This is a reboot of a blog post I wrote in 2015, and I had so much fun re-reading it, I just had to share! Next week, I’ll pick up where this leaves off (2015) and bring you up to date on my Halloween costumes over the subsequent years to present day…
Halloween Rocks
The first year I remember dressing up for Halloween was when I was nine. I had just discovered comic books—not like Betty & Veronica, but the X-Men and Avengers, and all the short-lived female spin-offs like Spider-Woman and She-Hulk, where super-strong, beautiful genetic mutants dressed like Solid Gold dancers and flew around fighting each other—and in the case of Marvel, spent the rest of their time in unrequited love triangles, or moping about how much it sucked to have amazing super-powers.
My favorite character by far, and my gateway drug into the Marvel Universe, was Dazzler, a struggling nightclub singer who could turn sound into light, like an atomic-powered disco ball. The plot lines generally were cribbed in equal measure from similar female heroines (like Supergirl and Spider-Woman but definitely not Wonder Woman) and romance comics like Katy Keene.
So, e.g., she’d be on a date at the beginning of an issue and some random super-villain like Doctor Octopus or Galactus would attack nearby and she would realize there are no other mutants in all of New York right now, so it’s up to her to save everyone in the roller rink, shopping center, gym or whatever.
There was usually a guest star like Spider-Man, Silver Surfer, or Dr. Strange and anyway, I’m not saying it was good. Nothing that nine-year old girls like is actually good, but we usually grow out of it... and sometimes the times come back around to show that we were right all along to love it, and then we revisit it decades later with a way better costume.
Halloween 1983 and 2001: Dazzler
I started making these ridiculous little avatar things for my Halloween costumes on a long-defunct avatar creator website when I originally posted about this back in 2015. The clothing options were seriously limited but after a few tries, that became the challenge… Can I use this primitive graphics tool to adequately represent the first three decades of my Halloween costumes past?
Yes, the answer of course, is yes…
1985: Marilyn Monroe
To say I was obsessed with Marilyn in my formative years would be a drastic understatement. I collected books, postcards, 6’ tall door-sized posters, calendars and all manner of other kitsch in my pursuit of the worship of Marilyn.
From around age eight to 13, my bedroom was like a shrine to the platinum blonde goddess. When I sketched absently in the margins of my math homework or drew at home, it was always Marilyn. Her caricature-ized features were so easily recognizable with just a swoop of hair, lips, pointy eyebrows and a beauty mark.
I wanted to bleach my hair so badly, but my mother wouldn’t let me (she was, let’s say, an “ally” to my obsessions, but she wasn’t crazy), so I did what any properly obsessed 11-year old on a budget would do, and scoured the thrift stores until I found a short, whitish-grey old lady wig that could almost (but not quite) pass for platinum blonde.
The rest of the costume basically made itself; black dress, black heels, white fake fur coat that I already had for some reason (because of course I did!), and the signature makeup that I could have drawn in my sleep.
1986: Cleopatra
This was long before the Internet, before the Discovery channel with its endless epics about ancient Egypt, so I’m not sure where my inspiration came from. It might’ve been a network TV broadcast of the Liz Taylor epic, at best, or maybe it was the Scarlet O’Patra version with Vivian Leigh, but I suspect the origin was dodgier than that…
Maybe it was a shampoo ad in Cosmopolitan or the enticing box cover of some B-movie glimpsed at the video store but never actually rented because my mother would have (quite rightly) identified it as “trash.”
Either way, my approach to the iconic queen of the Nile was no worse than any other teenage white girl’s… To me, the costume was not about the complicated gold headdress or yards of satin drapery—it was about lots of eyeliner and, because I’ve got the coolest mother in the universe—temporarily dying my ash-blonde hair jet black.
Oh, and an array of cheap costume jewelry like chokers, bracelets, and those cool snakey-armband things. For some reason, my adolescent brain equated armbands with uber-female awesomeness and I would dearly love to have a footnote for the exact moment that indelible association was created. (It was probably an episode of Fantasy Island.)
1987: Nancy Wilson from Heart
This costume wasn’t technically—or at least not exclusively—for Halloween but rather a series of lip sync contests at the Seattle Center, which used to be the site of a very cheesy amusement park and a cavernous indoor food fair where my friend and I would enter these contests on the first weekend of every month, doing Heart songs from their “glam rock Barbie” period—and rather brilliantly, I might add.
We were a crowd favorite. I had a totally realistic-looking guitar made of cardboard with strings made from fishing line, and she had an inflatable keyboard. We both wore great big 80s wigs and tons of makeup, and we really meant it. We kicked ass.
We came back month after month, doing all of Heart’s big late-80s hits; “Never,”
”What About Love,” “Alone,” etc…
It was fun until our fourth performance when the MC, an attractive girl in her mid-20s, took us aside after the show and gave us this intense lecture about how we were “too sexy.” She kept trying to make it seem like she was being friendly, like we were all girlfriends or something. She told us it would be totally appropriate if we were in a night club, but this is a family place, you know?
At which point I had to laugh out loud and tell her we were 13. No, that would not, in fact, be appropriate at all... Actually, maybe it was my mother who said that to her. I think, at that point, I was beyond putting intelligible words together and my mother had to intervene.
These days there are anti-bullying mandates and common sense about not slut-shaming children to prevent grown women from telling 13-year olds how sexy they are, but this was the ‘80s. She could have given us crack or indoctrinated us into the Church of Scientology, and no one would have batted an eye. (For the record, you fucking cow, don’t tell 13-year old girls they’re too sexy. We remember that shit forever! I hope her kids are in jail.)
1988: Cyndi Lauper
When “True Colors” came out in 1987, the video for it’s most anthemic track, “Change of Heart” was on MTV around the clock. (For the young, that’s how we discovered new music back then. We kept MTV on all the time, which was the only way to be sure you wouldn’t miss it when they played your favorite song. Our parents would tell us to “go play outside,” but eventually they all gave in and hooked up cable in our rooms.)
If a song got really popular, the powers-that-be would put them on “heavy rotation” (or “power rotation”), meaning the VJs were required to play it 16 times per week during peak hours, which meant after school and weekends.
“World Premiere” videos (while semantically suggestive of a single event, a song typically “premiered” over a long weekend) might be played every hour on the hour, like when Prince’s “Raspberry Beret” premiered and by Monday only the most passionate Prince fans could stand it anymore.
Often you would wait for hours and hours for your favorite song to play (it wasn’t like you could call Nina Blackwood and request it like it was a radio station). Other times you wished that Guns ‘n’ Roses would just buy their own Bizarro World MTV station so you could enjoy yours without “Welcome to the Jungle” playing every 10 goddamn minutes.
Anyway, the ‘80s were a great time to be an adolescent girl because the fashion icons were none other than Cyndi Lauper and Madonna, which gave us license to wear just about anything (or everything at the same time) and nobody cared, except of course for the designated MC of the lip-sync contest at the Seattle Center, because who else will speak for the children?
1989: Vasquez from Aliens
My parents decided to pick up and move us from Seattle to Charlottesville, VA in August of 1988. We arrived just in time for my first day of school at a small, hippie enclave in the hills, in a repurposed plantation house practically next-door neighbors to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
Compared to my old school in Seattle, it felt like a fashion-free zone, utterly devoid of goths, glam rockers, new wavers or wanna-bes of anything recognizable. The two identifiable tribes were second-generation granola (with hippie names even weirder than mine) and farmers (who were no joke two generations removed from slave owners).
Unspoken peer pressure and unbearable humidity conspired against all my beauty rituals, and I soon gave up wrapping my hair in perm rods every night and scrunching a golf ball of mousse into into it every morning to achieve Bon Jovi-style tendrils that audibly crunched when you touched them.
My crimping iron was also rendered utterly useless by similar factors. One day a girl who was probably just trying to make polite conversation with the new girl surveyed my below-shoulder-length crimped hair and asked in a southern drawl, “Doesn’t it take you forever to do that every day??”
No, of course not. Not really, I muttered, and then probably had to excuse myself because it had started to rain and my “low-maintenance” crimped hair would be straight within minutes if I stayed outside.
I have no memory of Halloween 1988, but it didn’t involve a costume, so I’m pretty sure I spent it torturing my parents, sulking around in a malaise of teen angst, bemoaning the loss of my cool west coast friends and whining about how much I hated the entire eastern seaboard.
By my second year in Virginia, I had almost stopped wearing makeup altogether and I had the second-shortest haircut of my life (the shortest ever was a few years earlier as the direct result of my Summer of Sun-In. If you know, you know!). I had set aside, at least temporarily, my lifelong fear of not looking “like a girl,” just long enough to go full Colonial Marines for Halloween 1989.
“Hey Vasquez... have you ever been mistaken for a man?”
“No... Have you?”
1990: Sinead O’Connor
This outfit consisted of black pants, a black turtleneck and black trench coat, all plucked from my regular clothing rotation. The only thing that made it a “costume” was the “Daddy Warbucks” bald wig from the toy store, which sat on top of my slicked back, shoulder-length permed hair looking more like a reservoir-tipped condom than a shaved head.
At least, I figured, I was putting in more effort than my boyfriend at the time, who still hadn’t decided what he was going to wear by the end of the school day…
When he arrived at my house that evening to get ready for the Halloween party, I was just about to launch into a rant about his lack of effort, when he ducked into the bathroom and shut the door, leaving my grandmother and I to wonder what the hell he was doing in there for the next 10 minutes.
When he emerged, he was wearing my black Joan Jett wig (yes, I’ve always had a wardrobe of wigs…). He had turned it around 180 degrees so the short spiky bangs were in the back and the long-in-the-back part was flopping around madly in front of his face. He had also applied a bold streak of fire engine-red lipstick, making him the spitting image of Robert Smith. No notes. It was 100% the perfect costume.
Nobody had to ask—and nobody, for the rest of the evening, paid the slightest bit of attention to what I was wearing, which was just as well. Reservoir-tipped condoms are among the ugliest things you can wear, at the best of times (i.e., in the heat of passion) and they go sharply downhill from there.
1991: Ariel/The Little Mermaid
My first year in college was at an art school known all over Baltimore for having some of the best, most creative Halloween parties you’ll ever see. People started preparing during student Orientation, in the first week of September.
My hair was shoulder-length again and over the last summer I spent in Virginia, a fantastic hairstylist had introduced me to the miracle of spiral perm rods (and thus began a decades-long love affair with spiral curls).
The hair salon nearest to the art school offered students an insane discount on all services every Monday, which ensured they had a steady business through the winter and an ever-changing roster of aesthetically adventurous clients.
The week before Halloween, I dyed my hair Jessica Rabbit red, but I couldn’t figure out an appropriately inappropriate dress—and I didn’t yet have my Rodger—so I went for the second-best red-haired cartoon character, the little mermaid.
1992: Madonna
Art school does funny things to people. Some take up smoking clove cigarettes, others try drugs. Most of them dye their hair—or shave their heads—or pierce unmentionables. In my class, a statistically improbable number of girls suddenly wanted to be called “Zoe.” Many came out of the closet (and a few went right back in after graduation).
Many art students come away with a lifelong inability to justify spending money on things like framing pictures and, yes, buying Halloween costumes. Many are compelled to lower their inhibitions and abandon false modesty, to seek out the attention of others and reciprocate it with genuine interest and curiosity of their own...
Me? I checked almost all of those boxes, except the smoking and Zoe stuff…
The same year that Madonna put out a $100 coffee table book called “Sex,” I celebrated my second Halloween at art school by wearing a short platinum blonde wig, knee-high platform boots, hot pants and a black leather halter top purchased at a sex shop (for a quarter of the price of the Sex book).
I made an entrance at the party arm-in-arm with a famous local drag queen named “Miss Piss,” who was also dressed as Madonna, with homemade breast-cones and a long blonde ponytail. We blew kisses from the landing of the marble staircase and tossed condoms and red AIDS awareness ribbons into the crowd, courtesy of the school’s free health clinic.
1995: Sexy Vampire (’Nuff said.)
1996: Barb Wire
The best thing about this costume is that no blonde wig is too cheap to adequately capture the essential quality you’re trying to convey. In some ways, this is everything you want in a Halloween costume: over-the-top glamour, instantly recognizable (especially with the “barbed wire” armbands) and weapons.
Pamela Anderson was my mid-90s platinum blonde obsession, picking up where Barbie and Marilyn left off. I had calendars of her, and all her Playboy issues, and I non-ironically went to see “Barb Wire” in the theater… alone, because no one would go with me.
1998: Sexy Vampire
1999: Sexy Vampire (sigh)
2000: Pass
2002: Harem Girls with Mr. Pink… yes, I took a chance at being upstaged again by a boy in lipstick! Apparently, I have a “type.”
2003: Gwen Stefani
Technically it was a “rock star party” some time in the summer but it still counts.
2005: The Bride from Kill Bill
It all started with my sudden realization that Quentin Tarantino’s epic came out the very same year that I coincidentally had, for the first and only time in my adult life, long, straight, blonde hair and, for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear to me, bangs.
Next, the mad search of the apartment and, failing that, the nearby thrift store, for an appropriate pair of yellow track pants and shirt... or, okay, a white track suit and some Rit dye?? Well, lucky for me, it turns out Rit dye is way easier to use than you might expect—especially when you’re dying something white that cost next to nothing and you never plan on wearing it again.
The pain in the ass part was sewing the black stripes down the sides of both arms and legs. I can’t remember why, but my sewing machine was out of commission. So for what seemed like hours while everyone else was getting ready, I was tediously sewing, like, 12 feet of goddamn black stripes on by hand.
Anyway, I hadn’t even thought about it until we were just about to leave and our friend called to say she was going to Toys ‘R’Us to pick up something for her neighbor, and did we need anything? I blurted out, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, but is there any way you can find me a sword??” And she did!
That’s a good high note on which to end part one of my tour through Halloweens past…
I genuinely hate this time of year because summer is my favorite season, but Halloween is one bright spot in the ever-darkening months of autumn. It almost makes all the leaves on the ground and having to start carrying an umbrella every day worth it… Almost.
Next week I’ll pick up a few years later, and bring us up to the present day. Tell me in the comments about your favorite Halloween costumes from childhood or more recently!