Yves

Dave came over last night to help me work on a Halloween costume. I don’t want to spend any money on one this year – in spite of my best-laid plans, the re-siding of my mother’s house, the repointing of part of the brickwork on my house, the replacement of several windows, and my yoga vacation with car trouble all happened at the same time. I considered using all the odds and ends of wrapping paper that I’ve collected over the years and turning myself into a badly wrapped present. I could then offer a special prize to anyone who correctly guessed what I was supposed to be. Or I could just run the brush through my hair several times and be someone having a bad hair day. But how many kids would I scare that way? Dave suggested that I make myself look like a dummy. You may be thinking that this wouldn't require much of an effort, but in fact you would be gravely mistaken. I put on some large black pants and a black sweater and gathered up lots of sheets and towels and pillowcases, and we stuffed the sleeves and pant legs and around my torso until the lumpiness of my body matched my hair. Then I put a black shopping bag over my head. The final touch was my skeleton gloves with the fake blood flowing through the veins. I’ve used these every Halloween since I bought them and they are always a hit. The blood no longer seems to be flowing in one of the gloves, but this only gives it a more skeletal appearance.

The plan was for me to slouch in a chair on the porch. When some adorable but incredibly naïve kids approached they would think I wasn’t a real person because of all the padding, and then when I jumped up it would scare them to death (but hopefully not to the point of falling backwards down the stairs). I wasn’t sure how successful this plan would be since I was too bulky to execute any quick manoeuvres. Although not a solution, I decided that it might be nice to slouch on the porch with a companion, so we created Mr. Dummy. We got my black rubber boots from the basement, put the ends of some black pants in them, used a candelabra for the torso, draped a black sweater over it, and stuffed everything full of t-shirts and whatever other bits of clothing I had that I wasn’t planning to wear before Saturday. Then Dave secured the ends of three wooden spoons and one skewer to the top of the candelabra, wrapped them with three washcloths and a shirt, and pulled a full head mask over the conglomeration. The mask looks like the face in The Scream, with the eyes and mouth painted a phosphorescent green. Unfortunately, it also has funny little ears that detract somewhat from its basic creepiness. So I pulled out a black hat that, while not a beret, nevertheless looks like something that a fashionable creepy lumpy thing might wear in Paris. In case there are any doubts about this, “Chapeau” is written across the front of the hat. We plopped it on Yves. It added a certain je ne sais quoi to his appearance. Instead of merely a creepy lumpy thing, we had a gay-looking creepy lumpy thing (my apologies for perpetuating any stereotypes based on sexual and fashion preferences). And now that the cats have discovered Yves and are trying to befriend him, we have a gay-looking creepy lumpy thing that appears to be in need of a good lint brush. It wasn’t quite the look we set out to achieve, but we were happy with the end result. I hope the kids are too, even the not-so-adorable cynical ones.