It Costs a Lot

Lyrics

[Intro]
(an entrance. Somebody has clearly walked into the room.)

[Verse 1]
She built it on purpose. Every inch of it, on purpose, from the beginning —
the hair, the nails, the heels she could not comfortably stand in,
modelled, she said, on the town tramp she saw as a little girl in Sevier County
and thought was the most glamorous thing that had ever walked past her house.

[Chorus]
It costs a lot of money to look this cheap. She said it and she said it and she said it,
and the joke did a job: it got there before you did.
Every single thing you were going to say about her, she had already said, louder,
and once she has said it there is nothing left for you to do but laugh.

[Verse 2]
They asked her about the wigs for fifty years. Fifty years of the same question.
And she never once got tired in public, and she never once broke the frame,
and she told them she wore them because it was easier, and because she liked them,
and because when you are five foot nothing you take the height where you can get it.

[Chorus]
It costs a lot of money. And underneath it, the whole time — the numbers.
Publishing, ownership, a theme park, a production company, the catalogue.
While everybody was looking at the outfit she was buying the building,
which is the oldest trick there is and it worked for six straight decades.

[Bridge]
She said: I am not a natural blonde, but I am not a dumb blonde either,
and I know exactly what I am doing, and I let you think you know better,
and the fact that you underestimate me is not a problem I intend to fix.
And then she smiled, and everybody went home thinking they had understood her.

[Outro]
(the room is still laughing when the music stops)
It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.
She counted every dollar of it.