Costumes!

Well, this weekend was very busy. And very costume-oriented.

On Saturday morning, I had a gig for the Halloween festivities at the Cultural Center. Colleen, Cesar, Sommer and I were to do two performances of a sort of make-your-own fairy tale. The Cultural Center was all decked out and scarified, and stuffed to the gills with tiny children in Halloween costumes. Now, the old Tanner biological clock doesn’t often make its presence known, but the sight of a toddler dressed up as a grizzly bear or a bumble bee kicks it into high gear. Adorable! I theorized that when I have babies, I may have to keep them dressed as ladybugs and peapods year-round so that I will remember to love them.

The four of us just about died when we saw one tiny boy dressed as… Mr. T! He had a little bald/Mohawk wig, drawn-on beard, bling, the works. It was HILARIOUS! Unfortunately, we couldn’t figure out how to take a picture without looking like a roving gang of child molesters.

The fairy tale was a sort of choose-your-own-adventure thing, where the kids would choose what was going to happen, and we would improvise around it. To start it off, Colleen asked the kids to decide what character each of us would play. We had been asked to come in costume, so Sommer was dressed as Little Red Riding Hood. “What should she be?” asked Colleen. “She could be anything or anyone in the whole world!”
“Little Red Riding Hood!” they called.
“Ok… what about Tristan? What should she be?” (I was dressed as a princess, in a pink ballgown.)
“A hippopotamus!” came the rousing response.
“Great! And Cesar,” Colleen asked, gesturing to him, bedecked in an impressive wolf hat. “What should Cesar be?”
“A wolf!”

All right, kids. Very flattering. Thanks a lot. Jerks.

The kids in the second show were a little more inventive. Sommer was a slab of cement, I was the Eiffel Tower, and Cesar was a kitten. Oh, the adventures we had!

On Sunday, I embarked on the costume that I’ve been planning for months. Finally, the looming deadline of Halloween seemed imminent enough for me to actually begin work. I am going to be Scout Finch dressed as a ham. For those unacquainted with To Kill a Mockingbird, the protagonist has to dress up as a ham for a Halloween school pageant which illustrates the county’s agricultural products. I decided to achieve this, as Scout does, with a chicken wire frame. I think the covering is fabric in the book, but I’ve opted to use papier maché.

Heading out to the hardware store, I started wondering if a store in the city was likely to carry chicken wire. It seems more suited to rural life. They did have it, though it wasn't exactly handy. “Follow me!” the man working at the front counter told me, grabbing a pair of wire-cutters. I followed him all the way to the back of the store, where he unlocked a door. We found ourselves out in the back alley. Strange… Crossing the alley, he unlocked another door to some sort of big shed thing. We entered the ill-lit building, stacked with boards and dowels and the like, and he pointed me to a few rolls of chicken wire. I selected the kind I wanted, and we set about to measuring. “I’ll need it to wrap around me for the costume,” I told him. He tried to measure it on himself, but we kind of figured it would be best if we measured it on me. So we switched places, and there in a dark, scary, alley-shed, I wrapped myself in chicken wire while a stranger wielding a weapon looked on. I should probably point out that the fellow helping me was a scrawny hipster whose own measurements made it impractical for him to measure the wire because he was so much skinnier than I. He was not the least bit frightening. I was pretty grateful for that. I don’t know what I would have done if the person who helped me had been a little shadier. Or properly nourished. “The things I get myself into,” I mumbled as we unfurled me from my cage.

There are tiny scratches on my arms, and drops of petrified flour water on the floor, but I now have a human-sized (not yet painted) ham sitting in the kitchen, behind the baby gate, so that it doesn’t escape. Actually, it’s because Molly’s dog, Lucy, has an insatiable hunger for the taste of papier maché. Or perhaps my ham-construction is just a little too believable.