Once a year, 100 teams of five people each dress up in wacky costumes and race shopping carts between popular bars in Portland. The guy who registered my team this year had a penguin costume on hand, so my team called itself: “AntarctiCart.”
So, while most people probably pre-gamed for the race by drinking shots of whiskey and Nesquik or cutting those skirts just a smidge shorter on their dirty nurse outfit, I prepared all morning by watching Nova documentaries on YouTube about Sir Henry Ernest Shackleton.
Sir Henry Ernest Shackleton, star of “Shackleton’s Voyage of Endurance,” survived an entire winter marooned in Antarctic pack ice, which slowly crushed his boat to pieces. My costume involved several cans of sardines and a hat made from an entire fox. No one knew who the hell I was supposed to be. In fact, running through the downtown streets Saturday afternoon surrounded by strippers and boy scouts, I realized I have this awful habit of making elaborate costumes that just confuse people.
Every costume party reaches a point where people are so wasted they can’t identify your costume unless you are clearly dressed as a giant banana or an M&M. But my bad habit goes beyond that. My costumes, I realized, are intentionally confusing and snobby. They say, “Hey, do you get the joke? No? Okay, we probably shouldn’t be friends then. Thanks, that was easy.”
I asked some of my dorkier friends about this habit and a handful of them recognized that they do the exact same thing. In an attempt to quantify the trend, I’ve broken down “Nerdy Costumes That Alienate People” into four distinct categories.
Pun Costumes:
My best/worst costume ever was the year I wrapped myself in a bed sheet, painted lipstick kisses on my neck and affixed a giant foam sword to my side. “I’m a sordid affair!” I shouted to people on the dance floor. “Get it? Sworded?!” Nevermind.
This year my friend Jill and I collaboratively came up with the idea to dress as puns on artist names. Forty-eight hours later, I was desperately lonely at a party, body swathed in a red-and-white picnic blanket splattered with ketchup and mustard (“Jackson Potluck”) while Jill was across town, smoking a cigarette with a unicorn horn strapped to her head (“Andy Narwal”).
Concept Piece Costumes:
My night as Jackson Potluck picked up when I ran into my friend Noah, who was wearing a top hat, a tuxedo jacket and a burlap sack fashioned as a skirt. He was “Trickle Down Economics.” We leaned against the wall and had a really solid conversation about the state budget amidst the Halloween debauchery.
Worse, Carl, my bike-scene friend, tried to make a Halloween costume out of “Greenwashing” one year. He wore a painter’s jumpsuit and carried around green colored cleaning products, but even in sustainable-crazy Portland, no one laughed.
But my friend Alex should win some sort of prize for dressing as “Angst” for Halloween during his high school years in rural Wyoming. He wore lots of black clothing and a frowny face pendant. “Most people were like, are you a goth or are you the Cure?” says Alex, who had to correct bitterly all night: “No, I’m ANGST!”
Costumes that Try to Outsmart the Theme:
The best example of this (besides the future-themed party where I dressed as “dead”) is probably when Angsty Alex showed up at his highschool’s ‘80s decade day dressed as an 80-year old man. No one thought it was cute.
Esoteric Character Costumes:
Jill, of Andy Narwal fame, takes the cake the year she went to a Boston University party dressed as Hester Prynne. “All these dumb guys were asking, ‘Is the A for Alcohol?’ I just gave up. I said I was a superhero.”
