Today we’d like to introduce you to Donatelle Mascari.
Hi Donatelle, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I was an actress professionally many years ago, and being a single mother of two boys, I could no longer depend on theater as income, so interviewed with a yet-to-be opened Neiman Marcus near Chicago. The interviewer said that I’m “one in a million” with the theater background, and told me she was going to send me to every makeup school available. With what I’d already gleaned from every kind of theatrical makeup, plus what I’d learned at however many makeup line schools, I was ready for anything. Chicago weather was rough, and between the store commute and kids, homework, and the regular workday, I decided to move to Dallas, where many of my family and friends are situated.
I should mention here that my mother’s family were some of those who helped found Ft. Worth and Kennedale. Don’t let my name fool you!
So… I bought this condominium for…$30,000.00 and told Sarah Norton’s agency that if I’d collected a portfolio of my work, it would be like a phone book, but alas you don’t do that while working retail. She signed me almost instantly. Peggy Taylor, beloved friend, and the first makeup artist in Dallas, also send me lots and lots of work both makeup and theatrical, and here we are today!
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Aaaahhh…the struggles along the way. Well, there was a very rare form of cancer…not breast cancer, but they treated me incorrectly for the kind that it actually was…and I mistakenly had radiation and a port in the other side of my chest. I’d always had the feeling that it wasn’t the usual breast cancer, but radiation and chemo were prescribed. I’d had no insurance to start with, so by the time insurance was valid, I’d had this knot for some time, and coming out from the mastectomy, the doctor said, “I’m sorry. It’s probably everywhere”. Well…there’s news…and there’s truth.
During this time, I couldn’t raise my right arm…had parents to care for (that’s not a complaint. I’d do it again double in a minute).
I’d asked the hospital not to tell my parents, but they did and my grieving father promptly had a heart attack. Bandaged on my right side, I went to Houston, the one place they thought they could save him (they did), and with no money, I slept on a love seat in the hospital in order to see him every five minutes on the hour so he could know I was alright.
Working was not really possible. Raising my right arm for any kind of time at all was murderous, so I had to make do with a phone job I could do from home. At least I could stay home and more or less swaddled.
I’d gotten up to 253 pounds and decided to lose it. I intentionally lost to about 116 and had surgery at Southwestern done by a very, very good student.
No bypass, just lost it.
After 20 years, I decided to be chest reconstructed.
That process, having been done by students over and over, finally worked somewhat and I continued to work.
Things are a little different when there’s a solid job to go to every day…but getting into and staying focused with marketing and relationships is a trial, a real challenge, but by this time, my reputation was solid and I continued to be called for the cream of the crop gigs in theater, teaching, film, f/x, consultations. My makeup line without advertising is selected from so many private label companies…usually, if a makeup artist comes up with a line, it’s one or two…but I find things from everywhere. The continuing education had to happen…the actors needed a resource, a real resource, because theater makeup has changed so much…lighting varies, distance varies…so I had that to do.
I think it’s what kept me alive…the need for what I do.
So then…I wake up at 2 am on an early April morning in 2009…apropos of nothing…no smell, no noise…nothing to wake me…and then there was such…really such a faint smell of electrical burn…that I reached over for my laptop to see if it was about the adapter cord. There had been a buzz about adapters being sometimes dangerous…maybe it was the warm adapter cord on the blanket. Nope. Not even warm…and no… not the surge protector, so I got up and went down the hall to the front door. And when I opened the door, wow, something was on fire…nothing to see…no smoke…no fire…but I had to call the fire department. I went back to my room, got my little dog into his kennel, and took him down to the car…went back upstairs to unplug my laptop from the wall behind the bed, and there were some kinds of crumbs on the bed. Dark, I couldn’t see…was just in a hurry to get the cord from behind the bed bars. When I went back upstairs in daylight…I saw that the crunchies I’d felt were actually pieces of the ceiling that had fallen onto the bed. In that little time from waking up to getting the things out of here, the ceiling would’ve fallen onto us…and I take that as a miracle.
I’ve included a picture of how it looked from downstairs, this electrical fire that started in the apartment behind me.
I’d lost everything except the iron bed.
We lived in a hotel for six months…bandages from reconstruction…doing makeup from my little suite…yes…another challenge. Mary Collins, dear friend, and agent, generously commissioned me to make up all of her talents for her agency website. This…I will never forget. Never.
During this time, it was my friends who came through. Family…let us say… not so much. Friends, though? I get mushy and tell them they’re just going to have to put up with it.
Surgery? I just finished my 22nd surgery, including a hopeful help for the lymphedema in my right arm due to the misdiagnosis. I’ll still have to have the regular massage therapy with bandages, but I think this is the last surgery.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
To me… validation comes from a sacred place…it’s the knowing you’ve done the right things, honed your talent…and that’s where I like to get my “attagirl”s… but my work is a business, it’s artistic, it’s my hobby…and if you can find someone in any profession who hasn’t burned out in fifty years…you have found one right here. When you say “makeup artist”…you think about someone in a salon, and we should all be thankful for this profession, but being a production makeup artist…is very different. With so many wonderful film hobbyists, many times they think that cosmetology school is enough…and maybe sometimes it is enough.
In the case of a production makeup artist…usually, it’s about understanding what the camera sees in film…and of course, coming from a film background…and I mean yes, real film! It’s its own art… but now there’s every kind of video and having been doing this for many years, I’ve had to learn and understand watching the video itself change. It’s electronically reproduced rather than photographically reproduced so there’s that, and in most cases, a makeup artist who’s proficient at this will be known for this and will have a good film resume, working one after another.
Then there is the celebrity makeup artist, working with these various personalities, being in that genre.
There are f/x makeup artists.
There are those who teach makeup in colleges and university study programs for theater or film.
There are photographic and fashion makeup artists.
My pride? My business is that I have running resumes in all of these and when they’re hiring and need a resume, I ask about what kind of resume in particular, and if they LOL want all of it, I tell them I’d mail it to them, but they’d have to pay the postage.
It would take many teachers in any particular specialty to run the gamut of what I, fortunately, swam upstream to learn the hard way, through thick and thin.
The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
Never daunted, as you can see, by work…I was hired two and a half years or so ago to be a Mrs. Claus character singing, dancing, and interacting with unmasked families from all over the world on the Grapevine Vintage train. Who knew about Covid??? I’m sure I contracted it, what with the handing out of treats, hugs, and taking pictures on enclosed trains four or six times a day.
What I learned was that the original, should that have been what I had…was pretty rough.
Add THAT to the mix of hardships.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.makeupmaven.com
