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Overview
This is a key piece in the costume of award-winning chilrden and young person's author Margaret Mahy when she gave readings in schools and libraries. The crazy wig was so integral to her identity that there was an outcry when she tried to auction it in 1980. As one librarian noted: 'imagine Arthur without Excalibur, Morecombe wthout Wise, Buckingham palace without corgis'.
Mahy began public readings in schools and libraries in the mid-1970s, mostly as part of the New Zealand Book Council's Writers in Schools scheme. Wearing a wig was part of Mahy's strategy of trying to hold an audience when she first began. She later commented that
'Dressing up for me is partly a disguise. It's also an attempt to keep myself under some sraps. But it's also more than that - it's a attempt to be as entertaining as I can for the children. Theya re a captive audience, they dohn;t necessarily ask for me to coem and talk to them...I want them to be interested.'
Mahy's first wig was green. The New Zealand Woman's Weekly commented on this and the rest of her performance in 1976: 'her tousled, bright green wig swept spikily in all directions ... she lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. The children at her feet are entranced: here is fantasy come to life, a real person with just the right aura of magic and mystery to sweep young minds off on Technicolour flights of imagination.'
Mahy lost her first green wig and for a while tried to go without it, although to the disappointment of her audiences, so she replaced it with this rainbow wig and others in the early 1980s.
References
Tessa Duder, A Writer's Life, Harper Collins, Auckland, 2012