Tricks of the trade

My face was sweating. Splotches of red paint speckled my hands and legs, giving my throbbing digits the look of a faded checkerboard tablecloth. My breath came in tearing rasps, and joints popped as I arched my back, happy to be done with the day’s handiwork. Time to reward myself with one of those hairy microbrews, I thought, the kind with orange-haired Vikings on the label that tastes like a motor oil-infused loaf of pumpernickel.

 

From that description, you might assume I was tackling a home project, or building a rocket ship in my backyard. Something manly and important. But no. With the concentration of one of those guys who writes peoples’ names on a grain of rice, I was making a pair of lobster claws for my Halloween costume.

 

I was 31 at the time. Welcome to my obsession.

 

It’s the same story every year. Around August, I begin thinking forward to All Hallow’s Eve, and start plotting my extravagant outfit, usually something culled from my video game and comic book-obsessed youth: Supervillians, turtles with mohawks, mutant abominations and in one odd case, Charlie Brown. That one was relatively easy. A curlicue on my forehead with a magic marker and I was pretty much done.

 

Usually it’s something that requires a half-year’s salary in art supplies and an advanced engineering degree. My creations have become the stuff of legend. So, frankly, has my dorkiness.

 

It all started one dark and stormy night. Well, it was dark. Not so much stormy. I think you’re just supposed to say that.

 

Anyway, about 10 years ago, a good buddy of mine, “Baldomera,” thought it would be fun to invite some friends to her home for an adults-only costume party, which is similar to a kids’ party, only with less candy and more Jack Daniels. I dug out a yellow Dick Tracy hat that I wore when I was 12 and skipped on over to Baldomera’s humble abode, feeling excited and more than a little ridiculous. This marked the first time since my early teens that I’d acknowledged Halloween with anything more than a viewing of “Ghostbusters” and a sack of Milky War bars, and so I rang her doorbell with some trepidation. As a kid, I had rocked this holiday. As an adult, I wasn’t sure I could, or was even supposed to.

 

By the end of the night, I was sold. Halloween was back, a new tradition had been born, and the serious work was about to begin.

 

Because if this was going to be an annual event, I couldn’t just toss on a hat and call it a costume. I may be lazy about certain things – shaving, laundry, basically anything to do with personal hygiene – but I’ll do anything it takes to look and act as much like an ass as possible.

 

Last year’s costume serves as a prime example. Since I possess the emotional maturity of Peter Pan (isn’t that a complex?), I opted to dress as The Shredder; he’s an evildoer from the Ninja Turtles universe whose outfit features an array of knife blades affixed on metal plates to his shoulders and forearms. Total human cheese grater. Which is a great visual, but I home-make all of my costumes, so this presented an arts and crafts challenge: With no factory-made plastic accouterments at my disposal, I had to figure out a way to make knife blades without using actual knife blades. Otherwise I’d end up high-fiving someone at the party and taking their hand off at the wrist. Major buzzkill.

 

The solution was sheets of Styrofoam. By carving out the shapes of said blades with a bread knife, and hot-glueing them to “plates” cut out of posterboard, I was able to approximate Shredder’s look without wearing hardware better used to fend off rabid bear attacks. Bumping into someone with a piece of molded craftware results in a soft crunching sound and a polite “excuse me.” Bumping into someone with a weaponized costume results in bloodstains on the carpet and a trip to the emergency room while stanching the flow with a homemade tourniquet. Sometimes creativity means knowing how to not kill people.

 

Styrofoam is a miracle substance, if you know how to use it. In another year, it proved the perfect answer to an age-old question: How do I make a set of lobster claws made iconic by a talking alien crustacean from a cartoon series about interstellar delivery drivers? Plato drove himself crazy with that one.

 

These are the claws that broke my back and made me crave beer. My chosen character that Halloween was Zoidberg, a bright red humanoid sea creature from the cult show “Futurama.” If I may bask in the rich soup of my own ego, these appendages were a wonder of ingenuity. On the inside of each claw was a carved-out recess, into which I placed my fists; each was bound by a pair of rubber bands. This gave me the outward appearance of having Zoidberg’s trademark health hazards as hands, while leaving my actual hands free to grasp dewy bottles of paint-peeling microbrews. These are the types of things you have to consider when transforming yourself into the feverish hallucinations of a bubonic plague victim.

 

It’s a similar tale every autumn. The annual shindig is a wonderful event, but as is often the case, it’s the anticipation – and preparation – that give it texture. Chances are good it’s a mild form of insanity that inspires these elaborate costumes; it was certainly a different scenario when I was a child, content with dime-store rags to fulfill my whimsy. As you get older, you try to top yourself, to improve upon and expand the standard template. 

 

Therein lies the problem, though. At what point does it become impossible to do any better?

 

Guess we’ll find out. When I discover a way to bend the laws of physics and swoop through the air in a functional Superman outfit, I’ll know it’s time to retire.