Beneath Each Costume

Halloween is around the corner, and I got to thinking about costumes past, not only in terms of taking stock, but in thinking about what those costumes meant or how I came to them.

In one of the earliest photos I have of myself, I'm dressed like a baseball player. It's a costume I was too young to have self-selected, and from thirty-something years' hindsight, the choice seems particularly off for never having liked watching the game, and having been absolutely terrible at most aspects of playing it.

When I was around five or six, I dressed as Skeletor. This was, most obviously, an expression of my enjoyment for He-Man, the cartoon for which Skeletor played the lead villain, though I like to think that the choice of this costume also foretold an interest in subversion and empathizing with villains who, after all, must have their reasons.

Not long after, I dressed up as Steve Urkel from Family Matters. Mercifully, I didn’t make any attempt at blackface—just sunglass frames, suspenders, and a button up shirt. I remember taking pride in being ahead of the curve on this costume, at the point when Urkel was popular, but still a fringe character on the show, before he would by most measures become the focal point of the program and so many kids would dress up as him the year following.

I dressed as Darkwing Duck, in obvious reverence to the cartoon and comic books, and what may have been my mother’s greatest costume design feat for covering a sombrero in gray fabric to approximate his hat, and fashioning a card stock beak. For my part, there was a sensation of hero worship—of a unique costume to embody a relatively esoteric character, even at his peak popularity.

I dressed as The Phantom of the Opera, which I stand by as a costume ahead of its time for a late elementary school or middle school kid—whichever I was, though if I am to be entirely honest, this concept had at least as much to do with my sister playing the show's soundtrack on repeat and coming to love it myself for that, as was not so unusual for my musical acquisition those years.

In poor taste, and in less an attention to than a oblivious indifference to current events, I spent a series of years dressed as The Unabomber. It was a costume of convenience, born out of recognizing how easy a hooded jacket and sunglasses was to replicate in a topical costume for those teenage years of trick or treating.

Neo from The Matrix was next—another costume of topical convenience once I recognized my passing resemblance to Keanu Reeves—at least as far as black hair and lean build could get me. I wore my pea coat with black clothes and sunglasses and called it a day. I don’t know that I would have embraced the costume were it not also representative of how close to home The Matrix hit for me, accessing dystopian ideas I hadn’t considered yet, not to mention that early discussion offered by Carrie Anne Moss about hours wasted online, searching for meaning—a dynamic my generation was just discovering as the Internet moved into every home and dorm room.

There was dressing up as Ferris Bueller, years after college, as simple as special ordering a leopard-print vest like the movie character’s, representative of having the disposable income to do so on a whim, and all the more so a love affair with The Legwarmers—a DC-based eighties cover band that I must have seen nearly twenty times during my years living in Baltimore. I attended their Halloween night show in this costume.

The was the year of the Dharma Initiative uniform—a costume that may have come across as a little hackneyed were it not the case that I caught up on Lost as the very first show I streamed on Netflix around 2010-2011, after the show had completed its six season run and thus hitting a sweet spot after the fad had settled, before the show faded closer to irrelevance. My girlfriend at the time joined me in dressing in Khaki with copy paper Dharma initiative badges pinned over our chests. She’d never seen an episode of the show, which, in retrospect was a bit emblematic of where the relationship was—both in her sort of blindly following my lead, but also, to be fair, being a good team player.

In a year when I otherwise didn’t dress up, I painted my face white with dark circles around my eyes and blood dribbling from my mouth—some sort of ill-defined zombie/ghoul to volunteer at a kids’ haunted house, lurching around a back room for one of the last scares.

I was an Angry Bird--a punny costume I’m still proud of, though hardly anyone understood what I was going for. I worry a Larry Bird Celtics jersey and fake yellow eyebrows, slanted downward as if in anger.

And then I was Jim Hopper, the weary sheriff from Stranger Things who (spoilers) lost a daughter, but made good on saving the kids, if not the entire fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana more than once. Heather and I were supposed to make it out to a Halloween party, but after a long work week, and while we were expecting, we struggled to muster the energy. We had a Stranger Things-themed baby shower, though, and so the costume nonetheless had its day. I thought it fit right, dressed not as an ideal father figure, necessarily, but a well-meaning one, and perhaps a better father in the far-reaching abstract than he’d ever been in a more literal sense.

Most of us have donned our share of different Halloween costumes throughout our lives, and I can’t claim to have had the most ambitious or best executed catalog across these years. Beneath each costume are our identities, though—the pop culture, jokes, or legitimate scares we choose to represent, and what resources we have to realize a vision. Food for thought as another October nears its end.