Feature image photo by Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images
You come around in a dark and cramped space, with fabric tickling your face. Momentarily panicked, you push your hands out and manage to open a door. You tumble out into what looks like a dressing room, with a large mirror propped on a table to one side and clothing and make-up scattered everywhere. You have no time to ponder the ramifications of being briefly trapped in the closet, because a butch woman barrels into the dressing room and hurriedly starts undressing. Oh my!
Unfortunately, this does not appear to be a romantic opportunity, as the woman starts grabbing random items of clothing to try on. She turns to you with a silent call for help in her eyes. The woman introduces herself as Gladys, and that’s when you clock that it’s Gladys Bentley, famed butch entertainer of the Harlem Renaissance! Gladys is about to make her first ever stage appearance, but is struggling to pick out an outfit that will give her the confidence to be her butch self!
Can you help Gladys pick the right outfit to galvanise her butch style before she makes her stage debut?
Among many items in her wardrobe Gladys has a lucky top hat, tuxedo and pair of trousers that are white, black and gold, but not necessarily in that order. Each of the items was given to her by a different friend, confusingly each with a surname that’s a colour which may or may not match the item they gifted: Ethel Black, Harry White and Alberta Gold.
Gladys is explaining what everything is when she gets her final call to get on stage. She dashes off, but has forgotten her top hat! There are a few top hats in there, so you need to work out which is the lucky one based on what she’s told you, so you can rush it out to her.
You know that:
The item from Alberta Gold is on a shelf
The trousers are on a chair between the shelf and the closet
The item from Ethel Black cost her 50 cents
The white item is in better condition than the tuxedo
The person that gifted the trousers spent exactly three times as much money on them as the tuxedo
The colour of the trousers is the same as the surname of the person who gifted the item in the closet
What colour is Gladys’s top hat?
Additional Tools:
Download a PDF grid you can print to help you solve the puzzle.
Download a PDF walkthrough of the puzzle. (This provides even more help.)
Listen to an audio file of Nicole describing the puzzle below:
