The office I work in actually allows folks to dress up for Halloween and holds a little mini-costume contest during the day so I’m scheming up something cool to go as. This is relatively new for me as for years I’ve worked in places that either A) didn’t consider it professional to allow you to dress up for Halloween (read: General Motors) or B) I worked the midnight shift so no one would see me anyway which takes some of the fun out of it.
I cheated at GM and wore some of those fake vampire teeth that look relatively realistic because you only put them over your eye teeth and then I smiled at everyone I passed.
A lot.
Evilly.
Anyway, last year I was caught off guard by the fact that I could actually wear a costume so I wimped out and wore my Renaissance garb that I usually wear to the Renaissance Festival. Yes, I’m that big of a geek that I go to the Ren Fest in garb. Bite me.
This year I’m putting some thought into what I should go to work as keeping in mind that I have almost no budget to spend on a costume. One of my most successful costumes from my High School days was Death and it was about as cheap a costume as you could hope for. The black robe and hood consisted of some scrap material my mother kept in the basement for as long as I can remember that were only used when we needed a black robe and hood. She probably still has it.
Combine that with a pair of “Zany Zappers” with the lenses punched out and a ski-mask with the eye holes safety-pinned down to mere slits and no mouth hole. Zany Zappers, for those unfamiliar with the concept, were these sunglasses they sold for awhile back in the mid-80’s that had red LED lights behind the lenses that you could flash on and off with the battery pack in your pocket. Total cost: $5.99 for the Zappers and a $1.00 for the batteries to power it. The lights, admittedly, don’t look much like eyes, but the costume still seemed to impress most folks who saw it even after one of my “eyes” burned out mid-way through the day. I’ve been meaning to sit down and come up with some new way of recreating the lighting harness with something that looks more eye-ish and wouldn’t require reducing my vision so much by pinning shut the eyes slits in the ski-mask, but I never seem to get around to it before the next Halloween shows up.
So this year I’m thinking my ridiculously cheap-assed costume will fall back on a new interpretation of an old Halloween staple: Zombies. Paint your face white with black around the eyes and mouth and a little blue on the cheeks and put on your old jeans and shirt with holes in it and roll around in the dirt a little and voil, instant zombie. If you’re like me and wanted to get fancy with it you’d make little latex rubber bullet holes or use the latex to make some fake wounds on your face along with a creative application of too much blushing gel squeezed out as rivulets of blood to add a little gore to it all. All told you spent maybe $15 on makeup if you sprung for the latex.
So what am I going to do that’s a new twist on this concept? Simple. Make the old clothes slacks and a button-down shirt with an old blazer, grab an old beat-up brief or attach case, use office supplies as part of the gory makeup and go as a C O R P O R A T E Z O M B I E !
I’m probably not the first person to think of this, but I’ve never seen anyone else do it before so I’m perfectly willing to claim it as new. Which brings me to the whole point of this (long-winded) entry: What are you dressing up as for Halloween this year?
If I do, it will be a headband with cat ears on it or something equally minor.
Posted on 10/23/2003 at 11:12 AM 
Posted on 03/27/2004 at 08:57 AM 
This sucks. I can get half a dozen people to advertise their damned Cyber-Begging websites in my comments, but not one person wants to share their halloween costume ideas with me.