Trashy Takes on a Whole New Meaning

When Bette Midler, dressed as Mother Earth, staggers into view on the April 22 Earth Day television special, she won’t be a pretty sight. Her face will be sooty and her dress will be trashy. Very trashy.

Costume designer Robert Turturice says he personally rummaged through waste-paper baskets, dumpsters and garbage cans for the debris that festoons Midler’s gown. Determined to use “things that people really and truly threw away,” he went digging, bare-handed, for two weeks.

His hunt netted polystyrene take-out trays, plastic bottles, aluminum cans, magazines, disposable-diaper packages, razors, toothpaste tubes, six-pack plastic rings, rubber tires, telephone wires and a car-phone antenna.

The wires and antenna are attached to Midler’s refuse-laden headdress along with plastic bags, bottles and computer-paper curlicues.

Supporting the bulk of the trash is a long silk-jersey dress, dyed and hand-painted with oceans and continents that show oil spills, deforestation and smog belts.

Turturice says he spent a whole day, “playing with an atlas on a Xerox machine trying to figure out the configuration of the continents and how I could put them on the dress.” Africa now sits on Midler’s left sleeve, South America is toward the hem and North America “sort of wraps around her left hip.” And to be geographically correct, there are oil spills painted in as many existing locations, including Alaska and California, as the designer could find.

A giant cast of celebrities (Bugs Bunny and Robin Williams among them) are part of the two-hour television entertainment, which tells the story of how the Earth became ill and what every person can do to save her. But only Midler and Williams have been specially costumed. His is a polyester surprise.

“Time Warner Presents the Earth Day Special” airs on ABC, 9 to 11 p.m.