Here as promised are pictures from my Halloween party in 2002.
The party was scheduled to begin at around seven but some of the out-of-towners started arriving much sooner than that. Case in point: Mary and Jill. They both showed up around three in the afternoon and hung out with us for a while before the party actually begun. They had offered to help us clean a bit but we had it all done before they arrived, so we just hung out, watched TV and played games until the official start time of the party.
Mary and Jill are pictured here right at seven, when they got into their costumes. And yes, they are a pepper and salt shaker, respectively. Their costume consisted of black and white sweats, duct tape applied to their shirts for the letters, and collanders on their heads. The collanders didn't stay on so well, so they kept coming off throughout the party.
Mary and Jill were the first to arrive, and they were the first to leave. Jill had to get home to spend time with her husband Everett and she had to teach Sunday school the next day, so they left around nine or ten. Unfortunately this means they weren't present for the costume contest, which I didn't remember to hold until after they left. However, I had this picture to show everyone who voted so they could have still won... but they didn't.
Here I am, again continuing my trend of coming to the party as an obscure comic book character who no one recognizes. This year it was Elijah Snow, main character of a comic called Planetary. And unfortunately at the time of the party, when Jill asked me if this comic was still being published, I had to answer no. Hopefully by the summer though that will change.
I kind of went overboard on this costume. I rented the tux, which cost me close to a hundred bucks. Also, the wig was what was known as a "surfer wig," which was basically like my real hair, only shaggier and gray. I had to trim down the shagginess in order to even be able to wear the thing without the hair getting in my eyes. Then I had to spray it down with a whole bottle of white coloring to get it the right color, which led to it being kind of crusty and gross. I couldn't touch it without getting paint on my fingers. All that effort for a costume only seven other people would get to see in person...
Of course this was not the only money spent on the party. I also went overboard buying candy... five buckets full. Between the handful of trick-or-treaters on actual Halloween and those folks at the party, I think that got whittled down to four. Luckily my students are gluttons; I got rid of almost all the candy there. But Sarah and I did eat enough of it that we vowed to not buy so much next year... which I believe was the exact same thing I said last year. I can't help going overboard; it's my favorite holiday.
Sarah's costume was a bit easier to get together, although it did take her quite some time to pick one. She had decided to come as a peasant girl in medieval garb, and so we searched and searched on eBay for a costume she could wear. But often the dresses would tell us everything about them but the size, so it took a while to find one that she liked the look of and that we thought might fit.
(We also kept going to this costume shop here in Olney to see if they had anything for her to wear, but this place was no help. We must have gone there three or four times in the month preceding the party, and each time they said they were working on organizing their costumes, that we would have to come back. Well finally about a week before the party, we went in and they just let us go back to the back of the store where they kept the costumes, even though they had never gone through them. The place was a disorganized mess and the medieval dresses were all hideous, so it was a good thing we found one on eBay in time.)
There IS a bit of a story behind her costume though, in that her purchasing it off of eBay was a direct result of her having just sold last year's costume, the Tigger costume, there as well. The funny thing is that she was able to sell her Tigger costume for MORE than she had originally paid for it. It apparently is no longer available through Disney as she bought it, and that makes it much more rare. (A brief side note: even though my Jack Skellington costume was also discontinued it sold for under the initial price... but I can't complain, since it wasn't MUCH under it.)
Anyway, when the day came for her to send off her old costume, she was a bit sad to see it go, but she was very excited to get the new one in the mail, so it kind of evened out. Sarah is never quite satisfied with the costumes she picks though, and she really doesn't like any of the pictures that were taken of her that night. ("You can tell I'm just wearing a turtleneck underneath it," she says.) I think she looked perfectly fine that night, even if the poor quality of the photos I took don't reflect that fact.
Neither Sarah or I were eligible for the costume contest, by the way.
Now here we have Jared, our other early arrival, in what I thought was the most inventive costume at the party. Jared came as Jack from Lord of the Flies, that great William Golding book that you probably read in high school about the group of boys who get stranded on a deserted island and basically go wild. You can see he put some thought into his costume, as he has Piggy's glasses, the conch they blew into to call everyone together, his sharpened stick, the face paint... and the torn shirt (which he only wore because I would not allow him to come shirtless).
I thought it showed a lot of planning and a lot of ingenuity, but my vote was the only vote Jared received in the costume contest.
After Jared, Mary and Jill, Sarah, and I all got into our costumes, the party officially began. I know; five people does not exactly make a "party" but what can you do? Jared's girlfriend couldn't make it for reasons that now escape me. I invited more of the old college crew, both Doorhinge and Progger and their significant others. But it's a long drive for everybody, and they had to bow out. (Actually Progger's girlfriend apparently threw a party of her own that night, but that's another story entirely.) Kyker too couldn't make it due to the distance, Denise and Aaron never replied to my e-mails, and I had lost touch with Marc so he and Danielle didn't get invited. Considering all that, I guess I was lucky to get as many as I did.
As always, the party started with the traditional showing of a scary movie, and I was sure this year that my pick this year would wow them, unlike in years past. The movie was Session 9, a movie about a haz-mat crew hired to remove the asbestos from an abandoned insane asylum. I had recently rented the DVD and it had knocked my damn socks off. It was so scary I literally stopped the movie twice and went into the computer room where Sarah was, just to get a breather. I'm not easily freaked at movies, but this one got to me.
Maybe I oversold it though, because the girls were completely unimpressed. They kept saying how boring it was; I would defend the movie, saying it was building atmosphere. But in the end, they didn't like the end result, having to ask me several times to explain to them what had happened. At least Jared seemed to think it was pretty cool; however, he also talked about the psychology of the movie and how it was inaccurate in places (although he did admit it was more accurate than a lot of other movies he had seen).
Shortly after the movie ended my friend Tiffany showed up, bringing our number up to six. Tiffany is the new chemistry teacher out at the college; she just got hired at the beginning of the fall semester. She actually lives in the same apartment complex as us, but we had not really hung out all that much at this point, having only gone to Evansville together with another teacher once. (I invited this other teacher and his wife to the party too, but it was kind of at the last minute and I think it was too late for them to get a babysitter. Plus they had other plans already, so they didn't show.)
Anyway, she came in the oh-so-inventive costume of... a chemist. Lot of thought went into that one, as you can see. :) But seriously, the beaker/mug she drank out of (pictured here) was pretty cool (the strange solution contained within it actually is 7 and 7).
Tiffany came late because she had been ushering at a play the school was putting on. (As it turned out, the next day when she went back to the school to usher for that day's matinee, her car ran out of gas on the way and I had to help her out by giving her a ride around town to buy a gas can and fill it up.) Somehow though she had the time to make caramel apples before she came over... well, actually they were apple slices that we dipped in caramel, but still, it was more than anyone else brought.
By the time Tiffany showed up the party was kind of losing steam, and it had turned into less of a party and more of a gathering. We were playing Trivial Pursuit when she arrived and she joined in. When the game ended, though, Mary and Jill had to leave, and our party denigrated even further, since at that point it consisted of all of four people.
But it wasn't too long after Mary and Jill left that Nate and Nikki arrived, bringing our number back up to six. Nate and Nikki came late because the party was the same day as Centralia's Halloween parade. Nate was involved with something in the parade dealing with his job at the rec center, and Nikki was helping her friend Beth Ann with the dancers from her studio. When their parts of the parade got done, they regrouped at my parents' house and then rode over to the party together in Nikki's Aztek, arriving around eleven and leaving when the clock read two... for the second time.
Nate came to the party as... a bee. He apparently got the costume from our parents' next-door neighbors, the Freemans. It was really just the vest and the hood that he borrowed from them; the brown turtleneck and jeans he already had (which says something about his interesting wardrobe choices if you ask me :) ). Anyway, the costume had a little stinger on the back and Nate kept complaining about where it ended up when he sat. One solution he tried was to sit with the stinger pulled forward so it stood up between his legs... which was a sight to see, let me tell you.
I think solely on the basis of his making jokes about the costume so much, Nate won the costume contest almost unanimously. He got all the votes but mine, which went to Jared. Because of these results, Nate got to pick something out of my infamous "prize closet." He ended up leaving with a DVD copy of The Usual Suspects. I went ahead and let Jared pick something too, since he was the only other person to receive votes, and he snagged my Almost Famous DVD. (Both of these were of course only in the "prize closet" because I had upgraded to the special edition DVDs; I'm not crazy enough to just give away my actual stuff unless I have replacements.)
And finally we have Nikki who came to the party as a biker girl. This was apparently a costume she had done before back at Murray at one of her sorority's parties, so she had all the materials on hand. (The tight black leather pants again make quite an interesting statement simply by being in her closet, albeit a completely different KIND of statement than Nate's. :) )
Anyway, we played games and watched TV for a while before the party wound down. The official end of the party, again as it always has been, was when we "time-traveled." I always hold the party on the same day as daylight savings time, so that we will be awake and at the party for the time change. Basically, when three o'clock rolls around, it magically becomes two o'clock again (and all the Evansville and Terre Haute stations realign again). It was at that time that Nikki and Nate headed back to Centralia, that Tiffany headed across the parking lot, and Jared headed for our couch. We all said our goodnights, and the party was at an end.
All in all, it was a bit disappointing, simply because it was so sparsely attended. But it was also a fun time, kind of relaxing to just hang out rather than have to do a lot of hosting. And truth be told, our apartment is not big enough for lots of people, so the small attendance worked out just fine.
But I'm warning you now: next year's party, my FIFTH annual Halloween party, will be Saturday, October 25th, so leave the evening free. :)
The party was scheduled to begin at around seven but some of the out-of-towners started arriving much sooner than that. Case in point: Mary and Jill. They both showed up around three in the afternoon and hung out with us for a while before the party actually begun. They had offered to help us clean a bit but we had it all done before they arrived, so we just hung out, watched TV and played games until the official start time of the party.
