I’ll go on the record stating that the most important all-purpose ingredient for a Halloween costume is dental floss.
Floss has many excellent qualities: you probably already own some (convenience!), it’s cheap, it’s strong. It’s almost certainly a better plan to use dental floss to hang something around your neck or dangle it from your wrist than it is to attempt shenanigans with tape, glue, or safety pins.
The first time I discovered the critical importance of floss was when I dressed up as the tooth fairy for Halloween back in…maybe 2008? It was primarily thematic until I discovered how practical it was for hanging a cardboard tooth around my neck. Floss is easy to tie in knots and unlikely to break; it’s smooth and thin enough to make its way through tiny holes without tearing something like, say, saran wrap, which I may be wearing later as part of a fake window.
I wasn’t going to dress up – I’m an adult, it’s been a long week, today is Thursday, it’s raining, etc. But at this point in my Halloween career I have a costume box that lives in my closet year round, so when I decided to attempt a party after work tonight I lifted it down from the top shelf (out fell a llama onesie, which was soft, and a pointy crown, which was not) and rummaged through. The window – left over from a stained glass window costume, subsequently used as part of a last-minute “bug smashed against a screen” costume in conjunction with a pair of orange wings that have served me well but are now quite droopy – needed a new sheath of saran wrap because the floss had ripped a path through it (nobody’s perfect), but seems like it will hold – and anyway, it’s part of a thunderstorm costume, so it’s just verisimilitude if it’s broken. The wind was too powerful!
I’ve been a storm before – 2014 – and yes, it does feel like cheating to repeat…but only in the same way that having a signature karaoke song feels like cheating, in that it’s something I tried to avoid until I realized how convenient it was. The previous iteration didn’t include the window, and I have some items in my bag (yellow plastic folder, multicolored scarf, tinfoil) for potential transformation into lightning bolts, clouds, and a rainbow, so at least I hope to be singing in a different style. I’ve retired the necklace of birds and lightning bolt earrings from the previous storm, though the base of the costume remains largely unchanged.
Now if I can find some blue streamers so that I have fake rain as well as all of NYC’s real rain tonight, I’ll be set.
