2006-10-28 - 12:49 p.m.
After I post this entry, I�m going to face driving in heavy traffic, fighting bedlamic parking lots, and waiting in long lines�I�m going shopping for the rest of what I need for my Hallowe�en costume.
I�m disappointed at never finding this year a Hallowe�en Superstore; no Internet search revealed anything, and I never saw one in my various travels around town. I asked several people at work if they knew where one was, but not one of them even knew what I was talking about. This is a store that rents a temporary spot in an available store space or warehouse during the Hallowe�en season only, and then packs up and disappears until next year. Since the availability and location of this real estate varies from year to year, just where one of these stores is going to pop up is unknown (or at least, unknown to me). I guess since these stores exist only during Hallowe�en season, if a person isn�t in the market for Hallowe�en goods, the fact of the store�s existence would be all but unknown to them. But I discovered them several years ago and was flabbergasted by the immense variety and supply of Hallowe�en items. It amazes me actually, for to see this stuff is to understand that Hallowe�en is its own little industry and it is way more than just throw-away costumes and supplies of candy for trick or treaters. To show you the kind of stuff they have, my favorite item (i.e., which I thought was the most clever and best fills the bill for this kind of unique, macabre, alternative merchandise) is tall, black, cut-off witch�s finger candles for candelabrum, complete with sharp black fingernails, and as the candles burn, the wax that drips down is blood red. Of course, at a store like this, you can also get squirmy, wiggly, rubber worms and insects and eyeballs and other grotesque items for putting into a bubbling cauldron of punch. Or, anything else your Hallowe�en heart desires.
What I need to buy are spiders, the more the merrier, large and small and long, creepy-legged and alive-looking, and, I hope, some that look like hairy tarantulas. So far, after having shopped at several regular party stores and novelty shops, I�ve got some pretty good ones, but not nearly enough in number and variety, and so far, no tarantulas. So today I am off to find tarantulas. Also, I need to find either a spider web already made, about a yard in diameter, or else some material that I can work with to make my own spider web.
What on earth kind of a costume am I making?
Well�this idea was a kind of an evolution and until I have all that I am looking for, I�m not quite sure what its final version will be. But for now, I�ll explain the gist of it.
It started with a conversation with the school nurse while I was microwaving my lunch last week. I asked her if she was going to dress up for Hallowe�en and she said that she is a BIG Hallowe�en fanatic, and for sure will dress up for it. She said she had asked several employees if they would join her in some kind of a costume theme, but nobody was interested. I said she should have asked me. �What kind of theme were you thinking of?� I asked her.
�Oh, I thought of maybe cartoon characters, Disney characters, or super heroes.� I can see that she was thinking along the lines of what might appeal to our resident population, i.e., school children.
�So what are you going to be, then?� I asked her.
�The Evil Queen from �Snow White�,� she told me.
Oh, I figure that would be a good one. She had hoped another female employee would join her and be Snow White. The only employee who seemed half-way interested in doing something with her was a black woman, but the black woman adamantly refused to be Snow White.
�That would be pretty clever,� I said, �a black Snow White. She could have pulled that off�after all, I was in that Disney Cinderella movie in which there was a black Cinderella. The characters no longer have to be race-specific.�
But no dice.
Then the nurse glanced at my lunch box�I am known at school for bringing my lunch in a Spiderman lunch box.
�Now you,� she said, �could be Spiderman.�
Well, I could, except in my mind, that�s too easy and not quite clever enough at this point. Although, in its favor, the trailer for the movie, Spiderman 3, is already being seen in movies (for a summer 2007 release), so there is already an excitement over that. This upcoming Spiderman movie will be another level darker. The tag line is something like, �How long, when you fight the darkness, until you find it in yourself?�
So I kind of rejected that idea�but then something percolated in my mind and the next day, I woke up with an idea. I could be �your friendly neighborhood spiderman,� but not the cartoon superhero, but some kind of weird man who walks around covered in spiders, like they are his pets, somewhat like those guys who carry around their pet parrot or boa constrictor. In a way, I had in mind something like Indiana Jones from, I think it was, The Temple of Doom, in which there was that horrifying scene near the beginning of the movie in which he goes into this cave and is seen with hundreds of spiders on his back. It gives me the creepy-chills just thinking about it.
However, the party supply store I went to didn�t have all that many spiders, and the ones they had weren�t big and creepy enough. However, their sales people wondered around the store showing off very amazing prosthetic make-up�things like big slashes across the neck or rusty, gnarly bolts drilled through their foreheads. I became intrigued by that make-up, and developed the idea that I could spirit-glue cuts and gashes on various parts of my body and have some of the spiders coming out of the cuts, as if they had somehow been gestating inside my body and now had bitten their way through. I explained my idea to one of the sales guys and he loved it, and showed me how to do it. So I bought prosthetic gashes, blood, and coloring make-up, plus lots of the spiders that they hand on hand. And at another store, I found a different kind of spider, so I bought a bunch of those, too. What I really need now, though, are some tarantulas.
I thought more about this and woke up the day after that with the idea of being dressed in something reminiscent of the Spiderman costume, a red, form-fitting shirt. I wanted to cut and slice the fabric so that the gashes underneath would show, and then some of the spiders would also have crawled out and be elsewhere on my shirt. Since I not only need this costume for school, but also for a party I�m going to that night, these prosthetics have to be comfortable. I don�t think I could stand to have anything glued onto my face for fifteen hours, but my arms, torso, or thigh would be okay, thus I have to slice open the clothes.
I saw the perfect thing at Ross Dress for Less a couple of days ago, a red, nylon, long-sleeved �t�-shirt, but then was reluctant to buy it, because I worried about the philosophy of buying something new and then ruining it for a costume. Surely, after having lost all this weight, I have several clothes at home that I can destroy. So, damn it, I left that shirt there.
Now I see that I don�t like any of my �big� clothes for this purpose (NOT very super hero, even a dark one!) and only the nice, lean, form-fitting shirt will do. Okay, so I hope Ross still has that shirt. Otherwise, I�m going to have to pay three times as much at a regular store.
I looked at my Spiderman 2 DVD this morning to understand the details of the real Spiderman costume. I can see that the basic structure of it is a shiny red long-sleeved mock-turtleneck t-shirt with a spider-web design in a circle around the neck and going all the way across the shoulders and around the chest and upper back. So I reasoned that the best thing to do would be to find a Hallowe�en-type spiderweb, if it is the right diameter, cut a hole out in the middle for the shirt�s neck, and attach it around the shoulders. If I do it right, it will look like the spiders that came out of my body were the ones that made the web around me.
What about pants? Well, the real Spiderman costume has royal blue tights. I won�t do that, but Ross also had royal blue nylon work-put pants, so that might be a good option. Otherwise, I say blue jeans�because my back story for the costume now is that while Peter Parker�s having been bitten by a spider gave him his super spiderman powers (this is how he �began,� with a spider bite), all this time, those spider �genes� have been mutating inside of him and NOW real live spiders are biting their way out of his body and his being �Spiderman� is mutating into something monstrous. So now he�s kind of half Spiderman (the �mutated� red shirt on top) and half Peter Parker (the plain old blue jeans on the bottom) and it�s ALL making him into something dark and zombie like (�how long before�the darkness you fight is your own?�).
So that�s what I hope. The ultimate reality may be something else, but we will see.
Okay, so now I�m off to fight the crowds.
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