— पांच हजार सात सौ तीन —
Holy shit am I glad I updated my blog
twice over the weekend, otherwise I'd be seriously fucked with trying to update you on everything today! I did a
lot.
To recap:
On Saturday,
I posted about the Pumpkin Carving "Party" that was just Laney and me, in the Braeburn Condos Commumity Kitchen on Friday night. I'm only seeming to remenber to light my pumpkin I've left out on the balcony about every other night. And a couple of years ago my pumpkin rotted by the following Monday; I'm hoping that won't be the case by today but the amount of rain we had over the weekend could be a contributing factor.
On Sunday (yesterday),
I posted about attending the
Día de Muertos Festival at Seattle Center Saturday afternoon, first with both Shobhit and Tracy for a couple of hours, and then for another couple of hours with just Tracy, after Shobhit left to walk back home and get ready for work.
And that brings us to today, when I need to update you on what happened
yesterday (Sunday)—and there were two notable events!
First, from which both the top and middle shots embedded in this very post come: the
West Seattle Harvest Fest at West Seattle Junction, or what they call "Downtown West Seattle." It's an annual family event that combines with the regular West Seattle Sunday Farmers Market, but with costumed kids getting to trick-or-treat with the vendors, and most famously, the kids' costume parade that happens at 11 a.m.
So far, I think this has become a legit annual tradition: Shobhit and I have gone every year for three years running now. The appeal for Shobhit is really the farmers market and nothing else. For me, it's the costume parade, which tends to provide many great photo opportunities.
This year I actually managed to get
42 shots out of it, a roughly 55% increase over
previous years.
This time, Shobhit just kept browsing and shopping, and we split up when the 11 a.m. parade started, so I could find a good vantage point and get photos. I like to get a video clip of the West Seattle High School Marching Band on their initial approach, and then cross the street to get still photos after they turn around and march back on the other side of the booths in the middle of California Avenue SW. This process worked out very well for me this time.
We left home at about 10 a.m., barely after I managed to finish and post my entry about Saturday. Luckily the Farmers Market opens at 10:00, so once we got there, we had a short while to browse the booths before the parade began. And once the parade was over, Shobhit already had about two tote bags full of produce he bought, and we were ready to go back to the car before it was even quite 11:30. This made him happy because there was an event he wanted to go to by 1:00 and this kind of barely made that possible, after we drove back home from West Seattle.
Anyway a bunch of the kids' costumes were incredibly adorable, but this obvious reference to
Jurassic Park was easily my favorite.
— पांच हजार सात सौ तीन —
Last night was the Halloween event Tracy suggested we do together: the "
Once Upon a Halloween... Triple Feature Pizza Party," at The Grand Illusion Cinema in the U District.
This is apparently a very longstanding tradition. I don't know how Tracy found out about it but it was the first time I had heard of it when she suggested it to me. I'm not usually big on horror movies but I still liked the concept, so I said: sure. And then, when I went to buy my ticket, I was truly shocked to find it cost only $16 per person. For three movies! And pizza at no extra cost! I was amazed.
It was Tracy's suggestion that we go in costume. I think I forgot to mention in yesterday's post that on Saturday, Tracy came in costume there too. She was the only person there in a standard Halloween costume: both Saturday and yesterday, she dressed as s scarecorw. The outfit was pretty simple: overalls with straw sticking out of the pockets, and a bandana. She put pieces of straw in her hair and did a pretty good scarecrow makeup job on her face, although that was rendered moot when we got our Day of the Dead faces painted on. After that she was a scarecrow / Day of the Dead hybrid.
Not yesterday, though. And I did follow her lead and suggestion, and dress in a costume as well. I had no clue what my costume would be for Halloween this year until last week when Tracy suggested I dress up as JD Vance. I had never heard of this, but apparently there is online speculation as to whether he wears eyeliner, which made it a perfect costume idea for me: I already wear eyeliner every day, and would only need to exaggerate it slightly. Otherwise, I had all the clothes I could need available already, the only question being what to do with the color of my hair.
This was why I went to Spirit Halloween on Saturday night after Tracy and I parted ways. I was looking for spray hair color. I took the bus to the store in the U District and was releived to find they had what I needed—or at least, I hoped. They had a whole rack of a bunch of colors. None were brown, and the black one was called "Black Metallic." I was really afraid it would look too metallic, but after I sprayed it all over my hair yesterday, it looked quite good.
I had also grabbed my work name tag that has for years just been pinned to the fabric of my cubicle wall. At home yesterday, I cut out a piece of white construction paper to tape over my real name, with "JD VANCE." I took
a really great selfie (some might even call it iconic!), deliberately standing in front of my American flag so it looked like your typical politician's posed photo. In that shot, the name tag still read JD VANCE.
But, then I texted it to several people: to Tracy; to the "We're Too Old For This Shit" text group; to Laney; even to Alexia. In every case, I wrote,
Just call me Gay D. Vance.
Tracy's response:
I mean.... I'm impressed
Within the WTOFTS group chat, Lea sent a "Haha" response. Gabriel replied,
Omg. Terrifying. And Mandy replied,
OH MY GOD hahahaha Nailed it
Alexia wrote,
It's excellent. Apparently she showed it to friends she was hanging out with, because she then wrote:
The girls are here for the game. We all think you look great.
And then there's Laney, whose response was the most consequential.
It's awesome! she wrote.
And I love that you referred to yourself as Gay D. Vance, and your costume would be even funnier and more delightful if you name tag said "Gay D. Vance."
I had considered this and was ambivalent about the idea at first. Whether we have an official work celebration has not yet been made clear, but I would definitely make that the name tag for work, even if it's slightly borderline when it comes to being work-appropriate. But, everyone at work knows me. This would not be the case at The Grand Illusion.
But then, with ten minutes left before Tracy was scheduled to pick me up, I whipped up a "GAY D. VANCE" name tag anyway. I
took another selfie next to the flag with that new name tag. The only problem is that aside from the name tag, the first photo is far better: my pose is better in a way I could not precisely replicate, and the lighting is better, mostly because in the second shot I had my blinds open and it was letting in natural and therefore a different tone of light. I was out of time to keep posing, so I just kept both versions of the selfie.
This costume, by the way, has a connection to past years in two different ways. It's actually the second Halloween costume I have done at Tracy's brilliant suggestion—the previous was when I dressed as a "
Crazy Cat Lady" in 2022.
The second connection to a past year is 2020: this is now my second Halloween dressing as a failed Vice Presidential candidate! (I'm making predictions now.) In 2020, when we did a virtual costume party, I dressed as "
Drunk Pence," complete with the famous fly on his head. And with a fun alteration to the name, it made sense for my costume this year to be "Gay D. Vance."
Whether I will replicate this again on Thursday, actual-Halloween, remains to be seen. We recently hired a new Office Manager and there has yet to be anything at all sent out about any official office holiday celebration. Thursdays most of Merchandising is out on store visits so I fear this might be much like 2021, when I did come in costume but it was the Friday before a Halloween that landed on a weekend and there was nearly no one else here at the office at all. There had been no notice of an official office celebration then either.
Last year was a little different, as Halloween happened to land on a Wednesday—the one day of the weeken when the most office workers come to work in-person. This year, we both have it landing on a Thursday, and we have a new Office Manager who I have no idea whether he's even aware of the office history with this holiday.
But, I am leaning toward coming dressed as Gay D. Vance whether there's anything official happening or not. We do have a site visit at the new Downtown store and office location with the Office Location Project Team that day, and this would mean my coming down there as "Gay D. Vance." Which might be a crackup anyway.
Anyway! Back to last night. Dressing as "Gay D. Vance" turned out to be a lot of effort for comparatively little payoff—I spent most of the time in a darkened theater where no one could see me, after all. That said, a guying entering the theater ahead of us when we arrived looked back at me and said, "That's a great costume!" And the guy working the concessions had some difficulty straightening out whether Tracy and I had tickets or were purchasing together or separate. His excuse? "I think your costume is throwing me off." Ha!
During the second intermission between movies, I had a guy from a couple of rows behind me tap my shoulder and ask, "Are you supposed to be Trump Jr.?" Honestly, I suppose that could have worked as well. They don't look
that different. But, I showed him my name tag and that settled it.
The first movie shown was an Italian movie from 1964 called
Castle of Blood. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. In this context, it was fun. It also had a couple of stunningly beautiful Italian women in it (and with one of them, a gratuitous shot of her tits that had no bearing on the plot whatsoever). When it ended, both Tracy and I agreed that we were enjoying ourselves and would do this event again.
The pizza party was between the first and second movies.
This shot I took in the lobby, in which you see Tracy removing an empty piza box, kind of cracks me up. The pizzas had been ordered from
Razzis Pizzeria, which I had never heard of but was good, and I liked that they had both vegetarian (yay for me) vegan (none of that shit for me) and even gluten free options (I don't think they ordered gluten free ones but there were both veggie and vegan pizzas). When we first went to get it, there was a little sign that said, "Please take max 2 slices." And then about halfway through the first, surprisingly long intermission, we were told that there was more left if anyone wanted to go get a third slice, and so I did (Tracy did not).
Tracy had also ordered a large popcorn for the first movie, which she didn't like very much so she only ate a bit of it. I probably at about a third of the bag during the second movie.
The second movie was a 1987 American horror movie called
Retribution, about a guy who attempts suicide and survives, but then also gets possessed by the spirit of a murder victim hell bent on venegeance. This was definitely a bigger crowd pleaser than the first film, although neither Tracy or I liked it quite as much. It was fun enough for this sort of programmed evening.
But, when we found out the third film was a 1985 Mexican horror film we had also never heard of, we agreed to call it a night and skip that one. As we walked back to her car, we talked about how we might both have been more inclined to stay if the event were on a Saturday night, but neither of us really wanted to be out until 10:00 on a Sunday night. And I had to take a shower after I got home, to get all that black spray shit out of my hair.
I washed my hair twice. There's still black kind of stuck to the shower floor. And this morning I noticed a spot of black still not washed off my scalp right at my widow's peak,
after I got out of the shower. I just rubbed it off as best I could. My hair there is slightly darker than normal for the moment. I'll be washing my hair again on Wednesday.
— पांच हजार सात सौ तीन —
[posted 12:30 pm]
