by Rev. Ivan Stang with Princess Wei 'R.' Doe

MOVIE! -- of a RARE public appearance by J. R. "Bob" Dobbs at the WCSB Masquerade Ball 2011, Cleveland (10-minutes, YouTube)

Listen to Hour of Slack #1332, live from WCSB the night after the Ball, partly about the event.

Charleston Okafor, the host of the reggae show that precedes Hour of Slack on WCSB, African Abstract, touchingly discussed the annual WCSB ball, station staff and much more with us for a few minutes before our show started, heard here.

Wei and I awoke at 3 PM Sunday after the Ball, slightly later than normal. We are, as they say in "A Clockwork Orange," fagged and fashed and bashed. We are literally bashed because we injured ourselves moving gear in and out of Cleveland Public Theater. We are fashed because we stayed up so late. We are fagged because we went to a gay bar owned by friends AFTER the party when all the bars were closed.

I just finished picking through the 352 stills and movies we took. Except for the movies. But I hope to post the best photos before tonight, when we'll do a live show. I would like the listeners to be able to see what they either missed or don't remember. For it was a great party.

Wei had helped with the decorating a lot, and I was drafted into running video projections of monster movies on the walls. Luckily I have a huge collection of both trailers and TV specials ABOUT monster movies -- ready-made collages so that it's all monsters, car crashes and damsels in distress. Late in the evening, when the huge crowd of at least 1,000 people were at their most impressionable, I slipped in ARISE!

The venue -- Cleveland Public Theater -- is huge and perfect, and anyone who entered and DIDN'T look up at the ceiling missed a regular Sistine Chapel of a ceiling-wide painting featuring many Saints of Bulldada, including The Three Stooges. Inside the main theater, WCSB staff had decorated everything in the "B-movie" theme, with silhouettes of people (including Abraham Lincoln) being murdered up on the opera seats and a huge painting of The Creature from the Black Lagoon's head, set up and lit near a camera so visitors could pose beside it in their costumes.

This Creature-head has an interesting origin. At a yard sale on our very street, Wei and I bought it for about a buck. It was an UNFINISHED but very well-started Creature-head partially painted on thick plywood, but partially just penciled in. The creator had intended it to be a table, but had to move suddenly. We nabbed it thinking that perhaps Pater Nostril or St. Byron Werner could finish painting the bottom half of it in psychedelic colors. I never imagined that anyone would be able to MATCH the original colors and seamlessly finish what the original artist had started.

But Liz did! Overnight! Liz Trenholme, Development Director at WCSB, is obviously also a killer artist. I was flabbergasted to see this huge thing -- which has been occupying our iVan trunk for months -- framed nicely and hanging, completely colored-in perfectly, used as a photo-backdrop. I was also amazed to see Liz's legs. Last year she dressed as a banana and normally at meetings she dressed normally. But she had a miniskirt get-up this year that showed off her excellent features.

General Manager Sara Corrigan also blew my mind with her HAWT Medusa transformation that involved painting all her visible skin green. I have a thing for green women as well as Jedi Mentat Vulcan "Moe"-like women, and… well, I will be VERY sorry when she soon graduates and no longer runs the station.

Now that I am old I feel it is acceptable for me to compliment much younger women on their looks without coming off as a masher. Which reminds me of station business manager Lindsay Stanceau's turn as Marilyn Monroe, which Wei agreed worked strikingly well.

Other costumes that stood out -- not that I saw all or even most of them -- were the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man from "Ghostbusters," Hunter S. Thompson, The Residents, and a guy in an inflatable costume THE SIZE OF A CAR. I'm not sure what it was supposed to be but it was by far the LARGEST costume there. One fellow was dressed as both of Dr. Seuss's Thing One and Thing Two; he himself was labeled Thing One and his crotch was labeled Thing Two.

Our friend and semi-co-host Dr. Sinister, doing Security, was an FBI Man or Agent Smith. Rev. Ron Slabe of Pyrosonic was the Guy Faulkes "V"/Anonymous dude. Our neighbors Fred and Chrissie were absolutely fucking hideous zombies; he had zippers under his eyes, one unzipped to reveal rotten flesh. Bob Mozick and his girlfriend Jo were there, as was the Official Plumber of the Church of the SubGenius, Cynthia P.

The funny thing is, because most of them were masked I had no idea these were friends of mine until near the end of the party. In fact, since Wei and I -- and we alone! -- had access to the second floor as projectionists, I was able to look down from the balcony and photograph cleavages that caught my eye. Only later after seeing all the photos did I realize I had been stalking personal friends' cleavages, something I would not normally do.

It was great, being projectionists. We had our own key to this huge empty space above the enormous crumbling majesty of the Gorden Theater, which gave us unlimited opportunities to do Private Things away from the crowd -- and to observe the crowd from above, as if they were my microbe pets on a slide.

Rev. Steve Scynic was also there, but then he is pretty much everywhere all the time, as far as I can tell, and always extremely helpful.

When Wei and I ventured out, she wore the Cthulhu mask crocheted by Rev. Joy DeVeeve, with some bright green hair added. She had to lead me around by the hand because I wore a new, previously untouched version of the Giant Head "Bob" Mask. We have 3 of these things, and the one I've been using for years is about a daid punk. The two untouched ones are a bit… sticky… as latex tends to get after a few years, and the one I used has especially bloodshot eyes. I wore a turtleneck to hide the mask's neck-edge, but that only made "Bob's" neck look like a turtle's neck. Indeed, the mask wrinkled up into some truly scary-looking positions during the course of the night, as seen in the photos. He is a HIDEOUS "Bob." When he was on the dance floor he did all those corny old dances from the 1960s: The Twist, The Frug, The Batman, etc. He also shoots the peace sign and the finger a lot. He is almost completely blind and deaf, and totally dependent on Princess Wei while out among The Others.

The four bands were all just great, as was the MC, the 669 show's devil-horned host Craig Calendar.

Our old friend/liability Rev. Jeff Free aka "Acid Burnout Man" was there… first time I've seen him in a few years! His exuberance had gotten him banned from many a Cleveland venue and pagan campground. Despite his Christmas lighted headress, he was pretty toned down this time.

After we had packed up all the audio-visual gear -- thanks to ACE and Regis for much of that -- we visited a Day of the Dead display next door, and then, despite the late hour, visited for the first time a gay bar, Vibe, recently opened by a non-gay couple we know, Carl and Dianne. They were dressed as each other that night, Dianne looking disturbingly mannish and Carl looking horrible, although his fake tits were possibly better than many examples of the real thing. I was able to tell the actual females from the cross-dressers, I think, and we had a good time there. I've been to a few gay bars and this one seems more "down home" and neighborly than the more high tech disco ones I've been to.

I had to explain to a few people that within the Church of the SubGenius world, just being gay doesn't make one especially weird, and cross-dressing is almost commonplace. "Weird" in our world would be a hermaphrodite with a parasitic twin hanging off part of him/her. Or, say, Banjo Bob.