DAY 7
February 8
Prompt: "Halloween 2009 and 2010."
In honor of the fact that this is AWT's 100th post, I'm doing a double-prompt today: Halloween 2009, my junior year, and Halloween 2010, my senior year. Two awesome nights...but two very different nights.
2009:
I went as the Joker and hung out with the Scooby-Doo gang (a.k.a. a group of very, VERY cool theater majors, two of whom I didn't even know by name until that night). Many, many pictures were taken. Energy drinks were consumed...not by me though; I hate energy drinks, I don't know why. Maybe the smell. Anyway...
So first, I went to an open room with Zac, Andrew, Shelby, Lindsay, and Yaron to get ready. This involved them getting into their Scooby gang costumes, while I put on my Joker makeup. I remember a lot of jostling and mirror-hogging in the bathroom that night. I think the boys might've tried to help me with the Joker scars...I don't remember.
But I do remember running into so many awesome, awesome people on the way...you see, we'd all been quarantined since the beginning of October, due to some illness scares in Traverse City, so that kind of forced people to get creative. I ran into a Snuggie, a nun, G-Sus (G-sustained...he was a composition major...it's a long story), Adam & Eve, a bride, Marla Singer, a few Greek and Roman goddesses, a gladiator, some vampires, a pirate chick, a few cats, a cross-dresser (several cross-dressers, actually), a geisha, a starving artist, some dolls, a panda, and a dude in a bathrobe. And that was just while we were trick-or-treating!
Once we'd sufficiently frozen ourselves to the bones (it was COLD--remember, this is Northern Michigan at night in October), we went back to the girls' room to warm up before the Halloween dance. (This was where the consumption of energy drinks took place.) Then it was off to Fine Arts, the go-to building for dances. This was before it was renovated, back in the lovely days of the sketchy loft and icky floors and not much room and tiny, tiny, TINY bathrooms. So imagine that, okay? And then picture about 200 kids crammed inside. Hormonal, sugar-high kids, to be precise, half of them more than halfway out of there costumes. Can you imagine how ridiculously hot it was in there?
So, I'm having a good time with my friends, dancing away, being amused by Erica (dressed as, and I quote, "a Catholic girl from Manchester who just lost her Bible"), and then something truly awesome happened.
Two gay boys (remember, people, this is Interlochen) climb into the loft, one of them a theater major dressed in a Little Black Dress and heels, the other a dance major wearing a skirt made out of Bosco Stick wrappers stapled to a pair of spandex shorts. They proceed to put on a little mini-show for us, dancing like goofballs and trying to stir up the crowd. They get told to back off after an entirely too short time (curse you, Interlochen chaperones!) but if you ask me what I remember most about Halloween 2009, that is DEFINITELY it.
2010:
Halloweekend starts the night before Halloween: Saturday, October 30, 2010. (Remember, non-Inty graduates, our school weeks used to run Tuesday-Saturday.) I was shaking partly from fear, partly from cold--it was less than tropical in the warehouse-like building I was currently inside of, and I was wearing a little red dress and sheer red scarf, playing the part of a vampire victim in a haunted house.
Yes, you read that right. I, the Queen of Being Scared Shitless, was willingly participating in a haunted house.
What possessed me to do this? I have no idea. I just know that I heard myself volunteer at that meeting with the Student Activities group, not wanting to be left out of the fun, and the next thing I knew, I was "chained" to an old-fashioned dining room chair, sitting in a freezing-cold warehouse at 8:00 PM on a cold October night, with eerie music playing and screams all around me. I was as terrified as I would be if I had to actually walk through the haunted house (my one consolation now was that I couldn't really see what was going on around me; I was separated from the other "acts" by a big black curtain). My "vampire" was really a close friend, Bonnie, who kept me warm between scares by hugging me (always my preferred method). I was a nervous wreck and kept asking why in the HELL I'd agreed to this until the Haunted Trail event actually began, and we got our first group of already-freaked-out people, ready and waiting to be scared...
I screamed.
I mean I SCREAMED. I was already wired, and the cold did not help, and I was as scared as the people walking through the trail, and when I heard footsteps, I let loose. Bonnie popped out from behind what I think was just this big, black crate, and came over to "suck my blood" before creeping on the kids (who, by that point, were also freaking out).
And then it was over, and our first group was gone. And you know what? I wasn't scared anymore. That was fun. It was like acting again...and my God, I didn't realize how much I missed acting. I wasn't me, the scaredy-cat, anymore. I was a vampire victim. I was the scarer, instead of the scare-ee.
I felt like a bamf.
Aside from the freezing cold, the Haunted Trail was a success. But it was just the beginning. Halloweekend continued on Sunday...kicked off by a lovely sleet storm...and, of course, during this storm, I was wearing a poodle skirt and saddle shoes, because we'd all agreed to wear our costumes during the day as well as for trick-or-treating. (Interlochen kids, for those of you who don't know, trick-or-treat at faculty housing every year.)
I didn't watch the horror movie that they showed in DeRoy that day. I just hung out in the library with lovely-as-ever Mishka (a.k.a. Mrs. Lovett) and Gustavo (a.k.a. Freddy Krueger). Oh, and I helped Ellie (who ended up going as Sweeney Todd) with her costume. That was fun. Oh, and I kept getting the crap scared out of me by Gustavo and his LOVELY Freddy mask...that was fun... *raises sarcasm hand*
I remember very little about the actual trick-or-treating. I remember that I stuck close to Thomas the whole time, because I was afraid of getting left behind. I remember Ms. Tye, my screenwriting teacher, dressed up as a zombie (which was AWESOME). I remember that it was cold--like, really cold--but this didn't phase Mishka at all; she went around the whole night in that sleeveless dress like a pro, while the rest of us shivered. I also remember that Gustavo spent more time trying to torment Mishka and the other girls than he did with his Hindu-God-consistently-mistaken-for-Smurf-or-Blue-Man-Group boyfriend (his costume was literally blue body pain...it was awesome), which I didn't mind one bit, because it left me someone to cling to and cuddle with. (Oh, the fun of having gay best friends.)
As for the dance...well, it sucked. I'll just be blunt: it sucked. I don't even remember who the DJ was. I remember that at one point the music cut out and a bunch of lights came on from nowhere...that was just weird...but what happened concerning NaNoWriMo was so much more important that I pretty much just forgot about the damn dance.
Ah, NaNoWriMo. Interlochen Gold. If you were part of the Dead Poet group, and you DIDN'T participate in NaNo, what was wrong with you?! If you did, you subjected yourself to a month of sleeplessness, energy drinks, sugar highs, coffee, dropping grades, diminishing sanity, and writer lectures (Emily and Mishka usually gave the best ones, just for the record.) Everyone really was crazy for NaNoWriMo; you might as well jump on the bandwagon. No use arguing; save your energy for writing.
So that year on Halloween, I became initiated into my first-ever NaNo celebration. We planned out a trip for the next day, so we could stock up on sugar and caffeine for the upcoming insanity. Then we planned to start writing at midnight and keep writing as long as we could, and then meet at noon the next day to show each other what we'd written.
And the resulting trip, the next day, was even better...but that's another story for another blog post. ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment