Happy Halloween
What's your daily costume look like?
I only remember dressing up for Halloween three times as a kid.
Somewhere between kindergarten and not, in the era when I had shaved my head before entering the school system, I dressed up as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Michelangelo to be exact. Sadly, I do not have photographic evidence of such an epic moment.
Between 7 and 10, I opted for a purple harem slash belly dancer slash genie costume. Baring my pudgy little belly and all. I know it was between that time because it was after my mom started going to AA (aged 7) and before the year a popular mean girl at school befriended me for a season.
Speaking of Hannah, in the 4th grade I got to hang out with her from time to time because I was selling cigarettes at school that I’d stolen from my parents. They weren’t hard to miss, every adult coming and going to our house was 2-packs a day closer to the grave.
But Hannah didn’t have any money, so she introduced me to her family and showed me the pet donkey they kept behind the nursing home her parents owned. We went trick-or-treating together that Halloween; she was a mime and I was a pirate.
She always wanted to smoke in her own bedroom, despite my protests. Nobody in her house smoked cigarettes and she didn’t seem to understand how obvious the smell is.
Not surprising, her dad caught us mid-puff one day when he was supposed to be busy making the new lunch menus.
We weren’t allowed to be friends after that, which is probably for the best.
Sometime in my twenties, Halloween became a thing after spending enough time around Daniel, my boyfriend’s roommate who was working to become a professional makeup artist.
I went as a zebra with friends, downtown Chicago. My costume was 100% body paint, and the weather was abysmal. Luckily, walking around the city naked, at that time, was an easy way to get free cab rides and VIP entry into nightclubs.
The next year I was a gold-dusted topless goddess. One friend went as a lobotomy patient and carried a giant jello-shot brain in a jar. Our group drank the whole thing and our own brains regretted it the next morning.
There were some opportunities to dress up as a pirate again, outside of Halloween, and attend legitimate pirate barge parties on Lake Michigan. A friend of a friend made a 15ft pyrotechnic dragon’s head to keep it extra.
I almost forgot about the year I dressed up as a Roy Lichtenstein comic! Everyone at the club just thought I had really bad acne…
I was a sexy little demon one year when I finally fit into a too-small corset I’d bought and didn’t have the willpower to throw away.
There was a pretty awesome demon with my Owl best friend! I almost took first place in the costume contest but lost out to a $5k Pikachu mascot costume.
I’d been sitting on plans for a green-slingshot bikini version of Borat for a few years. My ex-husband kept poo-pooing the idea, so I celebrated the divorce by donning that costume the same year with my bestie crushing her Cruella DeVille look! And yes, it was an absolute fucking hit while I danced like a weird old man all night.
The year after that, I last-minute went out as Harley Quinn, and ended up beating up a man-sized raccoon in the streets with my baseball bat when he wouldn’t stop following me. The homeless man who was my audience thought it was a real hoot.
One of the last times I’d really gone all out, I dressed up as Cleopatra and went to a sex club. I got there 10 minutes too late to compete in the costume contest, and everyone spent the night lamenting “it should have been you,” for me.
Which brings me to a point I was trying to get at all along.
I’ve managed quite often, to just do things based on a feeling. To not ask, “will people like me for this?” or “I wonder how I come across?”
I would dress up as these things because it felt good to me, not to impress people or get their attention or reactions. Though, I imagine it came across that way at times.
Sometimes what a person shows publicly is not an accurate representation of their internal workings.
We’re all wearing costumes, even the ones we don’t recognize in ourselves. They can paint us in many ways — glamour, strange, scary, pure, evil, funny.
But there’s still someone else deep down inside.
This year, last minute I painted on what I intended to be a green witch costume, and went roller skating two weeks early. I didn’t wear a traditional witch’s hat or ride on a broom (though I did have a blind person’s walking cane!).
And it surprised me that what seemed quite obviously a witch, to me, had other people asking, “are you a female hulk, an ogre, or a witch?”
I think that emphasizes the importance of figuring out who you are under every costume. Because regardless of how you dress up for the public, people will see you from other perspectives.
Who are you dressing up as?
I am so glad you have a photographic diary of your Halloween's through the years..Outrageous ..Outstanding..
an old gobbler