The Harbinger

Pale face, vacant stare, shifting, jerky gait, covered in the debris of the day. This is being a zombie. I am a costumer and attend many conventions where I dress up as all types of different characters. What is the appeal of dressing in a costume? For some, it’s done in celebration of a holiday or event. For others, it’s a mix of pride in showing off their body or their acting or costuming skills. But under it all is the same reason - bald-faced escapism. Most people are limited in this form of escapism to one day of the year, Halloween.

Halloween started initially as a celebration for the end of harvest by Ancient Gaels. They believed on October 31^st the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead overlapped and the dead would come back to life and raise hell for the living. So they’d put on masks and costumes to scare away the evil spirits. In a sense, dressing up today is the same in that we put on masks and costumes in hopes of scaring away the evil of a life of redundancy, monotony and Puritanism.

So many people have a need to act out against the conformity of society by stepping outside of the norm and being a little different, even if only for a night. So they put on a costume and run out in the world, feeling daring and different. Am I the only one struck by the tragedy of mega stores like Spirit Halloween that sell mass-manufactured, cheap costumes that fall into a select number of categories; turning out armies of sexy tramps, pirates and Jedi? Brings up the age old debate of non-conformists becoming conformists as the conformists become non-conformists, etc…or something…

My escapism is above all of that, of course, because I design and make all of my costumes. So just because I am one of 200 zombies lumbering down the street, I am a non-conformist because no one else’s zombie looks like mine. Dressing as a movie character is acceptable in my world if the quality and workmanship of the costume is “movie quality” or better vs. the cheap, synthetic polyester crap sold in stores. “Wait, how can there be “better than movie quality,” you ask? Have you ever seen some of this stuff up close? Its plastic pieces and hot glue. The Original Series Klingon belt buckle is painted bubble wrap! I would never wear something like that! And it was on TV or in a movie!

For me, costuming is a love and passion. I have a job in IT, where I help design software applications. There are rules and even worse, red tape that hangs over my head, much like anyone else, forcing me to design in standard formats, or to even feel the weight of the uselessness of my work when a project gets stuck in a spiral between management and clients who have different ideas of what they want and neither can see the other side. It can be a wasteland from the drought of creativity. To create is something I must do. It brings me peace and a sense of self-worth and accomplishment to take an idea, sketch it out, shop for just the right materials, sew them and fit them until I stand there dressed in the idea I started with. As I grow my sewing skills, I have expanded into additional costuming avenues, like makeup and prosthetics. I love taking liquid latex, tissue and a color makeup pallet and making rotting corpse flesh or open wounds.

So I cut and paint and sew and craft to feed the part of my soul that needs to do something different and interesting. After all, no one on the street wants to stop and take my picture…until I am in costume and come alive. I get to be who I want to be in costume- creative, different, confident and even hot.

A horn blares, and I jump with a startled yelp and look around. Pale face, vacant stare, shifting jerky gait, covered in the debris of the day… I am a zombie, but I am sitting in rush hour traffic in my car… is this escapism?

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