“What are you doing in the first week of July, Ellie?” “Nothing that I can think of,” I answered. “We’ll still have another couple of weeks of school, but it always winds down at that time of year. Why do you ask?” “My brother and a couple of his friends have written a play that they want to get put on at the Arts Festival that week, and now they need some people to perform in it. They’ve already roped me in, and they’re looking for another couple of people to take part so that they don’t have to. What do you think? It’ll be a laugh.” I couldn’t think of any reason why not to as I quite enjoyed acting and had nothing much planned for the Summer months. I knew that we were not going on holiday as my parents were saving up for a trip to Australia at Christmas, so anything to look forward to was good by me. Kate’s brother was always good for a laugh, and we had a couple of months to get ready for the festival, so once I had done my last couple of exams, I was going to have very little to do until September. “Sounds good to me. What can you tell me about it?” “They’ve booked the stage at St. Augustine’s church hall for the week, and are planning on putting on four performances on the Wednesday to Saturday evenings, with space for a Saturday matinée if there’s enough demand. I know they were hoping you’d say yes; I think they’ve written the part especially for you,” Kate responded, with a twinkle in her eye. A fortnight later, we were all together in Kate’s front room, having a first read-through of the script. It was a good one, with enough funny moments to make me giggle, and I now understood why Kate appeared to be smiling when she had asked me. They’d given me the part of an elderly lady who didn’t really seem to know what was going on, and her lines were full of double-entendres, so I was the one who was going to be getting most of the laughs. They’d already found me a grey wig to wear, but had left me with the job of getting some clothing suitable for an elderly lady who was not quite with-it. In order to get ourselves kitted-out, Kate and I had been given twenty pounds each to go and get a suitable outfit for the performance. As Kate was playing a 17 year-old, her part didn’t really need her to get a new outfit. In fact, she didn’t really need to do any acting at all, just remember her lines. A quick visit to Primark, and she had everything she needed – a new blue top and a lilac-coloured skirt which was on the short-side, although not daringly so. However, when it came to finding something for me to wear, there didn’t really seem to be anything within our budget. True, we found several dresses at M&S that were what we thought we needed, but had to rule them out on the basis of price. We also had to stop at the optician’s for Kate to pickup her new glasses. This took rather longer than we had expected, as when she tried them on, she said they felt far too strong for her. After checking the strength of the lenses, she was told that they were correct, but that the change from -3.75 to -5.00 and -5.25 was quite a big one, and she was going to have to wear the glasses to get used to them. The stylish black plastic frames looked really good on her. While I was waiting for them to make the umpteenth minor adjustment to her frames, I wandered outside the shop and started looking through the windows of a couple of nearby charity shops. From where I stood, I could see a rail of floral print dresses which looked just like they would be the sort of thing Elspeth Rabbitt would wear. When Kate rejoined me, we went in for a closer look. There were dresses of all sorts of shapes and sizes, so it took us a while to sort through them to find several that might be suitable. I took three to the fitting room to try them on. The first was a lilac and mauve number. The fit was quite good, but we decided it was probably a little too close in colour to what Kate was going to be wearing, so we rejected it. The second was a combination of mint and olive greens. Once it was on me, I thought it looked awful; Kate found it hilarious. She even managed to produce a straw hat from somewhere, which made it look even worse. Fortunately, it went quite well with the third dress, which gave us more idea of what we were looking for, but the fact that even my small boobs managed to make it gape was why we had to put it back. We paid a couple of pounds for the hat and went to the next shop. There didn’t appear to be as much choice in the second place, but maybe that was because we knew now what we wanted. After a few minutes of looking, we found it – a yellow and brown dress marked at £7. It wasn’t my colour, but it would be fine for Elspeth Rabbitt, and the fit was pretty good as well. Kate took a couple of pictures so she could show her brother what I was going to wear, while I posed for the camera. “I know what you need now,” she said, once again with a twinkle in her eye. “A pair of enormous knickers and a granny-bra.” “Very droll.” “But they’ll make it easier for you to get into your character.” “Firstly, I don’t need enormous knickers or a granny-bra, and secondly I don’t need to get undressed so there’s no point.” “I’m sure we could tweak the script so that you do,” she smirked. “How about a pair of glasses? All old people wear glasses.” “Does that make you an old person, then? I’ve just had to wait half an hour while you got your glasses sorted out.” “That’s not the same thing at all. I need them so that I can see.” “And old people don’t?” “Look, while you’ve got the dress on, let’s see what these look like on you.” Kate took off her new glasses and handed them to me. I put them on very carefully, making sure I didn’t touch the pristine lenses. Everything was a blur. “I’m not surprised you thought these lenses were too strong. I can’t wear these; I’d be a danger to myself.” “But they look good on you. Hang on, I’ll take a couple of pictures and you’ll see what I mean.” Once I had handed the glasses back to Kate, I was able to take a look at the pictures and the selfie we had just taken. I had to agree with her; the glasses looked good on me, although they were far too modern for an elderly lady. She offered me her “old” glasses to try as well, but although the vision was slightly better, Kate agreed that they still were not what we needed. “The Pound shop. They have lots of pairs of reading glasses for old people in there. I’m sure we can find something to suit you.” I went back into the fitting room and changed back into my own clothes. We paid for the dress and a beige cardigan I had spotted, and wandered back down the High Street to the largest of the shops. They had a lot of different styles in there, and many different strengths. In the end, we decided that there was no point in getting subtle glasses – if Elspeth Rabbitt had no taste in dresses, she was not likely to have any more taste in choosing glasses, so we went for a bold, multi-coloured pair with a +1.25 lens. I could see everything up close very well, and the distance was not too blurry either. Rehearsals for our play seemed to be a little haphazard as we had trouble meeting together in the weeks leading up to the festival. When we met on the first day of the festival, we still had not had a complete run-through of the play. We used the whole of the Saturday afternoon and much of the evening in rehearsals, and by the end of it, we were pretty confident that it was going to be alright on the night. We then set about practising a 5 minute snippet of the play to use the following day, as we sought to persuade people to buy tickets for the performance. On Sunday, we made our way to the spot on the high street where we thought there would be the greatest footfall. We made a point of getting there good and early so that no-one else could pinch our spot, and we would not end up in some out-of-the-way side street. It was just as well that we had done so, as ten minutes later, we saw another group arriving and watched as they had to retreat a respectful distance so that we were not getting in each other’s way. I was grateful that I had added the cardigan to my purchases, as the day was not the warmest, and we were planning on being out in the street for about ten hours, doing our mini-performance every twenty minutes or so. It was also an experience wearing the glasses. At first, the ground seemed to jump at me as I looked down, and the distance was all a bit blurry, but as the day wore on, I got used to it, and I seemed to be able to see things farther away slightly clearer, although I could see just as well when I took the glasses off, too. When I got home, I couldn’t wait to get the weight off my feet and set about running a bath straight away. As I lay in the bath looking at the various messages and texts I had received during the day, I realised I was still wearing the glasses. I took them off, only to discover that the text no longer seemed as clear and sharp as it had when I had been wearing them. It got me wondering whether I had overdone it, but, figuring that an extra 30 minutes or so of wearing them would make little difference, I put them back on until I had finished on my phone. I was very careful to take them off before leaving the bathroom so that my parents didn’t ask me about them. Tempting though it was to wear the glasses at school, I decided that it was more important to have all my costume for the play in one place, so I left everything packed neatly away in a carrier bag in my bedroom. I couldn’t resist popping the glasses on once or twice when I was checking my phone, but they didn’t seem to make as much difference as they had after wearing them all day, so I decided it was probably better not to wear them until I had to. On the Tuesday evening, we took everything to the church hall so that it was ready for the dress rehearsal the following afternoon. I really enjoyed the festival. In the end. we did four performances, playing to seventy or eighty people each time, so as we were not sold out, decided against the Saturday matinée. After the performance, we got changed as quickly as possible and headed off to the Green for the closing Firework Finale. Once again, I was absolutely shattered by the time I got home, but was able to comfort myself with the thought of a lie-in the following day as my parents had arranged to take my little brother to the zoo so I could get some sleep and catch up on my school work, which had rather taken a back seat for the last few days. I woke up rather earlier on the Sunday morning than I had expected. Maybe it had been the sound of the front door closing, or maybe it had been the silence which I unused to, but I was wide awake at half past nine. I lay in bed, thinking about the last week, the highs and lows of the performances, and the good time that I, and my fellow cast members had had. Then, my thoughts turned to the glasses. Could I really see better with them on? Had my vision got better the longer I wore them? Did I actually need glasses myself (I didn’t think so, because I had never even needed an eye test)? What was it like for Kate having to wear glasses all the time? Before I knew it, I had got out of bed and found Elspeth’s glasses. I tried looking through them and over them at things near and far, as I looked around my bedroom. I then flung on a dressing gown, and went off round the house, doing the same thing wherever I went. They certainly made things easier to see up close, although the distance was still slightly fuzzy. I worked out that I had worn the glasses for ten or eleven hours last weekend, so decided to keep them on until my parents got home later, and settled down to do some homework. I was so engrossed in what I was doing, that I ended up getting a smudge on one of the lenses when I went to rub my eyes. Removing my glasses to clean them, I realised that, like last weekend, I seemed to be seeing better with them on. As I had done earlier that morning, I went for a wander around the house, comparing the with and without. This time, everything seemed to be slightly better with them on. I also realised that I had been starting to think of them as “my glasses”, rather than as a pair of glasses I had bought as part of a theatrical costume. By the time my parents got home just after eight o’clock, I had been wearing my glasses for about eleven hours. I didn’t really want to take them off, but decided that I had better to so. I wasn’t quite sure how to broach the subject with my mum, but I somehow managed to explain that I thought I had been able to see slightly better up close when I was on stage the previous week, and that it might be a good idea to get my eyes tested, just in case. I very was careful to make sure that I didn’t say anything about having worn them all the time they were out or that I was 99% certain I needed glasses for reading (if not more). It was lunchtime on Wednesday, when I got a message to say that I needed to meet my mum in town at 4 o’clock for my optician’s appointment. I was made to look into several different machines before being ushered into a room with a large, black chair with a back-to-front chart of letters and other strange shapes behind it. The lady started asking me some general questions about my health and my lifestyle, before she asked me why I had come to see her. As my mum was outside, I felt able to tell her the whole truth, and even showed her the glasses I had been wearing. She took them from me and had a brief look at them, before putting them down on the table beside her, and putting a strange pair of glasses on my face. Then, she asked me to read as much of the chart as possible. I thought I was doing really well when I read down to the bottom line, and that I was probably wasting her time. Then she showed me some even smaller letters, which I had difficulty with, and I’m not sure I didn’t get some of them wrong. After that, she took me into the room next door and put some drops into my eyes, and told me to wait there until she came back in about 20 minutes. The wait seemed to go on for something more like an hour, but eventually she returned and led me back into the first consulting room. I couldn’t see very well at all, and when she showed me the largest set of letters, I struggled to read the bottom line, and I knew she had another two sets of smaller letters to show me. Then, she covered my left eye and had me read as much as possible, before she put a lens into the strange frame. Everything immediately became a lot clearer. More lenses followed, sometimes as well as the lens in the frame, sometimes instead of it. When she was satisfied, she covered my right eye and the whole process began again with my left eye. I wasn’t sure if I was always getting the answer right, but when she had finished, I was able to read the very bottom line, including the letters I had struggled with half an hour earlier. “You were right to come and see me, Ellie. You are a little bit longsighted and will benefit from wearing glasses.” What she had to say did not surprise me, but I was a little concerned that all this was self-inflicted. “Is it because I wore those glasses too much?” I asked, pointing at the pair which were still sitting on the table. “No. They may have made you realise that you needed to get your eyes tested, but they won’t have changed your vision at all. Look…” she said, replacing the chunky test frame with my stage glasses. “This is what you can see with the glasses you were wearing. And this… “she added as she held a couple of lenses in front of the glasses, “is what you will be able to see when you get your own glasses.” There didn’t seem to be much difference between the two, so I said as much. “There isn’t. What you are wearing at the moment is a pair of +1.25 lenses; I’ve prescribed you +1.50 for both eyes, which is the next lens up in strength. I’d like to see you again in 6 months’ time, when you might need a slightly stronger lens, but other than that, your new glasses should be good for the next 20 years or so. You could even wear those glasses while you’re waiting for your to come in, although I suspect you’d prefer to be seen in something a little more fashionable.” She hadn’t said how often I needed to wear my glasses, so I thought I’d better ask. “I’d think in terms of when you don’t need to wear them, rather than when you do. You’ll be able to get away without wearing them around the house, but will need them for reading and distance activities in the very near future, so I’d recommend you wear them all the time from day one. If you want, we can also arrange you an appointment for a contact lens fitting.” I hadn’t even thought about contact lenses, so I thanked her as she gave me a slip of paper, and made my way out to try to select a pair of glasses. In the end, I selected exactly the same frames as Kate was now wearing. It took a couple of weeks for me to get “my glasses,” and it felt good to be able to wear them in front of my family as I had been told that I had to, rather than sneaking Elspeth’s glasses on when no-one else was around. I had gone from wearing stage glasses to real glasses in just under a month, but it did leave me wondering how long it would have taken me to reach this stage if I had not said “yes” to Kate when she had asked me to play Elspeth Rabbitt.