Halloween Costumes

Tomorrow is Halloween. The culminating event of spooky season. Traditionally one of my two favorite holidays.

So whatever shall I talk about in today’s post.  Hmm?

Lots to Say, No Room In Which to Say It

The original title of this post was supposed to just be “Halloween”.  But, sometimes during the course of writing a blog post, things happen. 

I don’t always write these posts in order.  I usually type in my list of subheadings, and then jump around from sub-topic to sub-topic, writing in whichever section I feel like at the time. 

For this Halloween post, my subheadings included Decorating, Jack-o’-Lanterns, Skeleton Shopping, Scary Movies, Thematic Characters, Costuming, and Trick-or-Treating. 

The first section I wrote was the Costuming section, and once I had finished it… I had reached my typical post length.  I apparently had a lot to say about the Halloween costumes I’ve worn over the years. 

So, I stripped out all of my original subheadings and slid in new ones to properly break up the massive chunks of text into costuming eras. 

In an ideal world, there would be far more photos in today’s post than there are.  I know that most if not all of these costumes were photographed.  But some of those photos no longer exist, and the others are likely in the box of photos that my sister rescued from Dad’s house after he died. 

My hope/plan is that next year’s Halloween post will be an actual Halloween post and not simply focus on my costuming history.  I guess time will tell. 

The Early Years

I have to say that my favorite aspect of Halloween is the costuming.  I always loved getting to wear a costume.  Mom told me once that my first Halloween costume was Robin Hood.  This would have been much, much further back than my memories go.  I’ve seen photos of my cousin Marie and I dressed up as Raggedy Ann and Andy at Halloween, so I know that happened. 

The first Halloween that I actually have memories of was when I was a first grader.  That year, I was Batman.  And by ‘I was Batman’ what I mean is that I was wearing a cheap plastic Batman mask held to my face with an elastic string.  I believe this to be the first and only time that my costume was store-bought.  

I vividly remember trick-or-treating that year, because there was one house where the woman handing out candy wouldn’t give you any until you told her who you really were.  When she asked me who I was, I told her I was Batman. Then she said, “No, what’s your real name?”  Well, I did what seemed like the only obvious thing, and told her my name was Bruce Wayne. 

She took in that piece of information, and then stood there thinking.  “Wayne?  Wayne?  No, I don’t think I know your parents.  Did you just move to town?”  All I wanted was my piece of candy so I could move on to the next house, so I told her yes.  This seemed to satisfy her, as she gave me my candy and started interrogating the next group of trick-or-treaters. 

In the second grade, I was a big Mork and Mindy fan, and convinced Mom that she needed to make me a Mork from Ork costume.  Not his typical Earth outfit.  No, I wanted his spacesuit.  So, she bought a can of silver spray paint, and used it and a homemade stencil to put a large triangle on both the front and back of a red pajama shirt I had.  That plus the matching pajama pants, and I was suddenly Mork from Ork.  Sadly, no helmet, but the costume was still a success. 

Third grade was the clown debacle.  I don’t really remember the actual costume all that well.  My main memory of the night is discovering shortly into trick-or-treating that I was horribly allergic to the greasepaint that was covering the entirety of my face.  Not the best way to have to make that kind of a discovery. 

In the fourth grade, I invited my friend Chad over to my house for trick-or-treating followed by a sleepover.  We had both ordered the same book on costuming from the Scholastic book program at school, and had decided that we would go as a pair of Frankenstein Monsters.  Which, after each making our own Paper-Mache mask, we did. 

Middle School

By time the fifth grade rolled around, I had discovered Zorro.  Initially as part of the Saturday morning cartoon in the Tarzan/Lone Ranger/Zorro Adventure Hour, but I also somehow managed to convince my parents to take me to see Zorro, the Gay Blade when it hit theaters.  (Not really a children’s movie, but I remember enjoying it greatly. I have to assume that a lot of it went right over my head.) 

Anyway, that year Zorro was the only costume I was willing to accept.  Black pants, black shirt, black mask. Black hat (borrowed from Mom). Black boots with heels (also borrowed from Mom). Cape cut down from a skirt we picked up at Goodwill. And the sword. Plastic sword bought from the seasonal aisle at Pay Less. That sword irked me. It was roughly ‘t' shaped instead of having the basket hilt that a swashbuckler’s sword had. That may be the earliest memory I have of what I now recognize as OCD. Huh. Anyway, that Zorro costume was so awesome, that it was a rerun in the sixth grade. 

Sometime between sixth and seventh grade, Dad – in his typical wheeling and dealing – managed to obtain something that I’d been requesting for years: a gorilla suit!  Being second-hand, it lacked the rubber hands and feet. But the furry bodysuit and full head mask were still in great condition.  So, that Halloween, it was gorilla time. 

My academic record includes two suspensions and an expulsion. Some of those are stories for another post, but that first suspension happened on gorilla Halloween. My friend Stacy was dressed as a cheerleader. And one of the jerks in our class took her pom-poms away from her and was hitting people in the face with them. When he hit me, it shifted my mask enough that I could no longer see out of the eyeholes.  And he kept hitting me in the head.  So, I went to knock the pom-poms out of his hand.  Then I fixed my mask so I could see again, and what I saw was him laying on the ground, crying, holding a bloody tooth in his hand.  So I ended up getting suspended for allegedly punching him in the face and knocking out one of his teeth. Witnesses to the event corroborated my side of the story, but that dislodged tooth meant that I was suspended regardless of what actually happened.  That three day suspension meant no trick-or-treating for me that year.

By the eighth grade, I had discovered Doctor Who.  My first Doctor was Peter Davison, but after that the station went back to the Tom Baker era, and I was enthralled.  Which meant that once Halloween had arrived, I would be in need of a very long scarf.  Mom flat out refused to make me one.  So I went to Grandma.  Now, Grandma didn’t knit, but she did crochet. I knew that was as close as I was going to get with just a few months’ notice.  She agreed to make it for me if I promised to actually wear it.  Not just for a Halloween costume, but during the cold winter months as well.  I agreed, and she got to work. 

I took one of my Grandpa’s old coats, obtained a hat, and once I added the scarf, I was suddenly the Doctor.  I got a lot of “Who are you supposed to be” from people.  But I didn’t really care.  I was the Doctor. 

High School

I know that I had a costume every year in high school.  And the last couple of years there was also a Fasching (the German equivalent of Mardi Gras) dance that was a costuming opportunity.  That’s at least six costumes I had, but my faulty memory can only bring to mind three of them. 

I took an old pair of coveralls and dyed them yellow.  Stenciled on a couple of radiation warning symbols.  And carried around a lidded mason jar filled with water and a green Cyalume light stick.  Instant Nuclear Technician. 

Another costume involved the box that either a washing machine or dryer had originally come in.  A broken wall phone.  A phone book.  Spray paint, markers, and so on.  And using these things I transformed myself into a payphone.  There was a guy in the class ahead of me who came to the Halloween dance as a prostitute, and kept trying to conduct ‘business’ inside my costume.

The third high-school era costume that my memory will let me have was the California Raisin.  My Mom outdid herself on that one.  She sewed me a costume that started just over my head and went down to the tops of my legs.  Big puffy purply-brown raisin, complete with plush facial features.  A pair of tights and some tennis shoes, and I was good to go.  Won second place in the costume contest that year.  (Beaten out of first place by a couple wearing McDonald’s ‘Fry Guys’ costumes.) 

Parties in Salem

Then I got sick.  Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, not that I knew that for the first five years.  (It was a long and involved diagnosis.)  It was several years before I did a costume for Halloween again. 

But eventually some friends of mine in Salem invited me to a Halloween party, and I was suddenly back in costuming mode.  I was told I could bring a friend along, and so I shanghaied my friend Mike into service to drive me there and back again. 

This was early to mid 90s, and one of the things that was going on in the entertainment industry is that Ted Turner was colorizing old black and white movies before running them on the various Turner Network cable channels.  Which is what led me to my first costume of this new era. 

I took the loudest busiest shirt I could find, and paired it with an equally loud, equally busy pair of pants that clashed.  Mom sewed me an ammo bandolier, but instead of bullets, I filled it with Crayola crayons.  Then I hit a cowboy hat with a couple different colors of spray paint.  I was a cowboy. Specifically, an old black and white cowboy. With a sign stitched to the back of my shirt that read “Colorized by Ted Turner”. 

The host (Ed) invited me back the next year, and as we were all geeks and nerds, the costume I wore was that of an old time comic book spinner rack.  I took a big stack of comic books, a package of protective comic storage sleeves, several rolls of scotch tape, and a wire coat hanger.  Then I assembled all of that into an apparatus I wore around my neck and shoulders that had six sides, each with a staggered column of comic books that went down nearly to the floor.  And to top it all off, I made myself a paper hat which read, “Hey Kids! Comics!” 

Ed didn’t throw a party the next year, but our mutual friend the Fletch picked up the Halloween party baton and ran with it.  Years earlier, my Mom had sewed my Dad a Santa suit.  He would then leave the family Christmas party for a little bit, during which time Santa would show up to the joy and delight of my young siblings. 

I decided that Santa needed to go to a Halloween party.  I put on the Santa suit, and then added wristbands with long bone white teeth or claws or something. I would announce myself as Santa Claws.  Mike wore a green shirt, and I made him add a sombrero so that he could be my NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) elf. 

The Fletch was apparently inspired by my Santa Claws outfit, so the following year he declared that the party would be themed.  The theme?  Puns. 

It took me some time to figure out what I was going to go as.  But figure it out I did, and I showed up at the party wearing a shirt with a large buffalo on it. I also had a small American flag.  And a handful of one-foot lengths of this one inch wide crinkly black plastic I’d found. Ten in total, and each one had a pair of googly eyes glued to one end.  

The key to realizing what I was supposed to be was in understanding that those black crinkly things were eels.  With that piece of info, you could easily deduce that I was costumed as the year 1976.  You know, the American Bison Ten-Eel. (You can groan now. Go ahead and groan loudly, the pun was very bad.) 

My costuming supplies for the following year included a wall-clock, some duct tape, some electrical tape, a dozen road flares, and a spool of wire.  All of which I affixed to my body, turning me into the classic time bomb.  I even hung a sign on myself from a terrorist organization, claiming responsibility for the bomb.  (After I was finished with the costume, my brother wore it to school on Halloween that year.) 

By the time late October of the next year had arrived, I’d been having eye trouble which had caused me to wear an eye patch for several months.  I thought about trying to go to the Fletch’s party as Nick Fury (this was pre-MCU, when Nick Fury was still an older white man) or Odin, but both of those seemed like a lot of work. In the end I decided to just go pirate. 

I’d picked up a Spanish main-style sword (a blade that my younger Zorro costumed self would have killed for) several years earlier, so I made myself a scabbard for it out of cardboard and electrical tape, and attached that whole thing to a thick belt.  I also had a small chest of treasure.  Poker chips spray painted silver and gold. Strings of beads. Jeweled Christmas tree ornaments. And the like. 

I actually did a pirate costume a couple of times, and I can’t remember if the hook was there in the beginning at the Fletch’s party or not.  But at some point along the line, my pirate had a hook. I went to a farm supply store and bought myself a bailing hook (metal hook on a wooden handle used to lift hay bales). Then I held it tightly in my fist and had somebody wrap that hand in an ACE bandage. I thought it looked pretty good, and most people agreed. 

Some components of my pirate costume

from photo taken during Talk Like a Pirate Day

My eye problem cleared up long before the next Fletch Halloween party.  Unfortunately, that was the year that I lost the capacity for speech (which lasted about five years).  So once again I ended up having to build a costume around a challenge.  But this one was easy.  Mike and I went to the party as Jay and Silent Bob. 

I’d had some money saved up for something that I eventually realized was never going to happen. So, I spent that money on an Australian Driza-Bone full length waterproof riding coat.  My Silent Bob coat.  I darkened my hair with a can of that spray hair color you can get for Halloween, and darkened my beard (which had been trimmed down into Silent Bob style) with mascara.  I bought a long blond wig for Mike from the same aisle that had the spray color. 

Once we were all costumed up, we looked – and I say this with all possible modesty – awesome.  That was the last one of the Fletch’s Halloween parties that Mike and I attended. 

Parties in Portland

That last Fletch Halloween party led to another fairly long costuming gap for me.  But eventually, I had the opportunity to attend the Darklady’s annual Halloween party in Portland.  Putting me back in costume once again. 

When I was younger, every year Mom would try to talk me into crossdressing for Halloween.  And I would never even consider it.  Me? Dress like a girl? Subject myself to the ridicule of my middle school peers? Not going to happen.  So it’s a little depressing that when I finally did crossdress for Halloween, Mom was no longer alive to witness it. 

Yes, I attended my first Darklady event in drag. But not just any drag. Certainly not normal drag.  No, I was unwilling to shave my beard off for the costume. Trim it down?  Sure.  But get rid of it altogether?  Not a chance.  By that point I hadn’t shaved in 18 years.  Three more years and my beard would be of legal drinking age.  Which means that I had to find a costume that would allow me to hide it. 

I contemplated many different versions of a beard-hiding costume.  Full face mask, painted to look feminine?  No.  Veiled belly dancer?  No.  Bride?  No – where the Hell am I supposed to get a wedding dress fat enough to fit me on the cheap?  Luchadora?  I thought that was it, but when researching female Mexican wrestlers, I discovered that their masks almost always left the mouth and chin uncovered. So: No.  (If I had only known what the future would hold, I could have gone as a 2020 Covid aware mask mandated citizen.)

But then it finally hit me.  Something with a gas mask.  Soldier?  No.  HazMat Worker?  No.  Industrial Painter?  No.  Gas Mask Fetish Dominatrix?  Tempting… but to do it right I’d need a skintight latex bodysuit.  Or lots of leather.  So, again: No.  Post-Apocalyptic Survivor?  Hmm.  Yes!  Ding, ding, ding!  We have a winner. 

Okay. I now knew what I was going to be, I just needed to figure out who I was going to be.  I really wanted my name to be Molly (because as you all know, Molly is objectively the best female name).  But Molly didn’t sound hard enough to be a post-apocalyptic survivor.  Unless… unless I were to alter the spelling a bit to make her a bad ass.  Not Molly.  Maulie.  She-who-mauls.  Maulie, leader of the Post-Apocalyptic Cross-Dressers. 

Now all I needed was the actual costume.  My sister and brother-in-law (who was actually just my sister’s boyfriend at the time) converted a milk jug and iced tea container into a gas mask for me.  Goodwill provided me with a leopard print skirt. Dad contributed a large denim shirt, although he had no idea what I was going to use it for. (Dad would have freaked had he learned I was crossdressing, even just for Halloween.)  We acquired the bra from a plus size clothing store.  Most of the other stuff I needed we picked up from the Halloween aisles at local stores. 

My sister went to work on the denim shirt with fabric paint.  Then attached Halloween quality costume jewelry to it.  Cut a couple of holes in the back of a baseball cap (also adorned with fabric paint) so that I could have pigtails and still cover up my balding noggin.  My everyday dark glasses at the time looked perfect for the theme. 

I discovered that bras are incredibly uncomfortable.  I also discovered that I kind of liked the feel of wearing stockings.  (I got the same sensation from wearing compression stockings during an incident with a blood clot in my leg.) 

Anyway, my next Portland Halloween party I decided to go as a ghost. Not the traditional bedsheet ghost, but something a little more creative.  I was the ghost of a pinata. 

Once again I enlisted the aid of my sister in putting the costume together.  The costume design was really simple, although time consuming to build.  We started with a rain poncho, and then covered it with folded and cut strips of tissue paper.  All white instead of multicolored, because… ghost. 

The final touch was arming myself with a stick with which to beat the living souls who had once beaten me to death.  Revenge of the Ghost of the Pinata! 

Sadly, the costume didn’t quite work like I had hoped.  I was constantly having to explain what I was, after someone looked at me with their head cocked sideways and guessed, “Are you… a chicken?”

My final Portland Halloween party was an updated version of my pirate costume.  I ditched the belt and put together a bandolier-style rig for the sword and scabbard.  Plus, I added my Silent Bob coat to the outfit.  I made a much better pirate then than I had the first time around. 

Parties at My Sister’s House

All of my most recent Halloween costumes have been worn to my sister’s parties.  There have been several, yet I find myself struggling to remember what they all were.  I do remember two of them. 

The first of those was the year I decided that I wanted to be a dice bag for Halloween.  Again, I pressed my sister and brother-in-law into service as co-costume makers. 

A large piece of black fabric with gold speckles was turned into a full body length bag for me to wear.  No actual bottom to the bag, so that I could still walk around.  We then safety-pinned a section of it to my shirt so that it formed a pouch.  Which we then filled with giant polyhedral dice made from poster board. 

Three dice in total.  A d4. A d6 (with classic dots pattern).  And a d12. 

Who’s ready to play some D&D?

The final costume in what has turned out to be a far longer list than I had realized was for my sister’s party for the last pre-Covid Halloween.  And inspired by Avengers: Endgame, I wanted to be Fat Thor. 

Most of what I needed I already had in and amongst my own wardrobe.  The rest Amazon.com provided.  Primarily a hard foam Stormbreaker prop, and a pair of Crocs.  (Yes, I now own a pair of Crocs.)

Haven’t yet had a Halloween costume during the pandemic.  No idea when my next costume will be. 

Maybe next Halloween.