halloween

All in all, a fucking excellent weekend. I spent way too much money and time on a costume that disintegrated and gained 8 pounds and became unwearable pretty much as soon as I put it on, but those first 20 minutes were pretty brilliant, anyway.

This is how I looked on the trip there: carrying the wig because it wouldn’t fit into the subway. One guy took my picture like this. I don’t know what the hell he thought I was. Lots of little girls in BK were impressed with me, anyway. I was just a pretty pretty princess carrying a sparkly thing. Good enough for little girls!

It was a chickenwire base, wrapped in cotton quilting batting, wrapped in lace-print fabric, wrapped in lace.

Erwin liked to hang out in it.

Sewed and glued on were light-up electric candles, a cuckoo clock tableau, and an epic godzilla-vs-unicorn fight on the back. If i had to do it over again, I would not use cardboard, I would take out some of the weight (um…somehow – def. no heavy silver teapots, maybe no batting? I think the batting was heavy), I would curse more, I would screw sewing anything and just hot-glue it all, I would also not do it again.

Umberllas = cheating. So do reasonably-sized wigs.

Ian, if you couldn’t quite tell from the first photo, was SpaceBat.

It was one of those costumes that very few people got, but those who did were the ones that mattered, anyway. Ian says he DID hear ONE person say, “SpaceBat!” so that makes it worth it.

All of his stickers immediately fell off in the rain, though, so he was just a bat carrying a spaceman helmet, for some reason. Sigh.

After the parade, we went to a nerd party, then posse-walked to Odessa. Oh Odessa. I miss you.

Ian was so hungry that he ate an abandoned dumpling off of someone’s plate at an empty table that a group had just left. Now he has the swine flu.

NY in general was, as per usual, awesome. We got to stay with Chris. We gorged ourselves on ethnic food – these tacos weren’t the best meal we had, but they were the most photogenic:

THIS SMELLED AMAZING.

Both “gracias” AND “thank you” are misspelled here. Nice.

I went shopping! I visited Topshop, where the employees were wearing the hippest, most stylish Halloween costumes I’ve ever seen – Hot Gay Dracula in tall boots and skin-tight red jeans and a fantastic cape, a guy who might have been a nerd (plaid shirt, skinny jeans, suspenders, big black square glasses, afro) or might have just always dressed that way, Lady Gagas up the wazoo. In fact, the “Halloween Costume or Not?” game was a fun one to play – “80’s Girl” or just a girl with an ugly side ponytail? “Corporate Asshole” or corporate asshole? Etc. Also, how is it possible that the H&Ms in NYC are SO MUCH BETTER than they are here??? I’d almost forgotten. Ugh. Never buying clothes here again.

This photo doesn’t go anywhere else, but check it out: one stop shopping!

Sigh. Alright. That’s all.

Other people’s costumes, if you’re into that:

Anybody have any idea what this guy was supposed to be?

We almost went as yip-yips, and then were super-glad we hadn’t tried, because these guys did the Sesame Street thing soooo much better than we would have been able to:

I don’t really know what this costume was supposed to be, but I spent about a third of the night trying to get a half-decent photo of it, and basically never succeeded.

There were a few other examples of “The Awesome Photo Op That Wasn’t” (oh, Zombie Leia! call me!), including the single Best Costume of 2008…drumroll please!…and it goes tooooooo… “Adorable Tiny Obamas w/ Security!!!!”

Christ, it was a chore getting a picture of these two. But trust me – they were the single cutest bit of hope you’ve ever effin’ seen, complete with really serious Secret Service who were totally in character all night long, with a constant stream of really stern, “Back, please! A little room, everyone! The Senator’s coming through!”

This guy was going as Tyler as Travis:

These guys were totally terrified at my scary monster face after I turned around!!! Which I think was a compliment, totally for sure I’m pretty much certain.

I love this costume very, very much and have no jokes to make about it:

There were actually three really good floats of the night: naked man float!

Techno underpants ecstasy float!

Adorable actually-playing-Twist-and-Shout Ferris float!

The only non-eye-roll-y slutty costume of the night:

(I have no real defense, they were just kind of cute, is all, and the fact that they didn’t-exactly-match made it look almost homemade, which obviously endeared them to me.)

Don’t know what these guys were, but they appealed to my alcoholic nature.

Kind of ditto this, but a different nature.

This was another group that I pretty much spent all night trying to get a decent photo of: these were really, truly, honestly, literally FURRIES. You can tell because, although they are all dressed up as white wolves, they are also all dressed up. One of them was a bumble bee, one was a unicorn, one was…I dunno…wearing, like, a leather jacket? I’m pretty sure these were the first real furries I’d ever seen. …In costume, at least.

Don’t know if you can see this exactly, but these guys were holding hands. It was excellent.

They took a photo together because they were the two guys in the parade with light-up eyes, and if that shit doesn’t warm your cockles, I don’t know what will.

Ian and I had a bet: would we see more Jokers or Palins? I bet on Palins, because I figured there were more variations on it: Governor Palin, Sexy Bikini Palin, Hunter Palin w/ Stuffed Wolf Doll, Zombie Palin, yadda yadda.

Well – it was mostly just Palins with more or fewer tiaras and plastic baby dolls, and the Jokers outnumbered her WILDLY. All but one of them, interestingly enough, the regular purple-suited jokers – Ian and I both agreed that the nurse Joker was cuter.

Oh, hello adorable sparkly Japanese girls. You know what’s nice? Adorable sparkly Japanese girls seem usually to be our costumes’ biggest fans. Even if nobody really gets our dumb in-jokes and awkward make-up, adorable sparkly girls will still grin and wink at us. Excellent.

OMG cheater cheater cheater copycatter, yo! I still hold out a fraction of a benefit of a doubt that this might have been a coincidence, but Ian’s pretty sure this guy saw us last year.

This was pretty much the view I had most of the night (just add not being able to hear anything):

Phew! Exhausting! But yay Halloween! See you next year, NYC parade!

Yay for the best holiday of the year! Once again this year, we were in the NYC Halloween parade! This year, unfortunately, we had to take a four-hour bus trip to get there, but – worth it anyway.

(Brief food-blogging side-note: “Black Ice” flavored Blow Pops?

About as delicious as they sound.

I’d go ahead and pick those out of your trick-or-treat bags, if I were you.)

Anyway, New York was brilliant, as per usual. I totally bought a “Tiffany” bracelet in China Town, and managed to visit the 99cent store without buying anything!!! And I love NYC around the holidays, when people are sort of more friendly and forgiving of stupidness, like when you see some hot fashionable-type NYC lady wandering around with a pokerface and wiggly light-up jack-o-lantern antennae headband, and no one is making eye contact with her or acknowledging her at all, just like usual. I dunno. Maybe that doesn’t sound cute, but it’s fucking great. And I kind of love the subway ride to the parade, when half the car is dressed up, and everybody’s sort of very conspicuously not looking at everyone else, but also doing it, too. And I love the little kids wandering around at 2pm as Spiderman and princesses and pirates and all those boring obvious costumes – and I hate children! But, oh, it’s just the Halloween spirit that’s got me! Why, even the Dumpling Man sign wore a costume!

Anyway. Requisite photo of Ian standing at a subway stop looking handsome, and also some random other person:

So, blah blah, anyway – the parade. It was excellent! Ian and I went as monsters, which sounds kind of generic, until you bathe in the awesomeness that was our actual costumes:

I hope you can tell there that our eyes actually did light up?

I kind of tried to take my inspiration from the Muppets and from big-headed Japanese kawaii-type creatures, a la amigurumi and Hello Kitty-type stuff. For Ian’s specifically, I was thinking very much a Muppet-y, friendly “Predator.” Ian was thinking “Animal.” I think we got a nice compromise.

We got tons of compliments and lots of people took our pictures, though if you used a flash while doing so, you could see our faces through the monsters’ mouths, and the effect was sort of ruined, and the picture came out way less cool-looking. But still! Drunk people liked us! Best/worst comment of the night: we were walking down the sidewalk after the parade was over, and there were two (drunk) guys behind us, but I couldn’t quite tell at first that they were talking to/about us, because it was incredibly hard to see or hear inside those things. And we passed a bacon and eggs set, and I heard the guys behind us say something like, “What are you!” (And at this point I realized that all of the, “Teddy bear? Alien? Dust bunny? Turn around! I want to see your face!” stuff had been directed at us this whole time.) And the bacon and eggs said, “Bacon and eggs!” and the guys said, “We don’t care what you are! You’re boring!” and then I turned around and looked at them, and they shrieked and laughed and said, “Yes! Awesome! I didn’t expect it to be so scary! Everybody loved you and we wanted to see what you were! You’re great!” and it was very very very mean and sad and embarrassing for the bacon and eggs, but awfully flattering for me and I can’t deny that I enjoyed it very much.

Ian’s head was slightly smaller than mine (oh! oh! Isley! GO!) so we were able to just stick his in a big bag and carry it with us on the bus to NY, but mine was so big that I had to actually transport it in its broken-down state and assemble it there. Which meant, super-sadly, that we could not bring them back with us. I know, logically, that I will never ever ever ever ever have a use for giant furry monsterheads again in the future, but…sigh. It was sad to see them go.

(Eh…perhaps not so for Ian, who spent some time slamming his against a wall by its meatdreads and drop-kicking mine, because he was not the one who spent many an evening sewing love into every goddamned stitch of that impossible-to-sew fake fur, getting MuppetLung and FiberFinger and hot glue gun burns and, uh, other things that sucked.)

Anyway. Yay for NYC, Halloween, parades, and all combinations of the aforementioned. Pics of other people’s costumes in the next post!