Hallowe’en has come and gone. And I’m completely bummed out. I handed out candy from about 6:30pm until almost 9 o’clock, and very few kids even tried with their costumes. I know we live in a less-than-affluent neighborhood, but if you want it bad enough, you can get pretty creative with plastic bags, cheap face paint and some household objects like a lampshade or a few select kitchen implements.
There were over 10 kids dressed as Batman, yet only ONE Superman! I guess Smallville is more targeted to the teenage crowd than little ones, but I suppose that the recent Superman Returns movie made me think there would be more Kal-Els out there. Maybe after he knocked up an unmarried woman and then left town, Supes seems like a less appropriate hero to model your child after. Hmm.
We did have one set of kids sing us the “trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat” song, which was pretty rockin’, and a little 5-year-old Korean dude dressed in traditional gear who practically crapped his pants when I gave him an Oh Henry bar, and a 7-year-old girl dressed in a trenchcoat with facial hair painted on, as Silent Bob.
Those kids made the evening worthwhile, but the thirty or so tweens and teens who came in nothing but their usual jeans and hoodies, who then had the gall to say they were “dressed as Frodo” really frosted my cookies. We did not blow $50 on mini-chocolate bars to feed you apathetic, unemployed hormone bombs. No!
Sad to say, I’ve had nothing but negative feedback regarding my carving of Bernard. Apparently the uber-simple “ghosty face” I gave him was “weak”, according to one person whose opinion I value, and one total stranger (who apparently Justin wants to have kids with).
Click here to see Justin’s interpretation of his long-exposure photo of Bernard burning. He cropped tighter than me, used some sort of gradient, and healing-tooled the terracotta plant pot basin out of existence.
Here is my interpretation of Bernard-as-lantern. I thought it was nice that the view he got to see from his new eyes was the front yard of our home, where he was born and grew up…
…and my own long-exposure photo of Bernard entering the final stage of his existence, pre-pie. Somehow the reds look really weird on here. Either we need to calibrate our monitor at home, or I should do it at work, because that shit is just bananas. No way are our oven coils that satanic looking in real life.
