Prescript: I don’t have any photos; maybe later. In the meantime, let your imagination run wild.
Halloween party extravaganza tonight at Kelly’s, jointly hosted by her, Megan and Vincent. Our Guests dressed, respectively as Buster Keaton, Calvin and Hobbes. You cannot deny the cuteness of Calvin and Hobbes as a couples costume but next year I hope Megan and Vincent take me up on my original suggestion that they dress as Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth. Assassinations all night long, baby!
Andie dressed as a cowgirl. Her boots were too small and she got a blister, but as a cowgirl will, she brought homemade salsa that was the hit of the food spread.
Katie dressed as a tornado. She had tried to affix miniature toy people, trees and cars to her circumference of billowy gauze but they wouldn’t stick. If she’d done it, more people would have guessed tornado instead of “cloud” as I had. Andie had suggested to me a week prior that Katie would be dressing as “a literary figure,” but that information was dated. When Katie blew in the door to the party, at first I wondered: Is she Virginia Woolf’s depression? One of Mark Twain’s eyebrows? “Postmodernism?”
My costume, an extension of my Coen Bros.’ outfit from last Halloween, was H.I. McDunnough, Nicolas Cage’s character from the Coen’s 1987 classic, Raising Arizona, specifically the scene in which he steals a pack of Huggies. About half the people at the party guessed it correctly. Many had rusty recollections or were just wrong. Katie at first thought I was a pirate, which is fair enough for me thinking that she was a cloud or depression.
The best praise came late in the evening. I had volunteered for a beer-run after the fridge became bottleless and it is inadvisable to venture onto the streets of New York with a panty on one’s head, so I removed that, the wig and moustache and left my Huggies behind. I also put my glasses back on; I can’t see jack without them but I was striving for authenticity and had them removed for most of the night.
When I returned with the beer, a new couple had arrived to the party: the woman was dressed in a modern-day Southern Belle ball gown, satiny and emerald green, curly blonde hair and high heels. Which was not interesting. What was interesting was that her tall, big-shouldered boyfriend was squeezed into a practically identical dress, shoes, blonde wig, makeup over stubble. Before even introducing himself, he flat out said, “That’s the best H.I. costume I’ve ever seen.” (I have to imagine it was the only H.I. costume he’d ever seen, but I understood his point.)
I told him his perception was amazing because I was wearing only half the costume.
“It’s the shoes, the shirt, the whole getup,” he said, adding he’d seen the movie “about 90 times” and that he kept trying to get his girlfriend to watch it, which he took the liberty to point out to her, again. (“I know, I know!” she said, with exasperation.)
Costume Ingredients List
- Vintage ’80s striped shirt. $10 from RustyZipper.com. The one in the movie is knit but I couldn’t find one in that material. The chocolate brown, white and tan color scheme on the shirt I bought is similar, although the material is polyester/nylon.
- Vintage Lacoste jacket. Something I’d not noticed until freeze-framing the DVD: the wee alligator logo on H.I.’s jacket. Imagine my surprise when I found the exact model jacket at Rags-A-Gogo on 14th Street.
- Pants. Straight Fit Gavin Chinos in off-white, on sale from Banana Republic. Nice to have at least one costume element that I can wear as everyday clothing, or at least pre-Labor Day clothing.
- Shoes. My favorite part of the costume: vintage white-weave Towncraft loafers, size 10 1/2. (There’s a brief scene in Raising Arizona of H.I. slipping on a nearly identical pair with a shoehorn then checking them in a mirror.) I bought them unchallenged on eBay for $5.99 from a woman named Natalie in Sioux Falls, South Dakota who described them as "very unique and classy."
- Tan dress socks. My own.
- Wig from New York’s finest cosmetics/costume-shop chain, Ricky’s. In the movie, H.I.’s longish brown hair juts out in the back from under the pantyhose. I cut the brim off an old fitted baseball cap, duct-taped a swath of hair from the wig to hang from the back of the cap, then wore the cap with the panty hose concealing it. Which I think worked well.
- Fake moustache. From one of those here-today, gone-tomorrow Halloween stores, Party City of Manhattan on 14th Street. In retrospect, I should have grown my own as the ladies suggested. When I trimmed this one, it got Hitlerish.
- Pantyhose and a pack Huggies diapers from CVS/Pharmacy.
- Belt. I didn’t allow enough time to get one like H.I.’s, cloth with horizontal colored pinstripes, light brown leather ends and brass-plated buckle. “No one’s going to notice that!” someone had told me earlier. Not everyone understands my recent passion for Halloween costumes. Earlier this month, the L.A. Times published an article (“’Darjeeling Limited’s’ Style Infusion” by Monica Corcoran) on Wes Anderson’s obsession with style and costumes that concluded with a quote by him: “When I was a kid and went to a movie, I might come out of the theater and want to be one of the characters. The first thing I did was try to get the costume right.” I hear ya, Wes.
Postscript, Mon., Oct. 29, 2007: Email excerpt from Kelly: “I just wanted to let you know, in case you were planning on dressing up again, that you left your Huggies in my bedroom. Which is something I’d never thought I’d say.”