Stories of costumes from days long since past accepted, to be clear.
There are no pictures of how he dresses at that link.
2: I agree. There are no pictures there.
I always wanted to go as Freddie Mercury, but I couldn't figure out a work-around for his tendency to bare his chest in his most iconic outfits.
4: Another band is doing Queen at the event I'm attending. I'm curious whether they can pull it off. (They have to play as Queen, too.)
Can you go as David Bowie during his glam phase? That would be fun.
Oh, wait, I totally misread the post. You're not looking for a better costume, cause you're locked in.
Just get Drew Barrymore to go with you. That'll really make it.
I was planning on wearing a button down shirt that I could expose my belly with, and get a baby doll or alien doll, cut it in half, and some fake wound putty, and have the doll or alien ripping its way from out of my belly.
I couldn't figure out a work-around for his tendency to bare his chest in his most iconic outfits.
Whereas I can't figure out a way to pick up this low-hanging fruit without sounding weird and creepy. We've all got problems.
Yeah, I'm stuck. But I like costume stories.
On preview: 8 for example cracked my shit up.
It's probably been ten years or more since I last dressed up for Halloween.
The last time I dressed up, I went as Sam Spade and my roommate went as the Maltese Falcon. Needless to say, her outfit was way better than mine.
Eh. I don't have my uniform with me here, and I'm not into the whole zombie thing.
This thread is making me uncomfortable because I have two hundred things to do by November and I refuse to admit that Halloween is on any sort of near-future radar already.
The only way to truly enjoy Halloween costuming is to go as your inner, normally hidden self. I figure teo should go as Freddie Mercury let his hair down.
I refuse to admit that Halloween is on any sort of near-future radar already.
Dude, it's late October. You're just going to have to come to terms with that.
The only way to truly enjoy Halloween costuming is to go as your inner, normally hidden self.
I'm still sufficiently neurotic and repressed to want to keep that self well hidden.
19: I've been rehearsing for weeks. The Strokes' drumbeats are surprisingly tricky at times. PRESSURE.
How are you going to drum in clothes two sizes too small, and a too-small leather jacket? Aren't you going to cut off the circulation to your arms or something?
21: Great question! I've just now tried on the costume, and it seems I can type without any issue whatso werlkjsdflkjsdflkjsdflkjsdfsdfl [gurgle, snort, twitch, falls over].
I had no idea who this Moretti guy is and so followed the link. I then went on to the Strokes wiki and found this sentence 'At age 13, Casablancas was sent to Le Rosey, a boarding school in Switzerland to resolve his drinking problems and improve his academic performance.' I presume the parents later followed that by recruiting Paris Hilton to chaperone their daughter who was showing an excessive tendency to partying over her academic obligations.
My Halloween costume is "Sexy Lawyer."
Also, the Australian series "Underbelly" is pretty good.
It's probably been ten years or more since I last dressed up for Halloween.
Oh, at least fifteen here. I'm far too nervous about looking stupid (see also under: Smearcase Doesn't Dance.)
(
8: belly
I have always found this word icky and embarrassing. God only knows what maelstrom of pre-Oedipal drama is responsible for this fact.
)
Last Halloween I wore a crown of thorns. The previous Halloween I walked around with a cane and explained that I was lame.
24: Did you resolve the lawyer/secretary question?
I think the last time I dressed up for Halloween I was 15 and I donned a navy-style peacoat and pretended to be a teenager who was just out for the candy pretending to be a lost navy man.
max
['I was so pomo.']
After having been invited to no Halloween parties for the past several years, this year I have invites for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Halloween weekend.
Tweety and I have a half-hatched plan to go as Little Dead Riding Hood ( = 80s goth LRR) and the Big Rad Wolf ( = wolf in 80s clothes, probably neon or somesuch). The wolf part is difficult, though. Absent crazy great makeup and gluing-fake-hair-to-face skills, how does one dress up as a wolf?
Have Tweety grow as much beard as possible and then dye it and his hair a grey/white. Go as Big Rad Wolf Blitzer: the Jeopardy Before and After solution strikes again!
(Whoa, I'll probably have a little being to dress for Halloween this year. I think I'm going to keep having these weird exciting freak-out moments for a while now.)
I don't think any of my costumes would work for you, though my brother has successfully been arguably the best Freddie Mercury at a Freddie Mercury party for the last two years. Last year I was Sappho, which no one guessed (and there were people at the party we attend in blackface, so that was the end of wanting to go there). The previous year we went as the "B" girl who claimed she'd been attacked by a scary black Obama supporter and Lee was that Obama fan. The year before I was Trinity from The Matrix. Otherwise I hadn't ever gotten dressed up at Halloween.
A friend of mine dressed as me one Halloween in high school. I guess I've long tended to wear the same thing every day.
36: How does one dress as Sappho? Tattered, fragmentary parchments might be a little recondite.
37: Just made myself a chiton and curled my hair. But what other Greek woman would I be in a situation where there were zero classicists? Come on!
38: Maybe Cleopatra? Olympias? Some other kohl smuggler?
39: I'd really have been fine with any of those guesses, but no one even had a guess! It was a disappointment.
One costume I was quite proud of was Number 2 from The Prisoner. I had the blazer with piping, khakis and sneakers, and then I attached a white balloon with a string to the back of the blazer, so it chased me around. Unfortunately, apparently not a single fucking person in all of LA knows that show. Also it was a day of the dead party, as it turned out.
Who has separate, elaborate costumes for both day of the dead and halloween, anyhow? My friends, that's who. Goddamn Hollywood.
I went as Justice Thomas once. Since I didn't get judicial robes and stuff, nobody knew what I was doing and they were very angry when I walked around putting hairs on their drinks.
Maybe now your wife can call up all those people and ask for apologies.
I think she was a script for that by now.
The Moretti dude from the Strokes is the son of the famous (to some) Franco Moretti, literary critic. I don't know how that knowledge would improve a costume.
I keep intending to dress as Justice Ruth Bader Ginzberg one of these days. Maybe I could accessorize with a Constitution and a bloody axe or something.
You'd have to attach shoes to your knees and kneel all day. Ginsberg's main identifying feature is her tininess -- I'm not sure she's five foot.
You could pull off an O'Connor costume, but that's less appealing.
Absent crazy great makeup and gluing-fake-hair-to-face skills, how does one dress up as a wolf?
The little kid version would be big furry ears on a headband, and maybe black makeup on the nose for a muzzle. It'd look ridiculous, but is that a negative?
Alternatively, you could wear a sheep's clothing.
The really bonus-extra-eye-gauging factoid about the Ginny Thomas phone message is that, according to Jane Mayer at the NYer who has heard the message, it was delivered in a "singsong" voice. Now doesn't that just up the passive-aggression factor by a googleplex or so.
It'd look ridiculous, but is that a negative?
Clearly not.
I went to a medieval-themed Halloween party once as a Pictish king. I painted myself blue, wore a purple robe, accessorized with a silver torc and jewelry, and carried a large cardboard sword. It was all stock barbarian and not remotely accurate historically, but being blue was fun.
The last few years I've worn an old Japanese robe and dressed as Ye Generic Kung Fu Guy. Now that's getting old. This year I may dress as an annoying acquaintance and carry a kazoo everywhere. I dunno.
I once went to a Halloween party given by a bunch of guys from the Committee on Social Thought. Rather than dressing up, guests were supposed to bring something that scared them. So I carried around a copy of The Closing of the American Mind.
I heard of someone going this year with a black wig, a red dress, and half a table strapped to his waist. He's going to be Marina Abramovic. If I could come up with shit like that, I might actually wear a Halloween costume. (Ideally not drag. That happened the last time I did wear a costume, 1996ish. I was aiming for Louise Boroks and landed just past Theda Bara.)
A friend of mine went as Dial-A-Deity once. He made a large cardboard wheel of fortune and pasted pictures or names of major gods in each section. When someone asked who he was, he told them to spin the wheel and then replied that he was that god.
I was thinking about going as Christopher Lee (lightsaber, wizard's staff, vampire fangs and a toy gun painted gold), and I still might someday, but this year I just bought a V for Vendetta costume from a store. I might feel bad about the unoriginality of it, if not for two things: my girlfriend bought a Hit-Girl costume a couple days after I got my costume, so we sort-of-but-not-really have matching costumes, and a V costume will be very good to wear to the rally on the Mall the day before Halloween.
56: Also good for taunting scientologists.
I was thinking that the slicked down hair, lace jabot, and giant glasses would do it for the Ginzberg look. How many people really know how tall she is?
A girlfriend once put on a beard and wore a full slip, and carried a cigar. She was of course a Freudian Slip.
The really bonus-extra-eye-gauging factoid about the Ginny Thomas phone message is that, according to Jane Mayer at the NYer who has heard the message, it was delivered in a "singsong" voice. Now doesn't that just up the passive-aggression factor by a googleplex or so.
To me this all seems aims at her husband. Breakfast table squabble getting out of control. Some sort of deeply fucked up resentments within the marriage.
60: Oh, the dude(tte)s in Anonymous wear Guy Fawkes/V masks during their protests. Like so.
62: You must be able to sound exactly like Mrs. Thomas because no one suspects you yet. We'll keep quiet.
Breakfast table squabble getting out of control. Some sort of deeply fucked up resentments within the marriage.
Hadn't thought of that. He probably told her to shut her pie hole about the Tea Party, that it was inappropriate for the wife of a Supreme Court Justice to be involved in politics blah blah... Oh yeah, why don't we just ask Anita about the pubic hairs again, Justice Smartypants.
According to Tbogg, Mrs. Thomas isn't the only one who wants an apology.
Anonymous wear Guy Fawkes/V masks during their protests
That's a 4chan thing mostly, right?
One year, after screwing up my original plans, wound up at the drugstore on the night of the party looking for something decent. I ended up with Groucho Marx glasses. I didn't want to look like I totally mailed it in, so I threw on a shirt and tie. Then I got lucky.
On the way to the party I stopped at my friend's apartment. Earlier that day he'd gone to Salvation Army and bought himself some stuff to wear (just some vintage clothes and a fedora that made him look like Hunter S. Thompson). He'd also purchased a kid-sized Tigger costume but decided not to use it. This thing was small--it was one of those footsy-pajama full-body things--so I cut it up. I somehow got the hood over my head, used the legs as sleeves, and taped the tail to the seat of my pants. The mittens even fit like biker gloves once I cut the finger part off.
People did wonder why I was a tiger wearing a shirt and tie. I just told them that I was Tony the Tiger and I had a meeting with the union rep because Cornelius the Rooster was getting more than I was.
I've also gone as a zombie 70's newscaster and zombie Kurt Cobain. Pretty much take any slightly unusual clothing and zombie it up and you've got something reasonable. You could go as zombie Strokes drummer.
68.2: Did this involve a spiderman brief?
I think the last time I dressed up for Halloween I was 15 and I donned a navy-style peacoat and pretended to be a teenager who was just out for the candy pretending to be a lost navy man.
The last time I did, years ago, I wore an overcoat and got drunk, and told people I was Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Otherwise I hadn't ever gotten dressed up at Halloween.
Including as a kid? Were your parents anti-Halloween?
58: I think that would totally work. It's the giant lace collar I tend to think of (but will now think of properly as a "jabot") with her.
Were your parents anti-Halloween?
It's come up here before, but a surprising number of parents here opt for Harvest Festivals or whatever, often consisting of a bunch of parents rolling into the Target parking lot at 7pm on the appointed evening, popping open the back hatch and letting the kiddies run around doing some sort of treat-or-treating facsimile.
Come to think of it, I'm probably conflating more than one trend here.
73: My understanding is that parking-lot (or sometimes mall) Halloween became a Thing after the poison Tylenol scare and/or general child abduction hysteria.
Such a bummer. I have great memories of trick-or-treating. Everywhere I've lived as an adult still has trick-or-treating, though.
a surprising number of parents here opt for Harvest Festivals or whatever
At the school where my wife teaches, opposition to Halloween comes from religious fundamentalists who freak out about the whole thing.
I'm going as the Queen of the Night from the magic flute--my daughter as Papagena. (She didn't specifically request to dress up as Papagena--she isn't two yet--but does love the video of the "Pa Pa Pa" duet & regularly request to see Papagena). No one in the world is going to get it but I think she'll enjoy dressing up in feathers.
Last year we were Omar & Brother Mouzone.
76: You better practice hitting that high note!
I made a Beaker muppet head that came out pretty well, will post pictures to the flickr stream when available. Lab coat accessory is available from work. My current problem is the shirt and tie, the head has a 24 inch circumference which is an 8XL shirt size so I'm not sure how to deal with that part.
We didn't have any fundamentalists where I grew up,* but sometimes the Hebrew school teachers for the more conservative synagogues would plead with the kids not to go out (it wasn't forbidden or anything). Everyone went trick-or-treated.
*Pretty much anyone ultra-religious went to an ultra-religious school. Even still, I'm unaware of any "Christian" schools in the area. We had yeshivas and Catholic schools thick upon the ground, however.
Everyone went trick-or-treated.
Yeah. You know.
I've mentioned it before, but certain kids at this (public) school (in a wealthy suburb) have been known to curl up in the fetal position in terror at the mention of witches or the devil. I have yet to see the anti-Halloween fundies mentioned when people bitch about the forces of political correctness interfering with their traditional holiday celebrations.
I have yet to see the anti-Halloween fundies mentioned when people bitch about the forces of political correctness interfering with their traditional holiday celebrations.
Oh, please, people bitch about that all the time. What good is a pagan ritual co-opted by early Christianity if people won't bitch about it?
78: Oh, but some noted interpreters have sold out Carnegie Hall without doing so.
Sweet Christ, I knew what the link in 85 was going to be, but I somehow had to click through. Anyone else who did might want to hear this version to get the sound of FFJ out of your brain. Plus, what a great Halloween costume that would be.
84: Really? Honestly, I've never heard it.
You know, out local public school has a Halloween costume contest and Christmas carols during the Christmas pageant, with some dradle stuff thrown in for good measure. One of the local snooty private schools has a Fall harvest and Winter carnival, with all mention of religion, pagan or otherwise banned. I have no idea what they do at the Christian school.
I figured there was some chance FFJ had never come up here and you only get to hear her for the first time once. Best it should be without warning.
89: I hadn't heard of her, but fortunately the sound is off on my computer.
But having not heard her and only read about her, I think she is my new hero -- "Some may say that I couldn't sing, but no one can say that I didn't sing." I wish I'd thought of that line.
OT: I may be compelled to attend an Halloween party with a superhero theme. Is there a really drunk superhero?
91: Iron Man/Tony Stark. You could claim you got so drunk you lost your supersuit.
92: I like it. I may need some small source of illumination under my shirt.
93: Oh, and don't call it a "supersuit" unless that's part of the drunk act. I think it's just called Iron Man armor or something like that.
Mark {I,II,III,IV,V} Armor, or something. Right?
95: Probably. I basically hate Iron Man, though, so I don't know. I knew there were Roman numerals involved somewhere, but that's about the extent of my knowledge.
Oh, and don't call it a "supersuit" unless that's part of the drunk act
Where is my supersuit?
93: You know those lights that you can buy to illuminate say, closets? They tap on and off, they're round? Battery operated? That would be perfect.
(Like this.)
Is there a really drunk superhero?
I like RDJ, and I like robot suits in general, but I never read the comics. My current plan is to attend with my iPhone slung around my neck under my shirt displaying an appropriate picture. The downside is when I start reading Unfogged during the party I'll undergo cardiac arrest.
You could expose a bare patch of your chest and just keep squishing a bunch of lightning bugs there.
91: Hancock?
I do like the idea of an "Iron Man out of the armor" costume, though. A tux or some kind of formal attire, a pasted-on goatee, a perpetually half-full martini glass, and some kind of light under your chest like in 98. Simple, easy, but a genuine costume, not just some half-assed thing.
If I had a gorilla suit I'd go as Bristol Palin.
If I had a sloth suit that fit me, I'd go as a sloth.
My current sloth suit grabs my junk.
Maybe there are some moth balls stuck to your sloth balls?
I have not read this thread at all, but:
I like robot suits in general
Childhood terrors ensue. I wore what passed for a robot suit when I was like 7 years old: this was a corrugated box for a top and another for a bottom, both covered with tin foil, and I was supposed to walk in this contraption in a parade. I'm pretty sure I cried eventually.
I have no recollection of what we did for the head part, or whose idea this was.
Robots are stupid.
It will be obvious to all that for the next five years at least I dressed as a gypsy for Halloween.
106: When your sloth suit says "Gentle Cycle, Cold Only," you need to pay attention.
Robots are stupid.
Not stupid. Need input.
No matter how bad you need input, don't grab somebody's junk.
110: NUN SOUP, MOTHERFUCKER. NUN SOUP.
99: I await the inevitable mash-up, DRUNK FEMINIST HULK.
We prefer "hylk."
*hic*
