Thursday, October 26th.
I had this dream before I woke up on Thursday morning that I had found my brother’s old karate uniform and had gone out for Halloween as the last place contestant in a karate competition – you know, face all beat up, 10th place ribbon. And, yes, I realize that people don’t actually get that “beat up” at karate competitions ’cause there’s not a lot of punching or anything, but whatever. The Karate Kid didn’t look too rosey after the Cobra Kai kids went up against him. And besides, it was a dream.
But, anyway, when I woke up, I remembered the dream and I thought to myself, “That’s actually a good idea for a costume.” And I mean, how often does that happen – you dream something and actually end up finding it useful?
So, that was my costume. But, Sally still didn’t have one, so we decided to go to the Halloween store and look for some stuff. We mostly just wanted new wigs to play with, so we ended up buying two. Plus, these horrible masks that make you really wonder who approved these to be manufactured and sold.
They’re made of clear molded plastic – there’s a man mask and a woman mask. We thought about walking in the front door wearing the wigs and the masks, but we were worried my mom would have a heart attack, because you look like some kind of plastic surgery monster in these things. So, we walked in with the wigs, but gave her a little bit of preparation before we put on the masks. Because, well, this is what we looked like:

I’m on the left, Sal’s on the right. And the worst part is, it’s really hard to breathe in these things, and when you do, it clouds up the plastic, making it even harder to breathe because it gets really hot inside them.
And even weirder is the fact that the same exact mask made three people look totally different. Here’s Sally with the mask:

She looks like Geraldo Rivera. And then, our dad in the mask:

For some reason, on him it looks real dusky. And he looks like our neighbor from across the street.

After we were done torturing ourselves with those masks, we were still playing with the wigs, and we said that the black mullet wig kind of looked like Steve Perry’s hair (you know, the guy from Journey). So, I put the wig on and kept singing “Oh Sherry”, but Jeff (our brother) pointed out that I still looked too much like a girl.
So, I remedied that.

With a 5-o’clock shadow and some cheap sunglasses I got at the dining hall in college once (it was movie star night). Plus, I put on black jeans and pinned them at the ankles so they looked tapered. And put on my super old school white Reeboks from high school. And a black t-shirt (with a sports bra … I did what I could). P.S. Doesn’t Sally look like a total floozy with that blonde wig on?

In the end, I ended up looking like our long-lost brother. Like, Jeff ended up in South Jersey and somehow stumbled upon me sitting in the back of a pick-up truck. I look like a MAN! (I guess that was the point.)
We had no Pabst. So, we used cans of seltzer for the picture.