Happy Halloween!

Woo hoo! It's Bisbee's favorite holiday, when it's hard to tell who's in costume and who's just wearing their street clothes.

We missed celebrating Halloween last year because I was in Cape May, but we're going out tonight in a couple of our favorite costumes (right): The Horned Lizard King and Ambassador Krkktt. This photo is from these characters' inaugural year, 2001; I'll try to get a back photo of Tom's costume tonight to post as an addendum, because it rocks.

We each made our own mask in a workshop put on by a local art gallery. First we formed the basic shape in earthen clay then covered the form with plastic wrap and applied layer upon layer of cotton batting soaked in watered-down glue. After several days of drying, we painted them and added additional touches (dimensional fabric paint works great).

It's been several years since we've been that inspired, but on past Halloweens Tom's been the World's Largest Montezuma Quail (left), a Great Gray Owl, a Javelina, a gorilla tourist in Bermuda shorts and bucket hat, a musical spider (he played The Ballad of Spider John by Willis Allan Ramsey at the now defunct Quarter Moon Coffeehouse), and Tim the Enchanter (he won a costume contest with that one).

I've been a Druid priestess, green elf, and Mother Earth, but the last few years I've been bouncing back and forth between the frog alien pictured above and a Dia de los Muertos catrina, with skull makeup and a big black hat wreathed in red roses (very Dead). One year, a guy came up to me in the Stock Exchange Bar and said, "Your makeup's really realistic and I should know...I've seen a lot of skulls." (Uh, thank you kind sir?) In keeping with my costume, I abandoned my usual karaoke alter ego, Roberta Shrub, for "Güera Calavera" (roughly, "Blondie Skull").

So we're recycling costumes again this year, but maybe the spectacle of our Bisbee neighbors all decked out in their wonderfully creative finery will get us charged up for next Halloween.