Many factors went into the record low amount of excitement/preparation for Halloween 2012. Races, weddings, and fall trips were at the top of the ‘more important than Halloween prep’ list and the fact that it was on a Wednesday basically made everyone want to jump off a bridge…or just not celebrate it.
Our rag tag group of holiday loyalists lazily discussed the pros and cons of group costumes for much of October, aka drank wine and turned any singular idea into a group of that idea and were momentarily enamored with it. (see: playground slide to schoolyard games, unicorn to mythological creatures, pinterest to social media and Tobias Funque to…well a group of Tobias Funques)
Add to this process the confounding factor of going out two separate nights with two separate costumes and you’ve got yourself a catastrophic costume conundrum the size of California! It would be easy to freak out and/or hide out until November 1st, but that’s not our style, so we followed some great advice instead.
With great love of themed events, comes great costume responsibility.
-Somebody dressed as Spiderman (and NOT a store bought costume)
Cut to Friday morning, Halloween night 1 looming, feeling guilty about seeing Argo instead of costume planning the night before (great movie by the way!), and experiencing one of the most profound creativity droughts in my extensive history of costume making—it was time to make a decision.
And the decision that Sean and I came to was…ghosts at the beach.
The process of coming to that conclusion was lost in what I can only assume was a fugue state brought on by unprepared for Halloween panic attacks, but in retrospect it was probably 2 parts laziness, 1 part paying homage to the classic Halloween ghost costume and a serious splash of crazy.
After haggling with multiple target employees about the listed price of king size white jersey sheets vs. the register price of king size white jersey sheets, victory was mine and I checked out with a $20 sheet set, 2 pairs of jack o’lantern socks and pumpkin coozies.
Halloween was mine for the taking.
The next few hours were a blur of raggedly trimming the sheets, crafting up ‘ghost sunblock’ with SPF 1,000,000, and donning the bathing suits we wore all summer, only now realizing how tiny they are when streaming sheets through the legs was an epic struggle. And then came the eye and mouth holes. I don’t know what image Hollywood put in my mind about ghost costumes but the eye and mouth holes always seemed simple, and dark, and well shaped and stayed in place. They weren’t gaping voids showing a really strange and unappealing sliver of half nose/half lip for the mouth and a hairline where your eye should be. But we were late, and lazy and incompetent at sewing so the holes remained as they were and we set out on our adventure of a night as ghosts at the beach.
After performing ‘party tricks’ of eating and drinking through our horrendous mouth holes (I really don’t like the phrase ‘mouth hole’), our group, comprised of Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt from Parks and Rec, Miss Piggy, a giraffe and the other guy from Wham!, headed out to see an E.L.O. cover band and get rowdy.
As we roll up to the bar, the cab pulls away and my ghost counterpart realizes he does not have his ID. Ghost sunblock, check! Sunglasses, check! The only thing that you actually need for entrance into a drinking establishment, not check! Calling the cab co. is useless and E.L.O. was set to start at any moment! The thought of missing all the songs we didn’t know we loved by a band we didn’t know was E.L.O. was too much to bear, it was time to act fast. In our second cab of the night, explaining our ridiculous costumes for the second time we raced home to get beach ghost Sean’s passport. Pulling up to the apartment, Sean runs up the stairs screaming that he’ll be faster than Olympic runner Usain Bolt, a reference curiously lost on our cab driver.
After bidding adieu (ad-boo!, French ghosts? Ghosts at Nice?) to our jolly cab driver we once again watch him pull away only to realize that we had been thwarted by the ID gods once again. “Holy shit. This is not my passport. This is NOT my passport!” was the chorus that rang through the night as Sean realized that he had grabbed a similarly shaped booklet that was given out during a promotional Google ‘Field Trip’ day where you explored different areas of the city and took notes in your field guide. I was already to phase 3 in a plan to draw a fake picture in the fake passport and blow the breakers at the bar when Sean found his expired ID tucked into the fake passport.
Miraculously, we made it inside and enjoyed a wonderfully wacky night where we danced like ghosts to the E.L.O. cover band covering Duran Duran, spilled all over ourselves trying to drink through our ever morphing mouth holes and eventually turned our costumes into togas so people would stop likening us to Jihadists.
The night ended as most sloppy nights do, eating chicken fingers at 2:30 am at the Uptown Diner, a spooky place indeed.
BOO!
