Filed Under: halloween

Some things were not meant to be pink

October 13, 2010 at 8:22 am

I want to say that I support breast cancer research and admire anyone who has had to deal with that disease. Cancer is bad. Fighting it is good. However, every time I drive by this display on Franklin Street, I feel like the pink thing has gone way too far:

Run Like Hell…unless it’s raining

November 2, 2009 at 9:31 am

So…you know that race I was going to run while wearing a Halloween costume? Yeah, that one. Well, something rained on my parade. More specifically, it was this big, yellow-green blob:

Rain on my parade

I enjoy a good footrace as much as anyone, and I did trek downtown to ~~gawk at the freaks~~ document the event for you guys, but my costume did not involve an umbrella or a rain slicker, so I decided it was best to sit this one out. Good thing too, because there were two people in pink pig outfits with “H1N1” written on their bodies who looked rather contagious. Between that and the wet leaves littered on the course path, I probably would have broken my neck and then developed pneumonia.

My bystander status meant that for the first time in my life I got to watch the start of a race instead of standing patiently at the back waiting for everyone else to move. Did you know they have people on bicycles leading the runners? I had no idea! I always thought that the lead runners had studied the course in advance as part of their rigorous training regimen to know which way to go. It looked rather fun to be leading a costumed pack of people through the dark. The locals taking an evening stroll down the canal sure did look surprised to see Spider-man and The Flash run by. Spider-man was outpacing The Flash too, which didn’t seem right. (What do the comic book freaks have to say about this scenario? Could that really happen if The Flash were handicapped in some way?)

I enjoyed seeing everyone’s costumes. I particularly like that moment when my mind makes the connection between how they’re dressed and who they’re supposed to be, like I’m figuring out a puzzle. There were about 200 people, but two-thirds of them were dressed like runners. I bet they were embarrassed that so many people were wearing the same costume as them! There probably would have been even more people if the weather had been nice. Here are some highlights if you need some costume ideas for next year:

Bacon and Eggs

Bacon and eggs! Cute costume, but I would be afraid of being eaten.

Who you gonna' call?

The Ghostbusters looked rather waterproof.

Crazy cat lady

The crazy cat lady was my favorite outfit. In the background there is a guy in a green suit who was near the lead of the pack. What is he? A green screen?

Pac Man

Pac Man and one of those ghosts that try to eat Pac Man!

Other highlights included:

A man and a woman dressed as mustard and ketchup bottles, with a kid dressed as a hot dog
The seven dwarves (I only saw 4 who told us the other 3 were faster than them)
The cast of the Mario Brothers game, including Mario, Luigi, Princess Toadstool and others. One of them was carrying a boombox that played the Mario theme
Boy George, who also had a boombox, this one playing Boy George music
A man in doctor’s scrubs pushing a woman in a wheelchair. I admire her race strategy.
A PC and Mac, like from the commercials
Wayne and Garth
Christmas presents with lights
Indiana Jones

And what, pray tell, was I going to dress as?

Yeah, the photo is blurry. Let it go, ok?

Bzzz, bzzz! I was going to be a bumblebee and I was going to make some sort of joke about Flight of the Bumblebee. Alas it was not to bee, and it was just as well because I saw three other people dressed as bees, like they were all from the same hive. Bees don’t fly in the rain though, which is why this little bee stayed under her umbrella.

The Halloween store

October 23, 2009 at 9:46 am

There is a Halloween store set up in the corpse of the old Circuit City building. I can’t remember if such stores existed when I was a child, but in the past few years they’ve become popular in my town. The Halloween stores appear out of nowhere at the end of September, rent a huge empty space left by a recently deceased store, and then just as quickly disappear by the first days of November, making me wonder if they existed at all. You never know where they’ll show up next year, so you just have to keep a lookout for the big yellow banner hanging outside your local strip mall.

I went to the Circuit City Halloween store yesterday to look for a costume for the Run Like Hell race that is only a week away. It was odd to see rows of ghost masks and sexy nurse costumes lining the walls store, instead of the rows of flatscreen TVs that I remember. It was rather depressing to look at all the female costumes that featured skinny, provocative models on the labels, because it would be nice if you didn’t have to be thin and busty to find a costume. I read the label for the hot, policewoman outfit which said the hat was included and thought to myself, “Are the boobs included too?” Then around the corner I discovered I could buy a pair of fake boobs if I needed them.

It was hard finding an outfit that would be warm and that I could also run 3 miles in, but I found something and tried it on in the makeshift dressing room. I think it looks delightful, but the 8-year-old girl who stumbled into my fitting room only reacted in shock and apology. I will post a picture of myself in my outfit next week after the run, but I’ll let the anticipation build until then!

I took my package to the front register and wondered why this place was called Halloween Express when it took foreeeeeever to check out. I felt bad for the poor girl at the front register. She clearly was only going to be employed here for a month, she was the only person checking people out, and the credit card machine stopped working every time the phone rang. None of the other staff were any help, and I became increasingly anxious because the person in line behind me did not seem to understand the concept of appropriate personal space. I wondered why some of the other shoppers were bothering to look for costumes, because they were creepy enough without them. Then I paid and left, disappearing as quickly as the Halloween store soon will.

Yoda, a stormtrooper and an Indian walk into a bar…

November 19, 2008 at 10:46 am

I’d never gone to a costume party for Halloween before this year. I know this is odd, but at least I am familiar with the concept of Halloween, unlike a friend I had in middle school who had lived abroad her whole life. I took her trick-or-treating for the first time in the 90’s and she was befuzzled by the concept, asking, “So, we dress up and they’re just going to give us candy?” It is sort of weird when you look at it from the outside in.

The party was held at a bar and part of the fun was guessing what everyone’s costume was. Some people were obvious and were greeted with, “Oh, you’re a butterfly!” at the site of over-sized wings that almost knocked over drink cups all night. Other costumes needed time for all the clues to arrange themselves into the answer, like the guy in a scruffy blond wig and a flannel shirt who I couldn’t figure out until I saw the shotgun. “Kurt Cobain!” (I didn’t say they were all tasteful costumes.) There were three Amy Winehouses who were all dressed differently, but all looked scraggly and half-crazy. I wanted them to get into a cat fight to film for YouTube. I chatted with two people dressed in full clown makeup and floppy shoes who I would never be able to recognize in real life. If I did, I would probably be surprised to see them not caked in white foundation, though seeing them dressed in clown makeup all the time would be surprising too.

During the party I sat down at a table and surveyed the scene. I realized that the surrealness of the evening wasn’t caused just by the strange outfits. It was seeing people who would never interact with each other in reality or fiction chatting and dancing the night away. Yoda would never hang out with an Imperial Stormtrooper in the Star Wars galaxy, but there they were walking past each other without reaching for a light saber or blaster. I don’t know in what universe a six-foot tall Indian would hang out with a flapper girl from the 20’s, but there they were in the corner.

I thought about my own friends and the people I hang out with. I know someone who makes chain mail and someone who sews cool outfits from old fabric, skills I do not have. My friends listen to different music than I do and read books I haven’t read. But there is also a lot of sameness. Although I am intrigued by people who are different than me, I also gravitate towards people who are similar. This blog and the Internet have allowed me to meet people from different countries and different generations which I would never have met otherwise and I think my life is better for it. I wondered what our real lives would be like if we surrounded ourselves with more people who were different from us. It’s only when all who surround you are different that you truly belong.

Pumpkin warts

September 19, 2008 at 7:51 am

Woah, did you know pumpkins could grow warts?

Knucklehead pumpkins

I walked into the Fresh Market yesterday and saw a pile of these ugly creatures in the corner past the sliding doors. I thought they must be the victims of a pernicious pumpkin disease, but according to this site they bred these knucklehead pumpkins on purpose. “In fact, it has taken over 10 generations of breeding to obtain the size and consistency of warting for these varieties.”

Knucklehead pumpkins

Now, I LOVE pumpkin pie and pumpkin cheesecake and pumpkin bread and canned pumpkin mixed with instant pudding mix. Pumpkin is my favorite squash. I love that it’s pumpkin season again. These pumpkins are probably just as tasty as their clear-skinned cousins. So, I know it’s looks-ist of me, but I want to take a knife or a bottle of liquid nitrogen and freeze the warts off that orange skin. It looks so gross.

But to each her own. I suppose someone must think these pumpkins look cool if they spent 10 years of their time on it. I won’t be buying any, but I won’t be buying any pumpkins after I spent over an hour last year chopping up a jack-o-lantern and boiling the pieces to make pumpkin puree. It was soooo not worth the work. Only canned pumpkin for me, for which I won’t be able to tell if it had warts or not.

Filed Under: halloween

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