Skip to main content

dress up

cigar-tin story #62; see all of them here.

There was a white dress shirt in the middle of the street this morning. It had spray paint on the cuffs. I stepped around it like I would a dead animal and thought, Well, that's perfect.

When we were kids, we always had the same Halloween costume: a white dress shirt with the sleeves and tails stylishly shredded, decorated with pumpkins and tombstones and smiling ghosties, all drawn by hand in black marker (in fact, my mom was quite the marker artist ... she even did a Charlie Brown mural along the basement wall). Add some face paint and there you go. It was, I guess, a coping strategy; there were seven of us, eventually, after all. Besides, there just wasn't that many choices; there certainly wasn't the plastic extravaganza that you see in stores now, where any kid can be just about anything he or she wants for $19.99, with about zero imagination involved. And our big shirts nicely accommodated a parka underneath, and mittens, and was amiably accented by the not-too-greedy plastic pumpkin.

Comments

  1. I'm always intrigued by discarded clothing and footwear.

    Our dress up always involved sheets or curtains - and beads

    ReplyDelete
  2. so glad you stopped by my blog because I would never have found you - love your work, especially your writing :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. When I was growing up, we didn't celebrate Halloween.

    We did have Guy Fawkes though. Where you chucked firecrackers at each other, and burned a straw man on a bonfire.

    That straw man was often dressed in an old white work shirt that my Dad gave us.

    All sounds rather bizarre really. But there you go :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. When I was growing up we didn't have Halloween either but this year I 'made' my youngest a witche's dress- which was hillarious- one of the sleeves turned out to be inside out- but I thought ,well why would a witch care? She would probably sew the whole outfit inside out...but I didn't have enough time to change it all again- the best thing was that she (the witch in training)
    loved it all-nothing beats hands on and imagination-really!
    Annamaria :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. so true! my first costume was a gypsy. my mom made it-a cobalt blue silky skirt, a white "gypsy" shirt, all of her costume jewelry and a little red scarf on my head. i LOVED IT! i was 5 or 6 and in kindergarten. after that, i started wearing it pretty much everyday-not just for halloween and then especially for halloween-all halloweens until i just busted out of it. no one bought anykind of costume-there wasn't a place to do that.

    i am so happy because my brother in law is an iron man by day, project wannabee by night. he makes all the halloween costumes for their 2 boys as well as ones for himself and my twin. i am always amazed at what he comes up with-he is good!

    but yeah, what is the deal with that shirt?

    and, i finally blogged about you! it's longish so watch out!
    row, row, row

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the indisputable weight of the ocean

People are always telling me that my work is too dark. So I've put up this sunnier story, but even it has a shadow, as its original publisher – a fine Atlantic Canadian literary magazine called the Gaspereau Review – is no longer in business. ---------------- It was a simple enough thing and that thing was simply this: Edmund Kelley was a gentleman. Of course his mom called him her 'little gentleman', as in 'Oh Edmund, you are my perfect little gentleman,' which did seem to hold to a certain logic that these type of things often follow, considering her affection for him and the fact that he was, after all, only ten years old. Still, Edmund himself was not particularly fond of the diminutive aspect of that title. Gentleman was enough; gentleman summed up the whole thing rather nicely, thank you. He was definitely a more refined version of your average child. He lived in a state of perpetual Sunday m

Oona Balloona (doesn't care about new tables)

Well, it's Friday, and since I'm pretty depleted in the chit-chat department, I might as well put up some pictures of Ol' Giggles At Ghosts before Grandma starts sending me hate mail. Man, what a goofball. At this rate it's going to be, like, eighteen years before she has gainful employment and moves out of the house. I mean, come on . * * * * * C is especially crazy and frantic today. About two months ago she decided that she no longer liked our dining room table (take that, dining room table! no more BFF for you!). Since then she's switched the dining room and kitchen table (and all the rest of the furniture in the house -- about thirty times, but that's another story) as a provisional solution while she scoured area stores for an upgrade. And she thought she had found one, on Wednesday, at JYSK ( Whatever , I said). But when she ordered it, JYSK called back to say that they were really low on stock, and that the stock they did have was damaged, and

some paintings to keep you company

  at the stations of seeing ; mixed media on cradled wood panel, 24 x 30 inches.   $350 local.     At the Stations of Seeing I expected something on the level of poetry moving the machinery within but instead it was wreckage and difficult instructions Recursive Procedures for Life Structures and that sort of thing. IF—THEN—ELSE where the option is optional CASE, which is multi-situational DO—WHILE the function is zero BREAK and LOOP again and again until failure. please CALL, if you can, or while you are still missed. . . . I went away for awhile, for various reasons, and now I am starting to come back. Where I finally end up is anyone's guess, but one of the stations on the path of that return is a willingness to sell my art again; this post is about just one of the larger paintings I currently have for sale for clients and customers in the Kingston area. A good place to start. The prices for these works are lower because the transaction is personal, easier — come by my stud