=PROPER THEATER CLOTHES=

At the evening performance in New York a lady wears a dinner dress; a gentleman a dinner coat, often called a Tuxedo.  Full dress is not correct, but those going afterwards to a ball can perfectly well go to the theater first if they do not make themselves conspicuous.  A lady in a ball dress and many jewels should avoid elaborate hair ornamentation and must keep her wrap, or at least a sufficiently opaque scarf, about her shoulders to avoid attracting people’s attention.  A gentleman in full dress is not conspicuous.

And on the subject of theater dress it might be tentatively remarked that prinking and “making up” in public are all part of an age which can not see fun in a farce without bedroom scenes and actors in pajamas, and actresses running about in negliges with their hair down.  An audience which night after night watches people dressing and undressing probably gets into an unconscious habit of dressing or prinking itself.  In other days it was always thought that so much as to adjust a hat-pin or glance in a glass was lack of breeding.  Every well brought up young woman was taught that she must finish dressing in her bedchamber.  But to-day young women in theaters, restaurants, and other public places, are continually studying their reflection in little mirrors and patting their hair and powdering their noses and fixing this or adjusting that in a way that in Mrs. Oldname’s girlhood would have absolutely barred them from good society; nor can Mrs. Worldly or Mrs. Oldname be imagined “preening” and “prinking” anywhere.  They dress as carefully and as beautifully as possible, but when they turn away from the mirrors in their dressing rooms they never look in a glass or “take note of their appearance” until they dress again.  And it must be granted that Lucy Gilding, Constance Style, Celia Lovejoy, Mary Smartlington and the other well-bred members of the younger set do not put finishing touches on their faces in public—­as yet!

=THE COURTESY OF SENDING TICKETS EARLY=

Most people are at times “obliged” to take tickets for various charity entertainments—­balls, theatricals, concerts or pageants—­to which, if they do not care to go themselves, they give away their tickets.  Those who intend giving tickets should remember that a message, “Can you use two tickets for the Russian ballet to-night?” sent at seven o’clock that same evening, after the Lovejoys have settled themselves for an evening at home (Celia having decided not to curl her hair and Donald having that morning sent his only dinner coat to be re-faced) can not give the same pleasure that their earlier offer would have given.  An opera box sent on the morning of the opera is worse, since to find four music-loving people to fill it on such short notice at the height of the season is an undertaking that few care to attempt.

=A BIG THEATER PARTY=

A big theater party is one of the favorite entertainments given for a debutante.  If fifty or more are to be asked, invitations are sometimes engraved.