The Art of Becoming
Costumes, Disability, and Whatever We Want
About a year ago, I came across a piece of art online that would have altered my self-perception when I was a kid, but I can’t find it, so I’ll have to describe: it was a joyfully-cartoonish series of panels depicting adorable vampires, ghosts, and witches with varied mobility aides, including forearm crutches like mine, and it said something like, “Costumes are for everyone! Incorporate your mobility aides or don’t, it’s up to you.”
I stared at that bit of art for some time, thinking about how soothing that would have been (and still is now, in a different way) to the child I was who always put her all into transforming into someone else, or, more accurately, brought the parts of myself I actually liked to the fore while that visible disability could take a back seat. I wore a pink princess dress with hoops under the skirt and sleeves puffed out to the sky for years, until my stint in a wheelchair after my operation when I was nine necessitated that I was a crash-test dummy. Despite the lack of traditional feminine glamor, I was actually excited about it. Crash-test dummies were big that year (because the 90’s were fucking weird) so there were several walking around and I was by far the most authentic.)
Quick aside for a shoutout to my friend Neely who went as Dracula’s Credit Card: ah, childhood in the America of an economic surplus.
The year after that, I became enamored with some unnamed supervillianess that stole my heart when I saw her in miniature-drawing form as part of the wrapper on a pack of Bazooka gum. What? Odd life decision to see this and think I want to turn into her, but probably even stranger in a more delightful way that my aunt Soledad was a gifted seamstress who constructed that costume with aplomb. It didn’t matter that no one knew I was this particular star of a Bazooka gum-wrapper comic because I looked Maleficent-majestic.
Then came sixth grade, and one of the most surreal moments of my life thus far. Again thanks to my Aunt Soledad, I was Cleopatra that year, but while the Egyptian queen was inexplicably huge among my peers at that time, no one else had a costume like this: a shimmering gold floor-length toga-style gown with a long slit and a gold snake crown to match it. I was late to school that day, and by the time I’d arrived for first-period math, the class had already voted on who was going to represent us in the grade-wide costume contest that would take place in the cafeteria later.
When I arrived, though, everyone gasped, and started talking with intoxicating incoherence about how no costume could top this one. Before I could even express emotion about missing the vote, my class started protesting in my favor. “What do you guys think?” Mr. Evans asked, a bit puzzled by this sudden shift in mood. “Should we redo our vote?
At that moment, one that I still can’t believe, the entire class broke into a chant: “reVOTE! REVOTE! REVOTE!”
And so it was decreed, I would represent our class. I didn’t win the grade-wide costume contest (I think some other Cleopatra did, she had the hair), but that extraordinary show of group appreciation was better than any physical prize.
I didn’t discover group-or-paired costumes until college, when by best friend donned a legitimately terrifying rasputin mask and cloak, and I found a sailor dress in Goodwill that was identical to one that Anastasia Romanov wore in a black-and-white photo I cannot retrieve. (Images on the internet are not doing me favors today).
The next year, Nathan and my other best friend Steph and me were a trio of pirates, complete with fake mustaches which, in a find for the ages, I was able to acquire in a convincingly natural red. In a show of how convincing we were that was both terrible and vindicating, a car full of frat boys shouted that we were, “a bunch of butt-pirates!” presumably meaning to insult our fey ways of being, but as “effeminate dude” was the aesthetic ideal for all three of us, this was a compliment in the extreme. A water gun filled with rum completed the effect.
Unfortunately, that was not going to be my last run-in with Iowa City’s worst, by which we mean aggressive white frat boys. The year that my then-partner gifted me with the expensive and very real deep green corset required for Poison Ivy from Batman: The Animated Series, I was also required to wear a floor-length khaki-colored trench coat outdoors because Iowa cold does not fuck around. I had the pointy green boots, and I had henna’d my hair to up the red factor to the appropriately cartoon-seductress degree, but the coat covered what the corset showed and I couldn’t help thinking that was why this asshole could shout: “she went as a CRIPPLE for Halloween!”
I can’t say why this moment still bothers me, sixteen years later. Maybe it’s because that was the first Halloween after my father died and I’d been so relieved I could enjoy things like costumes that this bigoted slur destroyed me. Maybe it was because I’d wanted to badly to buy fake ivy to wrap around my crutches and didn’t, and I felt like that made me a less legitimate representation of my favorite pop culture eco terrorist. Maybe it was because transforming into a sexy supervillain was supposed to fix something and it didn’t. Maybe it’s because, and this is a fortunate one, it’s the only time anyone’s ever called me a cripple.
The frat boy wasn’t the reason I left Iowa City but I was certainly relieved to be away from them when we moved to Austin in 2007. At that time, tech was just beginning to burgeon as an industry there and concerns that the city would become what it’s become were brewing, but things remained delightfully weird. That Halloween, I was the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, in a room-filling red petticoat, shiny red corset-style top, and a crown I don’t quite remember. I wanted to buy lawn flamingos, saw off the heads, and adhere them to my crutches, but I’m no crafter.
The next costume I remember took place at my grad program’s Halloween in July, which is precisely the kind of event that a summer Children’s Lit masters program would stand behind. I employed the same red petticoat to become Little Red Riding Hood, a character and fairy tale I had become obsessed with. (I will never tire of scholarship on Little Red Riding Hood in her various incarnations.)
Costumes after that were sadly mundane affairs built around a single object: a Viking helmet, a pair of realistic-looking vampire fangs I couldn’t easily speak in. For a stretch, there, I lost my faith in transformation and just…didn’t.
I got my faith back this year, but I didn’t know what to do with it, until the Twitter account @fascinate, which showcases an invigorating array of fascinating things, on blessed me with this photo of a maple rose moth:
I had that feeling again, the one that hadn’t swept through me for years: I need to become this! and so I set about finding all the fuzziest forms of wearable baby-pink plus the requisite fuzzy yellow backing. I even bought reams of fuzzy baby pink and lime green fabrics to make wings, only to discover, after a glue-soaked defeat, that, as mentioned, I am no crafter. I was, however, already the owner of glittery pink Docs who had clearly been waiting for this moment.
The best costume advice I’ve ever received is, “Take something you already own that you love and build a costume around that.” (I might have forgotten to mention that the aforementioned red petticoat I had for the Queen of Hears and Red Riding Hood had long been one of my favorite articles, especially for Valentine’s Day.)
Here’s to life as more magnificent versions of ourselves, whenever the urge strikes.