Princess Wei and I were Good Mutant Americans this weekend.
After alternately Slacking off and doing yard work on the Slackermansion all afternoon, we killed a large pumpkin and scooped out its brains. There was some debate about what design to carve on it. One possibility was a BobCo Font Monster Hand, another was a postmodern motion of a jack-o-lantern within a jack-o-lantern. But carving a PICTURE of a pumpkin with a picture on it, onto a pumpkin, looked like too much work, so we took the Path of Least Resistance and, using an apple corer, simply made our pumpkin POLKA-DOTTED. No face, nothing spooky . . . just polka dots. It got quite a few compliments!
Even before the sun goes down, the stream of kids starts. We used our standard Good Monster-Bad Monster routine on them. In order to get the sweet sweet candy from the beautiful Space Princess, they first must pass by the hideous Space Monster. Don't be shocked, but I, not Wei, play the Space Monster, wearing a nice Skull-Alien-Overlord mask & cloak given me by the good Sister Decadence a couple of years ago.
This year I discovered that I could get more mileage out of the mask (and could see better) if I poked two fingers out of the mask's mouth-hole like a tongue, or even poked one finger each through the eyeholes, like extended eyestalks.
As you can see by our photos the kids were often more creative than we were.
When we had used up our $25 worth of candy, we closed up shop, Wei donned the amazing one-of-a-kind Tor Johnson mask made by the late St. Joe Riley, and we ventured down the street to stately Minion Manor for photo-ops at this majorly decked-out haunted house. Our neighbor Mr. Minion and his friends have made it a yearly tradition to out-Halloween every other homeowner for miles around, and it draws crowds from miles around. Corey even turned his Halloween know-how into a business, http://minionsweb.com, selling web-guns, air-cannons, lopped-off body part and other haunted house essentials. We lurked around Corey's place for a while, helping to creep out the timorous.
Finally we drove across town to the Cleveland Public Theater, where a huge Halloween party was in progress, hosted by Cleveland radio station WCSB (where Hour of Slack originates). I imagine this will become an annual bash, as it was a huge success in terms of attendance (and probably beer sales). The whole place was packed and people were spilling over into the street. In fact, it was SO packed, and hot, and stuffy, that we took a few pictures, bumped into a few friends from the station and A.C.E., and Starwood, and a few neighbors come to think of it, and then went back home after less than an hour. We could hear the bands from that party in the car all the way there and back, because it was a simulcast.
Then we watched monster movies! HOUSE OF DRACULA and AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN PARIS. Neither is especially good, in fact they're both terrible in different ways, but hey. It's monsters.
We woke at about 3 PM on Sunday! That was our cue to Slack off some more. We watched a couple of unseen Simpsons Halloween shows from previous seasons. I mingled another two test-tube microlife environments -- some drops from my steadily brewing Life Stew mixed into a Petri dish full of moss and water -- and within an hour saw a spectacular population explosion. For the first time I had a whole herd of naked amoebas. These little devils are hard to see because they're mostly transparent, but boy howdy, they thrash around like bucking broncos. Wei had trouble getting me to leave the microscopes long enough to eat dinner.
Like I do most Sunday nights, I tuned in WCSB to make sure they were playing the right Hour of Slack episode, and then later recorded Radio Synesthesia, but for some reason that show was not taking calls. Then there was more Slacking off.
Incidentally, by "Slacking off" I mean grown-up activities, private things that Mommies and Daddies do, which are best not discussed openly on a family-friendly forum such as this one.
Things like, you know, doing laundry and washing dishes. And stuff.
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