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!
aka this level of butch confidence (Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images)
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:
Ohhhh that was a good one! The bits about the condition and the price threw me off, as I made a grid that was larger than necessary, and I was frustrated that I couldn’t figure out EVERYTHING, but I eventually got enough to answer the question!
Yes, I think this one teaches us an important life lesson that we don’t necessarily need to know everything to get to an answer!
This took me back to middle school logic puzzles, but gayer 🌈
Thank you for perfectly capturing the ethos of this series!
Ahhh I almost got it on my own, but had to resort to looking at the walkthrough for the last clue that wasn’t quite clicking for me. Very clever Sally! That was a good one!
such a good one! so excited for this series.
if anyone needs MORE puzzles, I cannot recommend enough the series “Montague Island Mysteries.”
https://bookshop.org/books/montague-island-mysteries-and-other-logic-puzzles-1/9781454918110
Ooooh, there’s my Xmas present to myself!
I really needed that hint about the 50 cent clue! That would not have come to me!
This comment prompted me to think again about that one. I am simply too pleased for words with solving this but some credit definitely goes to you!
Thanks for these sally! And for the links back to those historical articles! What an amazing person and what a suit 😍
Finally got it, after copying the grid! It was so much fun to sink my teeth in this riddle!
These are showing me how poor my reading comprehension is. Keep getting impossible answers because oops, the information I was applying were not, in fact, the information provided.