Who's the Scariest?

Andy and Jess' house was done up, all four floors of it, with Heaven on the top floor, all soft music and gauzy fabric and blue lights...My fellow Swinging Orangutang Vinnie and I take five in Heaven.

The basement of the house was Hell. There was a very nasty torture chamber down there. Oddly enough, I felt equally comfortable in both places, although after awhile Hell got to me and I went back to Heaven.
Andy and Jess had worked for weeks, with the help of Matt and Ali, to transform their warm and pleasant house into something Other for this party. The basement was undeniably creepy. Andy confessed to me that his childhood dream was to make monsters for the movies. He'd be real, real good at it.

Speaking of scary...Bill of the Birds was voted Scariest.
I cannot imagine why, unless it had to do with the fact that he was 6'8 in that wig, and he slammed his costume together the night of the party. He's always been good at improv. We took separate cars to the party, and when he walked in I had a laughing fit that lasted a good 15 minutes.
Here, he's talking with Zane, who did a very convincing turn as roadkill, complete with tire tracks and litter pasted all over his otherwise natty attire. Half his teeth are gone, and his glasses are shattered. Beautiful. Here, he's talking with Hef.
Margaret was a new mom, not a huge stretch for her...you may remember her as Oona's mommy. She's got a big glass of Mother's Little Helper to get her through.
She had a crib mattress strapped to her back, covered with the accoutrements of motherhood, most of them having to do with poo management.
Robert Smith from The Cure made the scene. Every time someone pointed a camera at him he stopped laughing and smiling and fell right into character.
Although he did let down his guard once, for me.
A naughty schoolgirl from Kill Bill.
has a conversation with the Lizard King, who happens to be our next-door neighbor and fellow musician.
A little klatsch of witches in the living room.
And a very happy caveman, enjoying the company of his friends and a cold brewski. Gotta love Hef's artless hand, draped over the couch...
I love my creative friends so much sometimes it hurts.

Halloween Fun

I know. Halloween's a long way away. And so am I. I'm sitting at home by the fireside canning blogposts on a quiet November Sunday afternoon. Bill's in Texas. Phoebe's curled up with a book, Liam's reading; Chet is chewing a Nylabone at my feet. As I write, I'm looking forward to a ten-day natural history trip to Guyana, to not having to think about my blog for ten whole days.

So I'm looking back and writing ahead, picking and choosing topics that will sustain the effort in my absence. I'd love to think that at some point I could relax about it all and just go, leave a little note on my virtual door, Gone Birding. I'm not there yet. True or not, I believe that all my readers would up and leave if I were to do that, lovely as it sounds.

And so I give you some images from Halloween past, a wonderful costume party thrown by our fabulous friends Jess and Andy. Jess is a Muse, which is appropriate for a singer, musician and voice/piano teacher--My Voice Teacher!!, and Andy is a Pastafarian. He has a Flying Spaghetti Monster on his shirt, but his dreads hide it. This link is why I love Wikipedia.
Lots of people look great on Halloween. They manage to be slightly menacing or odd and alluring at the same time. Cathy and Martha are prime examples of this approach.As is Andrea.Clay as Cool Hand Luke definitely qualifies. He's carrying a specimen that he drinks from.Sarah made the scene, palin around with terrorists. (Stole that line from the Kinsey Sicks).

I happen to think Halloween should be scary, and Bill and I dress accordingly.BOO!

Happy Halloween (2008)!

With each holiday comes a set of things parents must do, things expected, things greatly anticipated. Christmas, of course, is the big one, the one that, if you buy into it the way merchants want you to, can devour a month or more of your busy life. Everywhere you turn, there are Christmas--excuse me--"holiday" decorations. I saw them in a Wegman's grocery store in Jamestown, New York in the third week of October. And there was this strangely ambiguous placard right next to the huge pyramid of Christmas trees. It said something like, "Some shoppers shop ahead and others prefer to wait until closer to the holidays to do their shopping. By placing these decorations out, we are allowing you to make your own choice."

Oh. Gee. Thanks for allowing me to make my own choice. And by the way, your dopey Thankoweenmas decorations bum me out.


Mama. Take a picture of me like this (poses).

I like Halloween. It comes with its own set of expectations, sure, and there's some parental stress, but it's vastly less of an exercise than Christmas. I like it especially because it's Liam's self-professed "favorite day of the year." That's enough for me, even if I didn't already like ghouls and witches, haints and jack-o-lanterns.

Because I was in Jamestown for trick-or-treat, Bill promised the kids we'd carve pumpkins the night before I had to leave. My part was getting the kids' costumes squared away. I am not a tinfoil robot-making kind of mother. I can paint faces like nobody's bidness, but I am not hand-sewing the Medusa costume, if you get my drift. I happily, nay, gleefully, spend my $20-40 rocks on store-bought costumes, dress 'em up with crazy wigs or fabulous face paint, and relax about it. Store-bought costumes are good, store-bought costumes are great; they are enough.

And so BOTB dug into the punkins, with the kids designing the faces and hanging over him and
me behind the camera.My sweet little artists.
not yet perfectionists, but darn close.
Can you carve this, Daddy?
I'll try. To make a jack-o-lantern, you have to stick a knife in the pumpkin. It's the way of the world, kid.
Having strong arms, he did the guts removal in record time.
The obligatory vomiting-pumpkin-guts photo.
My son as a dog: Mmmm. The lid smells good.
Ah, but does it fit back on the jack-o-lantern?
Liam's creation, made flesh by the Father.
The glorious end result. They're flickering outside on the patio each night.
Yes, that is supposed to be Chet Baker, and yes, we know it turned out more like a pig. Too bad there are no decent artists in this family. Happy Thankoweenmas!

Trick or Treating with the Indigo Hillbillies

OW! My brain hurts!

Finally, after the basketball game and the school party, it was time to go trick-or-treating in Marietta. I love this part. Marietta homes are so lovely, and it seems that each one has a generous front porch, where the residents sit in chairs to dole out their goods. Oh, I love it. It was just cool enough to keep us walking fast, a little spit of drizzle every now and then, but not cold enough to overcome the three pairs of winter pajamas under Spiderman's suit.

This lady was really getting into the spirit with a home-made costume. I thought she overdid the whiskers just a bit, but she gets an A for effort. You make do with what's in the closet when you're 80. This is not a PETA-approved costume.
Phoebe with her cousin Annalea (in the black wig) and one of Annalea's friends. They're zombie prom girls. May they dress up and trick-or-treat well into adulthood, and keep rockin'. It works for us. Sooo cute. Gotta love that little red bow, and the bruisy makeup.

Speaking of makeup, here's cousin Jake, as Dracula. Man, he was a sight, running down the street with his cape flying behind him, candy bouncing out of his plastic pumpkin. There's something a little Michael-esque about those enormous eyes, outlined in black...
Some people really go nuts at Halloween. I thoroughly approve of it. It's much more interesting than going nuts with Christmas decorations.
This is Chet Baker's costume. He went as a Neopolitan mastiff. Seriously, this was the first NM I'd ever laid eyes on, though I've marveled at them on televised dog shows. This is one of the giant breeds, quite rare. At first I thought he was a Cane Corso, and asked the owner, who said that their other dog was a Cane Corso. Wow. What a pair. It probably isn't a coincidence that they live in the most lavish house in Marietta. Their owners probably need two massively protective guard dogs to safeguard all their fancy stuff from the meth freaks. I noticed that the Cane Corso wasn't out greeting children...Actually, this mastiff, by all appearances a hound from hell, was extremely sweet and gentle, and his lead-gray hair felt like velour. What an incredible animal. I think he overdid it on the jowls, though. Blblblblblbbbbbbb! I cannot imagine what his dog dish zone must look like. Bacon's bad enough, dribblin' little bits of kibble from his tiny jowls.

That wraps up our Halloween report from Indigo Hill. I'm still getting little blebs of black makeup out of the corners of my eyes, and my skin feels like it was sucked dry from the greasepaint, but I'm staying out of the kids' treat pumpkins, so far. It'd be really scary if I raided 'em. Happy Halloween!!!
Oh. If you're in the Marietta, Ohio area, I'll be giving a lecture at Washington State Community College Thursday night, November 1, at 7:30 pm in the Harvey Graham Auditorium. It's part of the Evergreen Arts and Humanities Lecture Series. I'm really looking forward to it. There will be a reception and book signing afterward. I've been working on my talk, working in a bunch of new stuff, some poems and essays. I sooo want to deliver it in my skull makeup, in honor of Day of the Dead, but it's probably a bad idea, don't you think?

Happy Halloween!

Chet in his costume. Note the enormous fungus on our mailbox oak, the subject of a future post...

Oh, how I wish that trick-or-treating were done as it was in my childhood, on the actual night of October 31, when elves and trolls creep out of holes; but alas, it's always the closest Saturday to the date. That's good for blogging, though, because it means that blog ants have it all tied up with a bow by Halloween.

Chet greets the season by wearing his Halloween pumpkin t-shirt (size 3T) to meet the bus. The really scary part of his costume is the pee that soaks the entire underside of it. Pheeew! Boy dogs are hard to dress. He smells like a ferret now.

Every year, the kids' school has a Halloween party, and we like to dress up for it. The kids expect it. So we need to come up with four costumes each year. I love doing it, though, and try not to stress too much about it. I don't have a complex about making my own costume, and I'm happy to buy them after they get marked down a bit. I love going through the discount store costume racks. I find that a bit of artful makeup can push a storebought costume over the cliff. That's one of my favorite parts of the holiday--makeup hour.

Liam wanted to be Black Spiderman. Bill tried to talk him into something more interesting--I had found a groovy bat costume on sale the year before.

"Liam. There will be fifty Black Spidermen at the Halloween party this year."

A triumphant chortle in his voice, Liam crowed, "And I'M gonna be ONE OF 'EM!"Liam communes with Ethan, one of the many Black Spidermen running around, crouching and shooting imaginary webs, at the party.

He couldn't believe he didn't win a prize in the costume contest. Here, he's grumping about it while his ghostly mother (who took home the prize for Ugliest Adult) tries to jolly him out of it. Wouldn't that make you feel better, to have a ghoul come up behind you? Nothin' doin'. He stayed in a bad mood until trick-or-treat hour, when several double handfuls of candy jolted him out of it.

Phoebe had a dream a few days before the party, that a woman in surgical scrubs came up to her and said, "You should be a punk rockin' granny for Halloween." I was dispatched to Wal-Mart to find the right costume. Here, Phoebe vamps with her friend Chelsey, who I guess was just a rocker. I drew wrinkles on her with eyebrow pencil, and carefully bled lipstick up into the wrinkle troughs. Yeahh! She won Most Original.
Bill was planning to go as a football player, since he had a fabbo letter sweater from the 1970's. He borrowed a helmet from Zide's Sporting Goods in town (how NICE of them!). I thought his costume needed a little push toward the creepy edge, so I made a squishy pink and gray brain that protruded out the top of his helmet. Baaad accident on the Astroturf.Our costumes always have a little creepy edge to them. The former school principal didn't much appreciate that, but he's moved on now. I know I was scaring the pee-pee out of some kindergarteners, and my smile didn't help. It just made me look more like a skull. Sorry. Hey. It's Halloween. It's supposed to scare you.

More anon...Mwoooha ha ha ha ha!!