Kyle
Ryan
The
year was 2000. As usual, I wanted to make a costume out of whatever I had at
home to avoid spending money. Looking at my dad's hand-me-down army fatigues, I
had an idea: a terrorist. With the USS Cole bombing still in the news,
the embassy bombings of '98 still fresh, and a disturbing interview he gave
with Time in 1999 on my mind, I
decided to be Osama bin Laden. I bought a toy machine gun, made a head wrap,
and modified the fatigues. I tore off the name patches on my coat and wrote
"BIN LADEN" there instead, then wrote JIHAD in giant letters on the
back. All night, people would give me blank stares when I said who I was, so I
just started saying I was "a terrorist." It would've been a pretty
uneventful Halloween—ah, those blissful days before 9/11—had I not
run into a Five Percenter outside a bar. They're basically a militant offshoot
of the Nation Of Islam, and the dude didn't take kindly to the
"jihad" on my back. "This is your holiday," he told me,
as if Halloween was invented in Ireland to oppress minorities. I reminded him
that many cultures celebrate
Halloween in some form, but he just said cryptically, "Remember that we're
responsible for what we wear on our back." I took care to look over my
shoulder the rest of the night.
Andy
Battaglia
Last year, I dressed up as minimal techno (a white
T-shirt with the marker-scrawled words "hi-hat" on the front and
"kick drum" on the back), but more memorable than that was a few
years ago when I went out as "Emperor Tomato Ketchup." I wore all
red, with a homemade Heinz logo on my chest, a ring of green felt leaves around
my neck, and a crown on my head. I had a scepter, too. I was (and remain) a
huge Stereolab fan, and that's one of the few albums by any band that justifies
the major drag all but promised by costumes that require explanation.
Sean
O'Neal
Since
I'm a natural introvert (or buzzkill, whatever you want to call it), I tend to prefer
"conceptual" costumes over something more obvious (or
"fun"). The last time I actually got decked out in anything that
photographed well was 2004, when I went as Shaun Of The Dead (for obvious reasons). Two
years before that, I teamed up with two friends and went as Weekend At Bernie's (I was Andrew McCarthy,
my friend Chuck was Jonathan Silverman, and we dragged my incredibly committed
performance-artist friend Chris around all fucking night). That was probably
the closest I ever came to being "the life of the party," but my
personal favorite is still the year I went as The Wonder Years' Kevin Arnold: I bought a
gaudy, wide-collared '70s shirt and track jacket from a thrift store, then I
recorded an hour's worth of faux-insightful interior monologues (i.e.
"That was the year I learned that Halloween isn't about dressing up—it's
about opening
up") on my microcassette recorder, each one followed by the chorus to The
Byrds' "Turn! Turn! Turn!" Whenever someone would ask who I was
supposed to be, I would pensively stare into space and let those play; I don't
think I met anyone who didn't get it. Unfortunately I've never come up with
anything as inspired since, as evidenced by my costume this year: "The Man
From Two Minutes In The Future."
Genevieve
Koski
In
1992, my elementary school thought it prudent to ban all Simpsons-related clothing, which
meant my much-loved T-shirt depicting Bart Simpson writing "I will not waste
chalk" on the blackboard was officially too crude for school. I remember being
excessively upset by this turn of events, to the point where I, in some vaguely
formed spirit of protest, demanded a Simpsons Halloween getup for that
year's student costume parade. For reasons I can't quite remember, I decided to
go with Maggie Simpson. Since there was no way my mom was going to shell out
the money for a proper latex mask, we jerry-rigged a spiky yellow wig,
oversized cardboard pacifier, and bulging Styrofoam-ball eyes. I remember my
mom and I spending an unusual amount of time and energy on this
outfit—particularly the wig—and me being inordinately proud of it,
despite the fact that photographic evidence of that Halloween confirms that it
was perhaps the most unintentionally frightening costume I've ever worn. It
did, however, foreshadow my proclivity for oversized, obnoxious Halloween wigs
in later years, evidenced by last year's (spectacular) Amy Winehouse effort and
this year's foot-and-a-half-tall Troll Doll 'do.
Nathan
Rabin
I have a curious love-hate relationship with
Halloween. I love the holy living fuck out of it, but I seldom do anything to
commemorate it. As an adult, my incredibly lazy default costume is as one of
the Ramones—white T-shirt, high-tops, black leather jacket, jeans. A few
years ago, I went to a party without dressing up. It was one hell of a costume
party—one guy really went all-out with a Teen Wolf ensemble—and
deep into the night, a very inebriated gentleman walked up to me and
guilelessly enthused, "Awesome David Cross costume, dude! You look just like
him!" I guess being a bald Jewish man with facial stubble (I believe I was
growing one of my patented depression beards at the time), an aggressively
casual wardrobe, and grad-school glasses made me a dead ringer for a very tall
David Cross. So yeah, that was probably my most memorable costume, and it was
wholly unintentional.
Matthew
Borlik
Halloween
2005: I went as Jack Burton from John Carpenter's 1986 cinematic masterpiece, Big
Trouble In Little China. I had let my hair grow out for months so that on the night
of the party, I could cut and sculpt it into Kurt Russell's magnificent mullet
using half a canister of styling mousse and my roommate's hair dryer. The
centerpiece of the costume was the replica "Chinaman" tank-top I
purchased for $20 online at the fan site wingkong.net. To combat the late-October
chill, I went with jeans and matching jean-jacket option (which Burton wears
when he and Wang first infiltrate the Wing Kong Exchange) rather than the tan
trenchcoat-plus-trucker-hat combo (Burton's outfit of choice in the beginning
and end of the film), as the hat would have messed up my finely-coiffed hair.
(Sadly, I owned no beige baja jackets, blue silk kimonos, or brown
used-car-salesman suits.) Then I set out for the night determined to speak to
people using only lines from the movie—Burton quotes were obviously
preferred, but I allowed myself the use of all quotes (including Little Old
Basket Case On Wheels David Lo Pan's "Indeed!") for the sake of
having options during conversations. The problem is, there are only so many
times one can make a toast to "the Army and Navy and the battles they have
won" and "America's colors, the colors that never run" before
the pillars of heaven start shaking—especially when you're drinking shots
that hit harder than the misty potion poured forth from the gourd in Egg Shen's
Six-Demon Bag. A few lines were flubbed, several choice opportunities for
appropriate quote responses were missed, and people unfamiliar with the film
quickly left the conversation in confusion. For the most part, however, the
whole thing went over pretty well—so much so that I used the costume for
a different party the following Halloween.
Amelie
Gillette
One
Halloween, I dressed up as Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. This is memorable
because a) Julia Roberts plays a hooker in Pretty Woman, and b) I was 11 years
old at the time. So, why did my parents let me dress up like a hooker for
Halloween? They didn't. In fact, they didn't even let me watch Pretty Woman. But movies about hooker
Cinderellas have a way of finding their way to the most inappropriate audience
possible: girls at slumber parties. My friend Nicole had Pretty Woman on video, a big house,
and little-to-no parental supervision, so we always had slumber parties at her
house. One Halloween, we dressed up to go trick-or-treating there too. There
was a group of five of us, and we had all agreed to dress up as Julia Roberts
in Pretty Woman.
In the end, however, only my friend Elena and I went through with it. We both made
our own costumes out of old white T-shirts, though by very different processes:
Elena had a sewing machine and she knew how to sew, so her costume was an
almost perfect (to an 11-year-old) replica of the midriff-baring outfit Julia
Roberts wears in the beginning of the movie. I, on the other hand, cut the
sleeves and neck off one of my dad's old white T-shirts, knotted it in the back
in several places to make it tighter, and wore it as a dress. Still, we both
looked shockingly, stupidly hooker-esque—to the point that after a few
houses we were shivering with embarrassment, not to mention the cold. Elena and
I were about to turn around and go back to Nicole's, but we rang one more bell.
Mrs. Brant, our religion teacher at the time, answered the door. She was,
frankly, horrified. She asked us what we were supposed to be. Elena said
"En Vogue," while I mumbled something about "rock stars."
Then Mrs. Brant asked us if our parents knew we were out here "like
that," and we all fell all over each other to say, "Yeah. Of
course."
