game designer, one-time go-go girl, and creator of a party-time line of strategically ripped Lycra activewear.
For Wygonik, the name jumped off the page with more pop than a strand of shredded bodysuit.
Isabel Garrett is one of the Guild’s most endearing volunteer actors and scenic designers. Straight out of the gate, after her acting debut, she won two Genie awards and a passel of friends, nearly all with far more traditional day jobs.
Last week, the 69-year-old Sebastian resident was painting backdrops for this year’s Genie celebration Saturday night. On her knees in khaki short-shorts (or at least shorter-than-most shorts), she was hunched over a balsawood board on the stage floor, dabbing black paint into letters that read, “Pompeii Club” from the musical “Sweet Charity.”
Seconds later, she was demonstrating her own Bob Fosse moves – hip thrusts, shoulder shimmies and a tenuous one-legged drop to the floor. “It’s much easier in heels,” she adds after springing back to standing. “This is what I did at the 49er Club, only in pasties and a G-string. That’s how I paid for art classes at the Art Students League in New York.”
Remarkably, none of her Guild co-volunteers seemed to bat an eye, focused on their tasks in the cool darkness of the theater as easy-listening pop music played through the sound system. When her cohort Robin Volsky offered to transfer her sketches of cocktail-party silhouettes on the walls of the theater’s Green Room, Garrett demurred. “I want to paint those myself,” she said with the pretend pout of a jealous sibling.
Garrett’s scenic design is remarkable. “She’s a genius,” says Volsky, her collaborator. Wygonik, himself a talented artist who designs many of the Guild sets, called her work “fantastic.”
It was Garrett who painted – freehand, in three weeks – Wygonik’s elaborate set for “Into the Woods” a couple of years ago, and the English garden in “The Importance of Being Earnest.”
Her first effort at the Guild was painting the 36-foot-wide cornfield for “Oklahoma!” though, as she puts it, “I’d never painted anything larger than myself.”
She also painted the set for last summer’s benefit, “The Mikado,” the “best one I ever did.”
“Once I discovered the theater – I was home. Home,” she says. “There are wonderful people here.”
Bronx-born, Garrett’s father was well known in the garment district as an embroidery designer. Her mother was difficult. “She was the village crazy woman – a very good example of a bad example,” she says. “My father never spoke – he couldn’t get a word in edgewise. She was doing readings from the National Enquirer. I was the only fourth grader who knew who King Farouk was and how many affairs he had.”
Between the two, Garrett developed a comedian’s timing – just what she needed to sell her Bodywebs to rowdy bikers. “Give me 3,000 people and a microphone, and I’m in heaven,” she says.
She came to Doonan’s attention around 2001 when he was writing fashion columns for the New York Observer. Garrett’s toy career had come to an end and she had started Bodywebs after seeing something similar in a Greenwich Village head shop, and earned a mention in Women’s Wear Daily – earned being the operative word: she called with a pre-composed spiel about how Dior’s John Galliano had ripped off her line of Bodywebs – Doonan called them “slutwear,” to her delight – which she sold at biker and swinger conventions since the mid-1990s.
“I didn’t originate this technique,” she clarifies. “I was in one of these rock-and-roll trash shops in Greenwich Village and I saw this schmatta that looked like a bunch of strings. I went to try it on and it was to die for. So I went back and did it to my underwear and a bolero and wore it to this wild party.”
In 2001, Galliano marketed a remarkably similar look as part of Dior’s “trailer trash” campaign, charging $395 for a red one-piece bathing suit featured in a double-page ad in Vanity Fair – it was later on the cover of Vogue. That “trailer trash” label proved fortuitous for Garrett who happened to be living in a trailer – a camper, actually, parked at a nudist park in Kissimmee.
When Doonan’s researcher called, following up on the WWD mention, Garrett fed him that line. Doonan was wild with glee; he called the camper a “mobile maison de mode.”
It was Garrett, he says, who inspired his book. Her originality makes her worthy of celebrity, he maintains, far more so than the weight-watching actors and actresses who “show up on time for a film shoot.”
“Shouldn’t we expect a bit more from our cultural icons?” Doonan asks. “Busty, coquettish Isabel is so infinitely more worthy of our idolatry than Gwyneth or Halle or even Dame Judi.”
Not that Garrett’s resume doesn’t include traditional successes: a B.A. summa cum laude in art from City College of New York, and 20 years in the toy industry, first with Ned Strongin Associates (he was co-designer of Connect Four) and then at Parker Brothers.
Garrett’s contributions included Whoopsie, a doll whose pigtails flew up when you squeezed her middle; they were manufactured by Ideal, and 400,000 sold, she says. In 1982, she developed a card game called Greed, as well as Go Fetch It, a board game with an audio tape of directions.
In 1985, at Parker Brothers, she was asked to fill in the gap with a product when Atari sales were falling off, before Nintendo came into being. Her answer was to make videotape interactive.
She and her team worked with the game Clue, for which they re-wrote video by including actors, narration and multiple endings; it required a lot of forwarding and rewinding, the ‘80s version of “interactive.”
When her toy career was winding down, and her Bodywebs were ramping up, she rented out her “absolutely gorgeous New York apartment that I was paying nothing for” and headed for Florida to live “on the cheap” after meeting a man with a Winnebago.
They set up in a nudist park called Paradise Lakes, south of Orlando.
One day she heard that her spiritual teacher, Jean Houston, was doing a benefit for Kashi Ashram in Sebastian. There, Garrett met Kashi’s Brooklyn-born founder, the late Ma Jaya. “It was love at first sight.”
“I gave her a tamer Bodyweb and she wore it to work out,” says Garrett
Garrett came to the Theatre Guild after stumbling on a mention of “Once Upon a Mattress” as she was looking online to buy an actual mattress. The performance “blew me away,” she says.
When she saw that an upcoming production was “Bell, Book and Candle,” she decided to audition. “It was my favorite movie ever,” she says. She got the part of Aunt Queenie, the lead witch’s aunt. She has been involved in either acting or set design in nearly every show since.
“I never did anything in my life that wasn’t fun and light-hearted,’’ she says. “That’s who I am.”
