Tag: Harpo horn

Friday Photo Flashback

The timing on this photo find is almost perfect. We’re less than two weeks away from Halloween and I stumbled on this photo of my folks.

This photo made me laugh out loud! My mom is wearing one of my dad’s old band outfits. They used to wear these blue tuxes when they played weddings as I recall. That is definitely one of his tux shirts, too. Those ruffles were something!! If I had to guess, that is an old hat from a New Year’s Eve party, but I can’t say for certain.

Next to mom is dad, ever the clown! I love this picture of them. My dad is never one to shy away from dressing in something silly. I have NO idea where that polka dot shirt came from! I cannot begin to imagine where anyone would wear it that was NOT a Halloween party! The make up he is wearing was probably the makeup that they used on my brother and I the year we went out as “vampires.” The buttons on the coat are my Three Stooges buttons. I had quite a few of them as a teen. Obviously, the perfect things for his ensemble.

What I don’t know is whether he wore this outfit first, or if I did. Our high school band had a Halloween party my sophomore year. That party would have taken place in October of 1985. I don’t recall much about it. I know it was in a barn or at a cider mill maybe. We had to pile onto a bus to get there. At any rate, I wore most of this same outfit!

If I had to guess, I wore it first. I am sure my dad didn’t wear the yellow pajama pants (more on why in a minute). There are also no buttons on the coat. I would think that if my dad wore the coat first, then I would have kept the buttons on it. Then there is the horn. Man, that horn was hilarious. It was your typical Harpo Marx horn that was loud and annoying. I can see why I made sure to bring it to the party. Missing from my dad’s take on the costume are the hat and giant scissors. Maybe I lost them at the party?

Back to the yellow pajama pants. There is another photo of me before the party. My mom, always happy to ham it up, had the perfect pose.

Look closely at the back of the left leg. I remember my dad grabbing a magic marker that night. He wrote “Band Reject” on there! This is totally my dad! Great stuff.

That Halloween costume may have been responsible for my three year reign as “Band Clown” in the mock elections! What an honor!

Back to the original photo for a minute as I wrap this up. It makes me smile. My mom looks young and healthy here. Nine or ten years later, she’d get the initial diagnosis of breast cancer. There would be a lot of changes from that point on. In this photo, though, she and my dad are happy and it reminds me of some great days.

Ghosts of Halloween Past

A few years back, I wrote a blog about those terrible Halloween costumes we used to wear as kids. You know, the one with the plastic masks with the holes in them? The masks with that cheap rubber band that always broke? Remember those? Here is a link to that blog as a refresher for you:

Halloween Dress Up

There was a Trunk or Treat close to our house recently and I could see all the kids dressed up in their Halloween costumes. I tried to remember what I had dressed up as for Halloween as a kid and I really cannot remember. So I pulled out a hard drive which contains a bunch of photo scans from my dad. I figured if my folks had taken any pictures of us in costumes, they’d be on that drive.

What I found was that there were next to none on this drive. There were a couple, which I will share, but nothing from when we were really young. I guess my parents must have thought those costumes with the cheap masks and slits for eyes were not photo worthy. The only ones they took pictures of were when we did something out of the ordinary.

One year my brother and I wanted to be vampires or something. So my dad bought the make up and such and the result was … less than steller.

We don’t even have capes! I dunno, this get up stumps me. My dad tried to make me look like Sir Graves Ghastly, who was a local horror movie host on TV. I think that he did a good job, but without the rest of the vampire ensemble, people had to wonder who they heck we were!

Sir Graves Ghastly. We met him once at a mall appearance. He was very cool and everyone asked him to do his “laugh.”

Another year I went out as Oliver Hardy of Laurel and Hardy.

I’m sure this also made no sense to people answering the door because my brother dressed up as a woman. Perhaps Mr. Hardy had a date? I suppose I could have been mistaken for Charlie Chaplin, but my body shape was more Hardy than Chaplin!

The only other Halloween picture I have is from my Sophomore year of high school. The band had a Halloween party at some barn as I recall and we all went to it. I didn’t know what to go as, and decided on going as a clown. I threw on a pair of pajama pants over my jeans, one of my dad’s old shirts, an awful sport coat, clown wig, hat and tie, and added a huge horn. It was ridiculous!

This is just a guess, but that year at the annual Band Banquet, I won the Mock Elections for “Band Clown.” I am sure that this outfit played a part in that win. It was cool to win that award every year I was in band.

While this wasn’t necessarily Halloween, one of the other photos of my “in costume” that came up was one that I used when I worked at 94.5 The Moose. I used to take song lyrics and read them behind some classical music and called it a “Dramatic Reading.” It was a silly chance to “overact.”

The first reading I did was Gretchen Wilson’s Redneck Woman. Imagine classical music playing with me dramatically saying, “Victoria Secret. There’s stuff’s real nice. But I can buy the same damn thing on a Walmart shelf – half price!” It was utter stupidity. To promote it on the website, they took this picture:

HA! I’m such an idiot!

I suppose it is probably better that there are no pictures of me in those cheap costumes. I remember I was always overweight and the pants always seemed to rip before we were done Trick or Treating. And half the time, the thing that held the mask on broke after three or four blocks and wound up in the bottom of the Trick or Treat bag or pillowcase anyway.

As silly as these are, they are fun to look back at!