I was a good little student busy with college during these years (well, up through Halloween 1993, at least — in October 1994 I had graduated, though I was still working at my UCI job, prior to "entering the real world"), and I wore no major costumes during the period. In retrospect, I'm a little surprised I didn't work a little harder to seek out cosplay venues (to use the Japanese term), but I did do things here and there (nothing I have photos of, though).
For one or two of these years, I answered the door for trick-or-treaters at my parents' house. I dressed up a wooden coat rack with my (second1) skull mask (which isn't currently featured on any of these pages — think I went trick-or-treating in it one year, so if my Mom can find pictures, I'll add them), and a black cowl and robe. Underneath were blankets, for bulk (and a more ghost-like profile).
All the lights were off inside, except for the flickering candlelight from the table in the entryway. A Halloween sound effects tape was playing. The coat-rack specter was standing right where a human would stand if they were opening the door. When the trick-or-treaters would ring the doorbell, I'd hide behind the front door as I slowly opened it, making it seem as if the eerily still creep was responsible. This scared the bejeezus out of the little kids.
If I heard a wail of anguish, I'd have to quickly pop out and end the act,
explaining that it was just a dummy. This often failed to comfort. 
The older
kids, of course, got a kick out of it, usually enough so that they forgave us
for giving out in-the-shell peanuts rather than the requisite slabs of
partially hydrogenated oil, chocolate, and refined sugar, and graciously
failed to egg or T.P. our house.
I don't remember exactly what my outfit was for this, but I don't think it was anything too exciting. Black robe/cape; maybe some fake blood on the face. Most of the costuming attention was put into the coat-rack dummy.
Some time during this period, perhaps in 1991, at Oingo Boingo's semi-yearly Halloween show at Irvine Meadows (now Verizon Wireless Amphiteater), KROQ had announced a promotion where if you got there early and wore a costume, you'd get picked out of line and you could attend a pre-show dinner backstage, where you could "Meet the band!". Not that many people took advantage (my flawed recollection is maybe 100±50), but despite the controlled situation, we didn't get to actually meet the band. John Avila and Johnny Vatos did appear on a balcony above the courtyard for a short time and wave, and Dale Turner and maybe Sluggo appeared a bit later, IIRC, but that was it.
I have zero recollection of what I wore to this event. I just remember it was something minimalistic, so it wouldn't burden me as I partied down to Boingo. In fact, I seem to remember taking off the costume entirely and stowing it, after the backstage "event" was over. The only costume I remember was my friend Jean-Paul's — he wore his much-loved priest shirt. It was also during this event that Jean-Paul lost his ticket. Luckily he eventually found it, but we gave him crap about this ("Are you sure you have your ticket?") for years afterwards.
This story is only peripherally Halloween-related, but is amusing (although it's almost certainly a "you had to be there" type of thing). One day during this time period, my friends Johnny and Jason and I were over at (the afore-mentioned) Jean-Paul's house. For some reason, we were incredibly bored. We could usually find plenty of ways to entertain ourselves, but for some reason, this evening none of the usual stuff sounded good to any of us. Jean-Paul started absent-mindedly rummaging in his wardrobe, and pulled out his bicycle helmet and put it on.
When J.P. wore this particular helmet, it looked like nothing so much as a retarded person's crash helmet, so of course he had the act to go along with it. Suddenly, something that sounded like a viable boredom reliever! I suggested we go parade around in public with Jean-Paul acting like this. J.P. was immediately onboard, but he started talking about doing this on Halloween. "No," I said. "We gotta do this now!" He was up for it, as was Johnny. Jason thought we were crazy, and went home.
So out we went. J.P. was in his crash helmet and a dorky-looking unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt over a white T-shirt. He carried a boombox playing a CD by the industrial band Noise Unit (I think it may have mostly been the amazing track "Alle Gegen Alles" on Strategy Of Violence), and he stomped around in deliberate poor control of his motor skills.
I didn't wear anything special, as I recall, but I did the goofy trick where you populate only one of your jacket sleeves, and then stick your sleeved hand into the cuff of your other sleeve, so you can then move that arm up and down, and it looks like you have both arms in sleeves, with the cuffs "married". (This time I also stuffed the empty sleeve with spare clothes to make it look as realistic as possible.) Your unsleeved arm goes underneath your jacket, and each time you pump your sleeved arm and your other, virtual arm downwards, you push the chest region of your jacket up with your fist, as if it's some weird natural counter-action to the pumping action of your arms. Probably doesn't translate in print, but it looks satisfyingly goofy in real life. Along with my pumping, and some dorky expressions on my face, I yelled out every several seconds in a semi-retarded voice, "Today's my birthday...!" (it wasn't).
Johnny took on the role (as he described it) of "art fag", where he followed us around snapping photos, and making typical "Oh yes! Fabulous!"-type model photographer reinforcement comments. (He may actually still have those photos somewhere, but trying to ask him to find them would make asking my Mom to find my childhood Halloween photos look insanely easy by comparison.)
Along with a stop by Ralphs (where the lone checker just seemed disgusted by our presence), we paraded in a line like this past Rock-N-Java (now Café Ruba) at Newport & 17th in Costa Mesa, then the happening local coffee joint. We got the desired stares, laughs, and confusion from the patrons, though no one actually confronted us, which I think we would have liked. We paraded in one direction past the patio, then turned around, paraded past in the other direction, got in the car (parked just a bit out of sight), and left.
Pretty damn stupid, but it was fun, and it just goes to show what lengths
extreme boredom can drive you to. And it can be liberating to pull
boneheaded stunts like this, not giving a crap about what people think of
you. (Heck, I guess that's what the guys from MTV's "Jackass" are all
about... We came first, though. )
During the events of my last story from this time period, I don't believe I was wearing a costume at all, unless you count a Skinny Puppy T-shirt. Thus the appearance on "Dan Harkless' Costumes" is really strained, but hey, sue me.
It was Halloween 1993, and Pippin Commons at the Middle Earth dorms at UCI, where I was living, was having a theme night for the occasion. On one or two such events in the past, a student had brought in their own mix tape to play over the house sound system in place of the usual radio station. I coordinated with the Pippin staff in advance, letting them know I'd be bringing something in, and they were only too happy to accomodate me. (Muahahahahah!)
My secret weapon was the Zoviet France album "Look Into Me", which my buddy Jean-Paul had played for my friends and I during a recent get-together. The album was an industrial noise collage, filled with weird machine ambiences and recurring unidentifiable wailings and murmurs occupying a sonic territory somewhere between yowling cats, howling wind, and bawling ghosts. It was perhaps the most unnerving CD I'd ever heard, and ideal for Halloween, I decided.
I looked in stores for a copy of the album, but couldn't find one — it's quite obscure. In fact, I'm still looking for it. Therefore I had J.P. make me a cassette copy. To fill it out, he added suitably evil-sounding tracks by John Zorn, Schnitt Acht, Paul Schütze, Kenji Kawai, and Merzbow. Prophetically (as you'll see) the Merzbow track was entitled "'Lost Paradise' Fire Scene". Jean-Paul entitled the compilation "Easy Listening Faves".
So it came to the night of the dinner, and I checked in with a Pippin manager to get my tape going. I sat at a table upstairs near the sound system closet so I could guard it in case anyone tried to turn down or take out the tape.
And believe me, they wanted to.
The compilation starts off slow, quiet, and ambient, enough to make you feel a bit ill-at-ease, though you may not know why. I had the sound system turned up fairly high so it could be heard over the chatter of conversation. From there the tape builds and builds until it reaches a fever pitch of hellish noise (at which point I did not turn down the volume). I started to hear little yelps of dissent from the crowd, culminating in people actually screaming in anguish, "Make it stop!!!".
What could I do? I showed no mercy, and merely cackled maniacally in my twisted glee. Luckily the music was barely audible up by the kitchen where the managers were stationed, so cooler heads did not prevail.
I stayed at dinner for the full 90-minute duration of the cassette. The place was a ghost town towards the end. One acquaintance, a fellow industrial fan who I talked to from time to time (we'd bonded over mutual concert T-shirt appreciation), did mosey up to comment on the music. I guess he wasn't sure whether I was responsible or not, and he made the kind of goofy comment, "This would make good industrial music.". I responded, "Well, yeah, that's because it is.", and we shared a laugh.
But this was only the beginning of the night. Later in the evening, the fires came...
It was wildfire season, and in Laguna Beach, fire had been raging, but at what seemed like a safe distance from the UCI campus. Tonight, however, the hills to the south, clearly visible from the upstairs living room of my dorm, Harrowdale, began to be haloed by a hellish orange glow. As the evening wore on, huge towers of flame began to leap up behind the hills. Before long, the entire outline of the hills was evenly lit afire, like the edge of a giant gas burner.
I'm not sure what the actual geography was — the flames probably looked closer than they actually were (which means those towers of flame were really high), but as far as any of us in Middle Earth could tell, the fire was coming for us. Indeed the resident advisors were in contact with campus officials and were poised to give us an evacuation notice (Laguna had already been evacuated).
I have absolutely no doubt my dinnertime mood music multiplied the panicky feelings we felt as we watched the wall of fire that seemed to want to consume our home. For this I am not particularly proud.
Indeed the panic managed to infect me as well, and I decided I better unload everything from my room that I couldn't stand to lose (which was most of it), just in case the evacuation order was going to come without sufficient warning and packing time.
Up and down the stairs I ran, to and from my third-floor room, bogged down with my synthesizers, my stereo, my computer, my music collection, my books, my video collection, my class folders, etc. etc. (my dorm room was packed to the gills). The main reason I had chosen my dorm was that it was one of the few in Middle Earth that had an elevator, but the cruel and arbitrary Middle Earth management2 deactivated it except during move-in week (it wasn't even turned on during my move-out week). I'm sure this was not the intention when the elevator was designed into the building. I'm sure they wanted to allow wheelchair-bound students to be able to visit 2nd- and 3rd-floor rooms, among other uses.
Anyway, after I was done schlepping the essentials down to my car, I watched as the fire was contained and the flames ceased to illuminate the top of the hill. The crisis was averted. Now I had to put everything back in my room.
I immediately started the long series of up-and-downstairs trips to return everything to its proper place in my room. Of course I had to carefully lock my car door each time to prevent losing anything to theft. The trips up the stairs with all this heavy stuff were a lot more strenuous and slow-going than the trips down them had been. It took me until well into the middle of the night before I was finally finished, at which point I felt ready to keel over and die. So I guess I got what was coming to me for taking delight in the suffering of my fellow students as I played "DJ from Hell".
The Laguna fire, by the way, was reportedly the second most severe fire in the history of California. Per "Transient says he set California blaze", from the October 1, 1994 issue of the Miami Herald, the fire destroyed 365 homes and businesses, and caused $528 million in damages. Though this was wildfire season, this fire was apparently the work of an arsonist, one Jose Martinez, a homeless illegal immigrant who later confessed to the deed, saying he started the blaze to summon "Gotam, the chief of a thousand demons"!!!
| 1. |
My first skull mask, which I'm almost positive I went trick-or-treating in
one year, I bought at Olvera
Street in L.A., visiting there with my Mom after an (acting)
interview. (On the same trip, my Mom bought me an ultra-cheesy yet
somehow charming Batman marionette.) It was a cool and scary-looking
over-the-head mask. So scary looking, in fact, that when I woke up the
morning after buying it, I almost leaped out of my skin as I awoke to the
skull staring at me as it hung from my bedpost.
Unfortunately the latex on this mask was thin and low-quality, and it eventually fell apart. Thus my "(second)" skull mask. This mask is just a facemask, so you have to wear a cowl with it. The sculpt also isn't as realistic as the original mask. |
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| 2. |
I had a big beef with the housing department for their braindead policy
that put a few days' gap in between the summer move-out of Middle Earth
and the move-in of the Campus Village on-campus apartment complex, and
then a similar gap in between Fall's move-out of Campus Village and the
move-in at Middle Earth. This policy made it all but impossible to live
on campus continuously through two school years, at least if you wanted to
live in the dorms (I think it might have been possible to live in Campus
Village continuously — not sure).
If the gap were a few weeks, it'd be annoying enough, but the fact that the gap was only a few days made it incredibly frustrating. Though my parents lived close-by, the thought of packing my huge glut of stuff (I'm cursed/blessed with the Collector's Gene) into my car, over to my parents' house, into the house, and then a few days later, back out of the house, back into my car, and back over to campus, and then having to repeat the whole entropic endeavor in the fall, seemed ludicrous to me. And of course people without parents or a good friend with extra space living nearby wouldn't even have this option. I managed to pull it off, but it wasn't easy. As I recall, Campus Village did allow me to move in a bit early, but there was still going to be a gap so they could do any necessary maintenance to the apartment unit I'd be moving into. Middle Earth refused to allow me to leave my stuff in my dorm room for the extra couple of days (even though there was nothing immediately pressing they'd be doing with my room). Luckily, my boss at my job at UCI, Dr. Friehe, was very cool and allowed me to temporarily pack all my stuff into his lab for the weekend or whatever it was that Campus Village needed. This wasn't too horrible, since the lab was on my way on the path I'd be using to cart my stuff to Campus Village. It just meant I'd have to do extra unloads and then re-loads of the stuff, inconvenience my labmates, and keep anything I'd need while living at my parents' house for those days separate from the rest of the stuff. Another way Dr. Friehe was super-cool was in allowing me to use his cart to transport my stuff. It was Rubbermaid's 4500-88 heavy-duty grey plastic double-decker cart. This cart is godhead. The company I worked for after UCI, Unitech, had the identical model, and it always performed flawlessly for me. Later I bought one of these great carts for myself when I had to move between two apartments in a complex that was doing renovations. Now, heading back in the Middle Earth direction in the fall, there were further roadblocks. If I recall correctly, I didn't have to do the lab stopover this time, since Middle Earth is by-and-large empty during the summer, and was so just prior to the fall move-in. I thus argued successfully to be allowed to move my stuff into my dorm room early. It took intense pleading, cajoling, and appeals to logic to accomplish this, though. The head Middle Earth guy — I believe his name was Fred — seemed to enjoy being unreasonable. Of course I wasn't allowed to actually start living in my dorm room early, so I had to just move my stuff in and then live at my parents' for a couple of days again. Fred only gave me a few hours to accomplish the move, and slowed me down greatly by not turning on the elevator for me. The time allotted turned out not to be sufficient, and so I was still in the process of moving as the Middle Earth administration office closed for the day. Fred had asked me to return my key to him at the end of the day, but this turned out not to be possible. By the time I noticed what time it was (being rather busy with my endeavors!), the office had already closed, so I had no opportunity to warn Fred that I'd be returning my key just a bit behind schedule. I finished up my move and then left my keycard in an envelope that I slipped under the admin. office door, with a note explaining the lateness. When I next met up with Fred, he was hopping mad that I could have dared to "abuse his trust", and he repeated over and over that they would never make this concession for another student again. What an absolute ass! The thing that really angered me through all this was how Fred's mentality was completely that of being the ruler of his little kingdom, with me, a student — a mere serf — making "unreasonable demands" of his majesty. Any concession, no matter how small, was "bending the rules" and represented a huge perceived favor. It never occurred to Fred that I was a paying customer, not a peon to be looked down upon. Imagine an off-campus housing complex treating its customers this way and expecting them to keep coming back for more. It never ever occurred to Fred that he's in direct competition with these off-campus housing complexes, and if it's in his power, he ought to happily do small favors like the one I asked in order to make me, the customer, happy. Wow, this was a really long footnote, and pretty dang off-topic for a Costumes page!!! I have additional stories from my days of living on-campus — perhaps I'll give them their own section sometime and move this there, making the footnote just contain a link to the appropriate page. |
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Dan Harkless
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