By Eddie Whitlock
We are the monsters. At least, that’s my goal.
It’s that time of year. It’s my favorite time of year: Halloween.
When I was a little kid, my grandmother called a Halloween mask “a dough face.” I have searched and searched for someone else who used this term, but I have yet to find one. If your family used that expression, I would love to hear more. I suspect that someone up the line actually wore a piece of baked bread as a mask.
And I would appreciate your avoiding references to my lineage as being “in bread.” That’s not even funny.
The first costume I can remember wearing was Huckleberry Hound – an “Okay, Boomer” reference if you’ve ever heard one. A few years later, my friends and I were all going as Barnabas Collins of the gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows.” Six little Barnabi would show up at door after door saying, “Good evening. Trick or treat,” like the proper vampires we were.
I attended UGA in the early 80s. Besides Halloween, there was an event here called “The Galactic Garden Party.” I went twice. I wish I could tell you more about it, but those records are sealed. Maybe someone will contact me with the details I can’t remember.
For the past fifteen years or so here in Athens, we have the Wild Rumpus. Hats off to Timi Conley and the folks who make that happen. Calling it controlled chaos is as close as I can get to a description. It’s fun and it’s friendly. It is absolutely awesome.
My wife Joan and I have our costumes for this year almost ready and are looking forward to the event. We’ll put on our costumes and pretend to be someone – or something – that we are not. It’s a good time.
I am a physically small person. These days – as I shrink in my final years – I’m only about five feet tall.
A few years ago, while I was working at the Athens-Clarke County Library, I told a friend that I wished I could dress up as Frankenstein – my favorite classic monster – but that I was too small. She replied, “You could be ‘Fun Size Frankenstein.’”
It took a few years, but last year, I bought the official Universal Studios latex over-the-head Frankenstein mask. I got the shoddy coat, the dark green turtleneck, and the boots.
I modified the boots, though. I built a fake top over them so that they looked like platform shoes, but my feet went all the way to the bottom. The effect was to make me look even shorter.
I took fluorescent green felt and spelled out “FUN SIZE FRANKENSTEIN” on the back of the shoddy coat.
Joan dressed as The Bride, with a wig fashioned over an Easter basket and a white wedding gown. She looked great.
She was recovering from orthopedic surgery, so we didn’t walk very far in the Wild Rumpus, but we did spend several hours milling about in the cool, weird crowd that gathered downtown.
For the purists who are fuming over my references to the creature as “Frankenstein,” settle down. I know that Frankenstein was the name of the doctor who dared the gods by creating life. The poor creature is sometimes called “Frankenstein’s monster,” a name I find more demeaning than calling him by his dad’s name.
The creature didn’t have a name, though at one point in the novel he suggests being called “Adam,” after the Biblical first man.
Mary Shelley deserves major credit for inventing the science fiction novel with her book Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus. Her work preceded that of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. There were works that might be called speculative fiction before Frankenstein, but I think hers is the novel that establishes the genre.
As tempting as it is to repeat our costumes from last year, Joan and I are planning to modify our costumes from 2020 for this year’s Rumpus.
My daughter – her father’s child – chose Halloween 2020 for her wedding day. Only a handful of us attended because of Covid precautions, but we attended in costume. It was the best wedding ever. Last year, my daughter and her wife and their child sent us a photo of them dressed as Morticia, Gomez, and Pubert Addams. I raised that child right!
I have a couple of other costumes in my closet from earlier years. One is from 2017, the year I was “Dr. Ben Dover, proctologist.” I handed out business cards that referenced Donald Trump. I won’t go into details.
The other costume I hung onto is for “The Headless Horseman.” As a really short person, that costume works because my height – or lack thereof – adds to the illusion of my being headless.
I wore that costume one year while I worked at the library. That was the year my friend Mamie Fike honored me by dressing up as me for Halloween. She wore a Hawaiian shirt – my attire before the Proud Boys adopted it – a funky fedora, and fake facial hair. I have to admit that it worked.
The idea of taking on a different identity through a costume or a mask is allegedly based on primitive beliefs in spirits and the desire either to scare them away or to commune with them. I’m open to a different idea on that.
There may have been primitive priests who established their places in society by leading the fight against unseen enemies. It had to be an easier gig than fighting off real enemies.
And I’m pretty sure those early societies had – brace yourself – a few folks who indulged in shenanigans, hijinks, and folderol. I imagine a couple of those primitive people got together and put on costumes and masks just to scare the hell out of the primitive priest.
Can you imagine the look on his face when he was suddenly confronted with the actual incarnation of the imaginary villains he had preached about? Then the jokesters take off their masks, making the priest and his tales look foolish.
Religion, though, is wonderfully malleable. Those priestsimmediately absorbed the costumes and masks and said that wearing them was a good way to ward off the real spirits that no one had ever actually seen.
Being killjoys at heart, though, the priests said the fun ought to be limited to one day a year. Otherwise, they risked having the hell scared out of themselves all the time.
Inventing a day to celebrate the dead people in Heaven to be held the day after the really fun dress-up day just worked. Religion is always open to more excuses to require the worship of the unseen.
For me, I enjoy making myself into something I’m not. I am not intimidating, not at all. If I can make a costume that creeps people out just a little bit, I’ve done what I set out to do.Happy Halloween!
Eddie Whitlock is a Georgia native, a graduate of UGA, and wannabe writer. He retired in 2021 from the Athens-Clarke County Library where he worked as coordinator of volunteers, community service supervisor, and vending machine scapegoat.
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