Costumes and Shenanigans!

One of the great joys of October is carefully plotting out and executing the perfect Halloween costume. When I was younger it was often pieced together from the elaborate "costume closet" in my mother's sewing room. My siblings and I would look through the rubble of year's past on the shelves and imagine the possibilities, often trying out costume hybrids, like Undead Strawberry Shortcake.



Ernie the Witch and Dinosaur Michael Jackson would lead to discussions ending in Ernie's sweater REALLY looking a lot like that of Freddy Krueger... so then an entirely new costume would be created around the sweater. We would tear apart my mom's sewing room weeks in advance in search of sewing needles, scraps of fabric, forgotten scarves and bags of Goodwill donations... and then pester the parents for paints, tape, glue. As we got older, the pestering got more intense. "We need a machete! We need stilts! We need Chinese throwing stars!"

Of course, my parents were great at saying no when we were young... but they were equally great at giving us alternative ideas and options. They encouraged our explosive creativity by making sure that no costume idea was an entire failure, my mother working tirelessly at the sewing machine to get a pattern for "Wonderwoman" precisely right to match the original costume of the 80's heroine,



or the Simpsons family member costumes altered to fit us all as we labored for hours on their paper mache heads. I remember my sister working on her Freddy Krueger razor hand made up of Asian paper fan blades for hours. It turned out amazing. All of that creativity in our house only increased as we got older. My brother still wins costume contests for his Pirate outfits, my sister makes kids giggle with her uncanny resemblance to Pippy Longstocking, and I get oogled at for renditions of Sheera, Barbarella, or Marie Antoinette (complete with a hand-constructed guillotine in my wig made with a cigar clipper).




This year was no exception with my impersonation of one of the most famous female artist in modern times... Ms. Frida Kahlo. The best part of Halloween is portraying someone who is larger than life.