I have put serious work into a halloween costume exactly once in my life. This is that story.
The at the time president of Eureka was a big believer in United Way and he pushed that shit hard. For a whole month there was this huge company wide focus, with one big event each week. Week 1 was a kick off picnic. There wasn't a ton going on, mainly just food, they also had a don't forget the lyrics contest. Is that show still on TV? Can I just assume people know what I'm talking about? Well the concept is they play some snippet of a song and then you have to not forget the lyrics. This struck me as a no brainer for me to sign up for. After hearing a song more than five or so times, I can usually remember a substantial amount of the lyrics with just a small prompt.
That, apparently, didn't help me round one. I think I got some sort of country song? Luckily round one was apparently just a practice round. Round two I got Love Shack, which, if you didn't know, is a little old place where, we can get together. There was apparently only one round of actual competition before the finals. Four people were supposed to advance from that round. Only two people (including me) managed to make it out of round two. They really wanted four people for the finals though, so they let two random volunteers get back in, which seemed unfair to me. In the finals, instead of just being assigned a random song, you got to pick from a list. Instead of some sort of random selection process, or, I don't know, rewarding the people that actually remembered the lyrics in round two, they just asked for volunteers to go first. Well I jumped on that shit right away. I mean, what if there was some super easy song, was I gonna let some sucker get it? Fuck and no.
A quick perusal of the lift left my choices at summer of 69 by bryan adams and some other song. I'm tempted to say the other song was thunder road by the boss, but I feel like there's a 0% chance I would have passed that up. Summer of 69 was a song I was briefly enamored with, I think because of a punk cover of it I have. This meant as opposed to songs I hear on the radio and sort of know, I knew the lyrics to this song and could have gone off with no prompt. The format for the finals was you just kept going as long as you could and whoever got the farthest into their song won. The prompt they gave I think just went through "I got my first real six string" I went from there all the way to somewhere around "standing on your mamas porch" before forgetting some small thing. That was more than all the other contestants combined. pwnt!
Week two was some sort of oktober fest thing. The only competitions involved cooking. Good news for me! I entered in the desert category. German chocolate cake made from scratch (with scratch made frosting) cause that's what winners do.
Week three was a costume contest. My thought process going into this was that a costume somehow vacuum related would win. I suspected no one would come in anything truly spectacular, so a vacuum costume would win entirely cause it'd seem clever (CAUSE IT'S A VACUUM CLEANER COMPANY, GET IT!?). For reference it looked like this:
Let's break it down
The base of the outfit is the cheapest black sweatsuit wal-mart sold
The helmet is made out of the top of a Capture
Glued to the pre dust cup filter cover off a Surface Max
The mask was the exhaust filter cover off a surface max with some elastic glued to it. It was quite painful.
The chest piece was a bag cover off a Smart Vac
The hoses you see holding it on are two hoses off the above mentioned Capture, here's a closer look
The belt buckle is the spin duster cleaner control dealy off a Capture (we were doing a ton of testing on those at the time, which meant parts were plentiful). Tragically I couldn't find a good picture. That thing on my left is a spin duster. I pulled it out like a sword on stage to the delight of all gathered there. The belt is made out of vacuum belts. CLEVER! The knee pieces were dust cups off a pet lover lite cut in half with foil glued to the back
It's unfortunate that the picture doesn't show the cape very well as it is, by a wide margin, the best part of the costume. It's three cloth bags off sanitaire commerical units cut up, sewn together, then sewn onto the hoody. If I were less lazy (and, to be clear, I'm very lazy) I'd goto my storage unit and dig it up to get a better picture, instead, just imagine if the bag on this was a cape.
I called the character The Boss, see cause it said the boss on the chest plate. Did you know The Boss has a tagline?
"Who knows what dirt lurks embedded in carpets, The Boss knows."
Guess how many people at work got that joke. Did you know The Boss has a backstory?
In a world
Malcom Magnificent had spent his whole life in the Sad Meadows Orphanage. It had always been hard for Malcom to make friends, anytime he did they ended up getting adopted while poor Malcom was left behind. He was not a very attractive child. To curry favor with the Orphan Keepers (is that what you call someone who runs an orphanage?) he would clean the orphanage. All too often, vacuums were his only friends. Sometimes, it seemed he could hear them talking to him, but he had enough trouble fitting in and knew that mentioning this to anyone would only isolate him more.
On his eighteenth birthday he was called into the orphan keepers office.
"Malcom, it seems your time here is at an end and I have something to tell you that I should have told you long ago."
"What's that Orphan Keeper Sir?"
"Malcom you have parents, they never wanted to give you up for adoption, you got mixed up with the child of an unfit mother. Sadly by the time we figured this out you were already ten and you did such a good job cleaning that we really didn't want to lose you. The council decided the best thing to do was to not tell you and glue fake sores to you in your sleep so that prospective parents would think you had leprosy."
"So I'm not hideously ugly?"
"No, Malcom, you're a winner, now go and meet your parents!"
Malcom managed to suppress the unbelievable rage he felt towards the Orphan Keeper and ran off gleefully to have the tearful reunion with his parents that he had always dreamed off. He was just blocks away from their house when tragedy struck. Some sort of ray came out of the sky, demolishing what was to be his new home and vaporizing his parents. Standing in the wreckage in tears, he did the only thing he knew how to do. As he stood there, vacuuming up his parents ashes, something changed inside him. He could feel powers welling up inside him and for the first time he acknowledged the voice of the vacuum.
"Today you are no longer Malcom, you are The Boss. Go forth and fight crimes with whatever powers you feel a vacuum bestows upon you!"
Did you know The Boss has a theme song?
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Guess what the odds are that you'll ever hear it. Here's a bonus picture of me accepting my award:
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