My Love O' the Dress Up

I love any excuse to dress up. I'm dressed as Lucy Ricardo as I type this post even though everyone else at work is a total BUMP ON THE LOG.

My love of the Dress Up goes way back to near-womb status and hasn't left. In junior high I trolled thrift shops for vintage prom dresses and old, tattered wedding dresses and hung them on my walls as decoration. I collected wigs from garage sales, and I spend many an hour dressing up in my treasures. My mother, who is a painter, has a a portrait of me in a curled, red bob topped with a tiara and in a sad, frayed wedding dress which fit me, a girl of 13, well; this always fascinated me. I meant my disguises to be for my own private pleasure, not as a model for my mother, and in the painting I look COMPLETELY bummed. I really wanted to get back to talking to myself and conjuring scenarios that begged for a barefoot, bewigged, homeless bride.

Mandy and I, up until this last year, competed in a Halloween drag lip-synch contest and we consistently left our competition in the dust. You wanna know how to piss off some amateur drag queens? Have women win the drag contest. Our first year we were the contemporary version of Lady Marmalade. I was Pink. Mandy was Mya. Two boys were Lil' Kim and Christina Aguilera. Our second year, we were all different aspects of Britney Spears; school girl, drag racer, the green goddess with the snake. I choreographed the tightest, most Britneyest moves EVER. Our sucka competition got served! The last great year, we were Chicago. Mandy was a Velma Kelly INCARNATE (she looked so much like her it was scary!) our boy toy that year was an impressive Roxy and I was Mama Morton.

This weekend, Husband and I went to Pechanga with a group of people and celebrated Halloween at a night club. Pechanga, which is a casino on a Native American Indian reservation out in Butt Fuck California, deserves it's very own post, it's own dissertation and analysis really, but I'm just gonna stick to the Halloween fun.

I went as Heidi, in drag apparently. My true intention -- and stick with me here -- was for me to go as Jamie Lee Curtis in Trading Places -- y'know where she's the hooker, Ofelia in Eddie Murphy's movie, but then there's the train scene? Where she dresses as a fraulein, but she keeps saying she's Inga, from Sweden? And they say, "But you have lederhosen." And she's all, "YA, Inga from SVE-DEN." So, yeah, I was her, Jamie Lee as Ofelia as Inga from Sweden. And I made Husband dress as Eddie Murphy as Billy Valentine as the African consulate in that same train scene. “Merry New Year!” (The crowd is silenced). So, yah, too obscure especially when the people we hung out with probably weren't even born when Trading Places was made. By the time we left our hotel room, I said, "Let's just tell people we're figurines from Disneyland's It's A Small World."

So, this club at Pechangas . . .let's just say that if you go to an all-adult Halloween venue at a night club, ladies' costumes are only about one thing: Smuttiness. Which I'm totally ok with, but the bombardment of the sexy versions of costumes eventually became hilarious. Husband and I leaned on a railing most of the evening and watched the crowd. He'd say, "What is that?" And I say, "That's a fire fighter. Can't you tell by the flames on her panties and the red pasties? Doesn't the helmet give it away?" He'd say, "Sure." And then we'd laugh and laugh. Then he'd say, "Ok, let me try. Is that an indian girl?" Pointing to a girl in a brown, micro mini dress and aviator glasses. And I'd say, "No, silly, that's a highway patrol officer. See the boots?" And we laugh and laugh again. This went on all night long. Supposedly there is not one costume you CAN'T make smutty-sexy. None. There were sexy nuns and sexy babies. Sexy Brownies and sexy dolls and sexy police officers and sexy pirates and sexy devils (big) and sexy gangsters and sexy -- whatever. Fill in the blank. I am not dressed as a sexy version of Lucy Ricardo, however. But I do find the rigid conservativeness of the 50's gear and the red wig rather hot. But no, I'm not wearing a 50's dress shortened to my upper thighs, nor white stockings with the I Love Lucy garter belts. Or the platform lucite heels though I may do a striptese to Babalu later . . .

This is what sexy costumes plus alcohol do: They make people dry hump each other on the dance floor and on the couches lining the club. From where we stood, Husband and I had a perfect view of this and we gawked as shamelessly as they grinded on each other. We yelled out, "DAMN!" at regular intervals. We'd tap each other and point out a new couple spotted at another location. It was off the chain there at Pechangas. And then as the evening wound down, we'd see certain characters bite the dust to their alcohol consumption. Like the sexy Strawberry Short Cake that passed out on the couch in front of us much to the disappointment of her grinding partner. We saw the sexy mechanic just plop down in a big drunken HUFF near the coat check. We saw the dude dressed as the pope throw up on the dance floor. Wow, these people know how to Par-tay up at Pechangas.

I can’t wait for trick or treating tonight. Husband will be Ricky Ricardo (duh!) and Maya is a mime and Mina is an angel – who wanted to wear angelic black lipstick to school today. Awesome.