13 posts tagged “halloween”
This has to be the coolest idea I have seen in a long time. I wish I was this clever...
The husband and I hobbled down to a club called The Fez and were treated to a night of 80's music. First thing I heard when I walked through the door was Tom Tom Club. Yay!
I say we hobbled because, well...I am old and have bad knees from an old injury. The husband, who doesn't have chronic knee problems, whacked his knee into a cast iron table in our hotel room. Why on earth you would put a cast iron table with a glass top and iron handles sticking out about 4 inches on each side of the table in a small hotel room is beyond me...so far I have walked into it twice. After the second time I wrapped the handles in hand towels...
Anyway, so we went to the club and danced a few songs. Had some drinks. Danced some more. Love and Rockets, Dead or Alive, Echo and the Bunnymen...shhh, don't tell anyone but I even danced to Shout at the Devil...
The costumes ranged from a guy dressed as Oscar the Grouch (complete with garbage can) to a really great American Psycho guy in a wall street suit and a clear plastic rain slicker to a sweet little girl in a mermaid costume. I just wanted to squeeze her because...well, she looked squeezable. There was even a very impressive Mormon girl with a bread braid hairdo and a nekkid baby tender love doll.
The "sexiest couple in the club" award goes to the classy dominatrix and her hot cop date. I'm not much for either fantasy archetypes, but these two made me do a double take. It helped that the guy was a pretty good dancer and she could work those boots. No pictures because I am shy...
Today we spent most of the day with ice bags on our knees. It was rainy anyway...
It's that time of year again.
I think I need rehab.
Usually I use Gimp, but I am doing a project in In Design and Photoshop (and a few other Adobe programs) came with it. Hope I don't like it too much. This creative suite is nearly 900 bucks with taxes and so on...
I met Bruce in small town Paragould, Arkansas. I can’t remember what year it was, possibly somewhere between 82 and 84, but it was October. It was Halloween and I was sitting on a front porch swing wondering why I was spending my favorite holiday in Paragould. My woeful thoughts were interrupted by a loud schwack-schwack-schwack-schwack sound coming from up the street. It was the sound of big flappy shoes slapping pavement. As the sound got closer I perceived the form of a 6-foot tall bowling pin making way down the sidewalk in the dark. By the time the bowling pin reached the walkway to the house, I realized I was not looking at a bowling pin at all, but Opus the Penguin from Bloom County. Opus made it to the front door. He was cursing. “What the Hell was I thinking?” The head came off and there was Bruce.
The rest of my Paragould visit was a dismal disappointment. I thought I had been summoned as a gesture to rekindle a sputtered romance. Boy, did I misread that invite. It was a long drive for nothing but embarrassment, rejection and just a little bit of confusion. Now, in retrospect, I am convinced that the reason I was there was to meet Bruce. The rejection was worth it.
Some years later I walked into Little Rock convenience store. Bruce was working as a clerk. I immediately recognized him and after a "Hey, Opus!" and a "How would you know that?" moment, we caught up as much as familiar strangers are allowed when one of the strangers is bagging your groceries.
Bruce would come to be referred to, by the locals, as that “bitchy queen down at the Circle K.”
In the late 80's I moved to the Hillcrest area of Little Rock. It was a leasing typical of most in Hillcrest - creaky, rundown, drafty with a bloated rent - but it was Hillcrest! Old houses housing new money and well allowanced street punks. The house on Palm Street was designed similarly to the one in the Amityville Horror film. It was in horrible disrepair. Some brainiac had split it up - sloppily - to have 2 apartments downstairs and one really big apartment upstairs. I was upstairs, and now, as a surprise to both of us, that bitchy queen from the Circle K was downstairs.
When I first met Bruce his hair was full and black. Now he was thinning on top and wispy tailed in back. His eyebrows were elegantly arched. He wasn’t a drag queen, per se, but his eyebrows suggested he could be ready for drag at the drop of a roll of duct tape. Surly, sharp, and sarcastic, he could shut someone up with a look. From time to time he seemed to channel Joan Crawford or Agnes Moorehead.
Bruce was, and always will be, the best neighbor I have ever had. We were catapulted from casual acquaintance to running buddy status nearly overnight. We seemed to understand each other’s moods. As friends and housemates, we never quarreled or found ourselves on opposite ends of an issue. How rare.
We drank big bottles of red wine and wore vintage hats around the house. We had hair dying parties where all attending left with purple hair. We went out with giant chalk sticks and circled the dog poop on the Hillcrest sidewalks adding admonishments and reminders to be more conscientious. My favorite was: PICK UP AFTER YOUR DOG, YOU BASTARD! THIS AIN’T PARIS!
I never bothered to have the gas turned on in that apartment and I cooked all my meals on a hot plate. The wind whistled through the gaps in the sills. The wood roaches were so plentiful and big I could hear them rattling around at night. It truly was miserable lodgings, but I was clam happy to have a good friend a staircase away.
Then the owners sold the house and we were evicted. He moved down the street and I moved up the road and we saw a little less of each other. He quit the Circle K and took a job at Your Mama's Good Food. We were coworkers at a dysfunctional family run camera shop for a short stretch. I moved to West Little Rock and he moved to Texas.
I spent a lot of time missing Bruce. Wondering where he was, what was he was doing, was he happy?
Just when I thought I would never hear from him again, he called me. He said that he was still in Texas.
He
also said that New Braunsfels, a town founded by Germans, would be a
great place to live “if it weren’t for all the dust and Nazis.” Then he
laughed that big beautiful husky laugh. He gave me a number to a phone
that wasn’t his and we stayed in contact for a few months. Then one
night the person on the other end of the line said they didn't know who
Bruce was, never heard of him. I verified the number and stumped, I
never tried calling that number again. That was around 97 or 98.
Several
times I used Google - and an odd assortment of other Internet searches
– to find any kind of contact information I could. How do you find a
guy who never had his own phone? There was even a time I was driving by
New Braunfels on my way to San Antonio. I detoured through the town
with the irrational hope that I would spot Bruce. I would recognize him
by his walk…we would have a happy reunion…
My second bright idea was to call every restaurant in New Braunsfels. He had to be working in one of them.
I then relocated to Canada. How would he ever find me now? Was he looking for me like I was looking for him? I was so excited to tell Bruce about my big Canadian adventure. He would LOVE it. He would have to come and visit and stay forever…I had to find him.
On the morning of February 13th of 2006, shortly after midnight, I started a new search for Bruce Moore. After about 45 minutes of hitting nothing but dead ends and useless links (Did you know that the city planner of Little Rock is ALSO named Bruce Moore???) I was feeling glum. It was late, I was tired and I had a sudden realization that I may never speak to Bruce again. I may never find him. Chances are Bruce isn't even in Texas anymore. Maybe he moved back to Piggott. Maybe he had found that husband he was always lamenting about…
I decided to give it one more search then go to bed, this time on Yahoo. And there he was.
I found Bruce Moore’s obituary. My beloved friend had died 11 months earlier.
And
now I can do nothing but miss him every day. We met on Halloween, a
holiday we both loved. This year I remember him, most fondly, on Día de
los Muertos.
How are you celebrating Halloween today?
Wedding Anniversary
Bright orange pumpkins with carved scary faces
Graveyards at twilight and old haunted places
Black rubber bats dangling from strings
These are a few of my favorite things...
Small work on paper.
My earlier posting about David Bowie was just a sliver of my obsession for the man.
I once was a make up artist for a local David Bowie impersonator, a woman who did such a fine job that she was chosen to be on "Puttin' on the Hits." Something happened and she never made it to the show. I stopped hanging out with her as this was happening because she was getting too creepy for my own good.
I also made up my old boyfriend, Shaun, one year as Screaming Lord Byron (the character in the Blue Jean video) for a Halloween costume party. He looked fab and, if memory serves, he won the contest.
I found this pretender a few years ago:
http://www.davidbowietribute.com/
Now that is some gooood pretending!
