By Shelby
True confession: Before last weekend, I hadn’t dressed up for Halloween in a decade. No joke. As a rabid fan of movies, television and pop culture in general, it’s not because I had no interest in pretending to be one of my favorite characters for a few hours. Instead it was more because I am a major craft-o-phobe. What can I say, Halloween was just so much easier when my mom would handle all the dirty work of piecing together a costume for me. It’s probably not a coincidence that the last time I donned a costume I combed through the racks at Goodwill for hours to find the crucial elements. That infamous last costume? Kurt Cobain. Yes, like Cady in Mean Girls, I clearly missed the memo that Halloween is a time for girls to dress up as sexy kittens and bunnies and not dead rock stars.
This year that all changed when one chickster decided to throw a Halloween party and invite some other chicksters and their boytoys. When a couple of chicksters tossed around costume ideas over La Palapa’s tortilla soup, one of the ideas included Kill Bill‘s Gogo Yubari, the mace-wielding schoolgirl/personal bodyguard of O-Ren Ishii. I loved the idea from the get-go. Not only did it give me a chance to subtly bring sexy back to Halloween, but it also gave a little credence to this chickster’s mister, who thinks her eyes make her look like her family is more from Hanoi than Houston. And the costume had been featured on my favorite show of all-time, Gilmore Girls. (If the Kurt Cobain costume didn’t clue you in to the extent of my geekery, I’m betting that last statement just did.)
So what did I need to become Gogo? A wig (check), schoolgirl outfit (easy peasy) and a mace (not so easy). I started with the long black wig, which I found for $15 at Spirit Halloween. Next, a trip to Goodwill yielded a navy blazer, plaid skirt, white Keds and a tie for less than $20. I was afraid the mace would be my downfall. I trolled the aisles of Michael’s, a foreign wilderness to those of us not versed in the language of DIY, and picked up various objects, wondering how someone craftier than I could turn a Styrofoam ball into a deadly weapon.
Finally, a trip to the new Costume World opened up a new realm of possibility when I came across a ball and chain and then a spiked collar. Using a bit of superglue, I attached the collar around the diameter of the ball. Since the chain was only a few inches long (and made of black plastic), I headed to Home Depot and picked up five more feet of real chain for a scant $3. I have to admit that the addition of the real chain really gave the mace some gravitas and had the added bonus of making that awesome swishing sound when I whipped it around.
When I got dressed for the Halloween party, I was pretty excited about my costume. And then I was even more excited when most people actually got who I was and thought it was pretty cool.
But what’s the main lesson I learned from this experience? Always choose a costume that involves a weapon. People don’t care how accurate the costume is, or even who you’re dressed up as, when you’re carrying something shiny that looks like it might kill someone.