Hellova Halloween
As I mentioned before, they take halloween pretty seriously on this side of the pond. So to give myself a shot at really exploring the culture we headed south to Madison, site of the maddest halloween party in the midwest.It all started with the outfit. As children of the 80's will already have recognised I'm beetlejuice, all credit goes to Liz on the choice of character. Notice the stripy suit, i made that. After an intolerable (for others) amount of moaning, complaining, hours of work, backache, toil etc, i managed to spray paint straight lines down a white jacket and trousers and produce a masterpiece. I have new respect for clothes designers. If i ever see another roll of masking tape in my life i might go into spasm. For those not aquainted with Beetlejuice, he's a rather flamboyant and unpleasent fellow from a comedy horror film who has a penchant for grabbing with crotch, (all in good time). Liz backed me up as the punky Lydia (another character from the film).
Our drive down to Madison was accompanied by a gradual sense of being poisoned from the fumes coming off my sprayed suit. After using all the black spray paint had we moved onto metal spray paint and the piece de resistance anti rust spray as each ran out in turn. The chemical cocktail was combined with the news that the police would be out on the streets of Madison in force - there having been riots the previous year, and a crowd of 20,000 people expected. oh yes. party like its 1999.
The evening kicked off about 7 and I recognised pretty soon that i was going to the love it. Every 5 meters or so, down a mile long street, people were shouting 'beetlejuice! beetlejuice! beetlejuice!', 'hey BJ' 'you are like the most awesome beetlejuice EVER!' etc. It really was a youngest childs dream. Families out on the streets to look at the costumes, photographed me incessently "(and others admittedly) as did a chinese tourist who wanted to have a photo with me - her eyes almost popping out of her sockets when I spoke Mandarin to her. People tapped on the windows of restaurants as i passed to take yet more photos - and for a few precious hours, I, Nigel Peter Harrison was a star. Actually it wasn't so different from being in China thinking about it, the difference being you actually understand what people are 
shouting at you. The first bar I went to, I had the temerity to proclaim that Beetlejuice's get free drinks and it worked! at first at least. After a few we wandered up and down the strip seeing and being seen. Probably half the people on the the street, which was pretty much packed, were in costumes. Although often, not particularly halloweeny, apparently just dressing up is the important bit. So there were contingents of jocks dressed as beer cans and that kind of thing. I 'hung' (check out my command of the local venacular) with Kiss, Fruit of the Loom, the cops, the fake cops and eventually completely destroyed my vocal cords doing a poor voice immitation of BJ. There is only so many times you can say 'you're working with a professional here' in one evening.Then it was back to a bar for dancing until kicking out time, at which point everyone flooded 
onto the street. The police had erected huge floodlights to light the street hoping to discourage bad behaviour. At the end of the night in order to move everyone on mounted police rode through the crowd, spread out and then back again to try and push the revellers back down the street. At the sight of this one portion of the crowd morphed into a bunch of english soccar hooligans and began jumping up and down chanting at the police. People like me, stood by the side to see what happened. It was one of those times when you wonder whether having the police there really just stirs things up. Eventually hearing idiots shouting idiotic things and engaging in a dance up and down the street with increasingly frustrated looking police we called it a night. Having no place to stay we reverted to type and in true tramp fashion slepted in the back of the car in a multistory car park - classy.
I'll just finish up with some photos. Heading to Chicago in a couple of days so probably will have something to report from there......
Here come the cops
Fruit of the loom
posted by justplainnigel @ 1:05 PM
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