We thought it might be fun if Team Experience shared a few of our favourite Halloween memories with you.
by Nathaniel R
Some years ago I quit Halloween. It wasn't for lack of loving the holiday (have pumpkin patch sized love for it!) but for personal sanity. Favourite costumes over the years included Pinnochio, Peter Pan, Glinda the Good Witch (with my ex as The Wicked Witch and my best friend as The Tin Man, pictured left), Medusa (with an elaborate snake wig), and Mr Green in a group Clue costume. Letting Halloween go wasn't quite a cold turkey move but I knew I had a problem.
To surely every therapist's delight, the problem came from childhood...
Growing up my mother would make matching costumes for all four kids in our family (I'm the baby). One year we were aliens. Another sunflowers. Etcetera. It was never as simple as ghosts, or some such. Our church would hold a party and there'd be a 'best family costume prize'. We kept losing to the Snow family. My mother was super competitive about it and was very upset one year when they'd repurposed their bumblebee costumes from the year prior into spiders and won again. To my wee eyes they were impressively constructed but she was inconsolable. She'd made everything from scratch laboriously. Again.
This rubbed off on me.
To this day I've never bought a Halloween costume but fretted over the construction of one with zero sewing skills. Go shopping. Buy plentiful accessories. Procure glue guns and makeup. Monkey with it obsessively. This kept escalating until the mid-Aughts. But the warning sign was surely one week in 1997 when preparing an Uma Thurman / Poison Ivy lewk. By Halloween night I was as nuts as Dr Pamela Isley.
Nathaniel as Uma as Poison Ivy in the late 90s...
I bought a dark green leotard and matching tights. Found women's sandals with huge blocky heels which I spray painted green. The red fright wing was cheap enough but it was finished it off with an insane amount of $$$ spent at a craft store on decorative foliage and berries and what have you. Creating the hair horns for the wig was a nightmare so traumatic that I've blacked out all recollection of how I accomplished it, only remembering that I spent the entire evening worrying that they'd fall off or unravel (which they're already doing in that photo!).
The double eyebrow, long before drag queens were always upping the ante with creative face-painting, was inspired by one specific look in the film because I didn't know how to manage the more famous arched leaf eyebrows.
To my horror a professional drag queen at the local bar also came as Poison Ivy that night. To her horror my costume was better. Throught the night I tried to work in Uma's campy lines from Batman and Robin (1997) while awkwardly flirting with drunk gays. Turns out Akiva Goldsman dialogue must never be uttered without delusional movie star confidence! But the look itself was a hit. I'd dedicate this night's particular costume win to my mom, but she wouldn't have approved of any such condragulations.
Have you ever been a super villain for Halloween?
More Fav Halloween Costumes from Team Experience: