Well, that was great. It’s been a few years since I’d been able to throw a proper Halloween party — the Fickeweens of yore formed the start of a proud tradition, but without a venue my various skeletons’, giant spiders’ and fog machines’ annual appearance was relegated to a fun-but-sadly-professional office open house.
But Annie and Ezra bought a new place this year and heroically stepped in to fill the void. And we had a great time! I put a bunch of the pictures here; the best are probably the ones I collected from Instagram. Sorry, people who still believe in copyright! Let me know if you’d like me to pull anything down; my interest is just in making sure this stuff gets saved. And if I missed anything that you think I should have here, let me know about that, too.
The quality of costumes was very, very high — I was particularly thrilled by Josh’s obscure Hellboy reference. But there were a ton of great efforts present.
In a departure from my streak of dressing up as supervillains with romantic problems (which, to be fair, is most of them), I went as Mr. Fantastic. I wanted to concentrate on the party, and this was relatively easy to pull off — just (yet another set of) Under Armour and a layer of white duct tape on top of part of my Omni-Man costume.
People did get a kick out of the electroluminescent panel I used for the logo on my chest, though. Like everything else that is good in this world, you can buy this material from Chinese vendors on eBay — it comes in various sizes and colors. Attached to an inverter — which requires a meager 2 AA batteries — it’ll change from a pink to a cool white glow. Pretty neat! You can cut the material down, too, but bear in mind the delicate nature of the foil that makes the electrical connections. Adhesives and solder won’t work — you’re going to need to clamp your connections. I found that paper binder clips did a good job. Conductive paint or glue might work, but I didn’t have any on hand.
An even more important Halloween costume innovation: the duct tape smartphone pocket. Man, what a quality of life improvement. Highly recommended! Add a little adhesive velcro if you really want to class things up.
I made one for myself and one for Steph, too — she put together a great version of Debrie-from-Arrested-Development-as-Sue-Storm, making for what I think was a quite successful (if slightly textually complicated) couples costume.
Anyway! More on this year’s specific decorative efforts in a separate post. For now: many thanks to everyone who came out; to Annie and Ezra for opening their house to this stupid hobby of mine (and buying everyone beer!); and to Steph for putting up with my weird obsessiveness these past few weeks.