Happy Halloween everyone! This holiday got me thinking about the best costumes I ever had. When I was a kid, I loved dressing up. When I got older, I made some of my costumes. So I thought I’d share some of my favorites with you. When I was 5, I was an angel and my little sister was a devil. My costume was made out of a sheet with gold rick-rack trim and gold cardboard wings. I went trick-or-treating with my best friend, Cindy Garfit who dressed as a goldfish. My sister was really small and kept losing her plastic pitchfork along the way. We had to backtrack to find it.
One year, I decided to dress as a bunch of grapes. I dyed a sheet purple, then cut out cardboard circles, glued wadded up newspaper to the front of them, and covered them with pieces of the purple sheet. All of this was stapled together to form a sandwich board-type costume that rested on my shoulders. Apparently, I thought balloons were too easy.
Then there’s the pumpkin costume my mom made me, again from a dyed sheet. I remember the body was stuffed with newspaper, I wore orange tights and had a green posterboard stem hat. I sense a sheet theme here. Guess all my costumes were really sheet-y! Sorry, couldn’t resist.
When I was a senior in high school we all dressed up and paraded around the gym. I was a gangster. I found an old pinstriped suit of my dad’s, wore a hat, and carried a violin case. Not terribly hard, but it was comfortable. In college I was dracula one year. I got a floor-length cape from the theatre department, wore a white tuxedo shirt, black pants and a red scarf around my waist. My hair was really short so I slicked it back and painted it black with this hairspray paint. It was so messy! It took forever to get that crap out of my hair, ears, clothes, room. Still, it was a great costume.
So, what were your favorite costumes? What are you (or your kids) going as this year?
Pretty Pretty Bang Bang 
One year I was a nun and my twin was a priest. I created a Bible out of a cigar box so that when people gave me the candy, I would flip the Bible open to receive it. My brother was going to be the pope, and we were going to make a pope-mobile out of our wagon and pull him around in it, but that didn’t work out.
My Mom also made me the SWEETEST Queen of Hearts costume! It had a big padded behind and was competely authentic looking. Let’s see…my Dorothy costume was awesome, as was my sisters candy corn outfit.
My Mom was Tammy Faye Baker the year of the big scandal. She gooped on tons of eye makeup and made it look like she had been crying. I thought that it was good, but none of the neighbors seemed to get it. They kept asking her if she was OK. I guess that her Edward Scissorhands costume is still the family winner though. My Mom is the coolest!
One of the earlier years here in STL, I went as a group with Hank, Matt, Wade, Jennifer and a couple others — we were the entire cast/crew of Gilligan’s Island and we were AWESOME!! I was Ginger, Jennifer was Lovey Howell, Matt was the Skipper…the rest is a bit fuzzy…if you ‘broke character’ you had to drink. Just for the record, its really hard to speak in that soft, breathy voice of Ginger’s for hours on end! We won some sort of prize for Best Group Costume…I think it was more alcohol. We were nutty!