Monster Bash!

When I left home for school, I got rid of much of my childhood business. What I didn’t get rid of, my mother did. This is a parent’s responsibility.

During the 1990s and on into the 2000s, however, first retro-nostalgia toy and gift stores and then eBay popped up to provide Baby Boomers and Gen Xers the opportunity to pine for and purchase long-last treasures from their forgotten and discarded youth.

I bought a copy of all the Schoolhouse Rock videos on DVD, that was before I had children. But once I did have children, hey! Retro and educational. Those are still pretty awesome, nothing hideously dated about those.

At some point in the past fifteen years I fulfilled a desire for a few of the magazines I had enjoyed in my youth, with titles like Dynamite and Pizzazz. The one Dynamite issue I just had to have I found online, the June 1975 issue, which included instructions for a Monster Bash, the ideal monster themed party.

Christopher Lee Black Light
Poster Included!

I thought it was important to have this artifact in the house and left it around for the kids to discover and look at, but that’s not really a thing the kids ever do.

My brother, whom I tried to emulate in so many ways, was inspired by this issue of Dynamite to throw a Monster Bash! including the suggested party games "Pin the Fangs on the Vampire" and recipes for creepy snacks and desserts like "Poisonous Purple Punch" and "Transylvania Treat".

There was also a face painting element, which traumatized me. No one offered to paint my face with scars or fangs or bolts because I was the annoying little brother. One guest arrived late, an exchange student, and he offered to paint my face, but he didn’t understand that this was a monster-themed party. He made me up like a clown, much to the amusement of my brother’s pre-teen friends. I was humiliated. 

Right to left: Rich, Jim, George,
a tribble and a monster.
(October 1978)

A few years later, when I was ten, I threw my own Monster Bash, which was really just an excuse to decorate the family room, have the guys over and eat ice cream. We didn’t play any of the games and we certainly didn’t do any face painting.

I’m not even sure what it all meant. Halloween debuted that year, the original John Carpenter film, and so followed an avalanche of slasher films which I did not watch. I mean, I saw one or two, and they were horrifying and not in a fun way. I’d rather sit up with my brother to watch Hoolihan and Big Chuck, but even that was just to hang out with him. It wasn’t really my bag, except for the comedy sketches.

"Creepy Feely Feelings"
(October 2009)

We did have a few neighborhood Halloween parties, when the kids were small. They bobbed for apples, our creepy snacks were pretty freaking creepy. Once I even dressed up like a mad scientist and we played "Creepy Feely Feelings" where the kids have to touch things in covered bowls like peeled grapes which they are told are eyeballs or dried apricots which they are told are severed ears.

During the pandemic I have been stepping up my outdoor decoration game. I’d usually only have time to get things out the day of trick or treat, but starting in 2020 I started putting things out, a few at a time, starting at the beginning of the month. I wonder what I will wear to hand out candy this year.

Maybe I will dress like a clown.

See also: On Fear

Twentieth Century Revival Party

“It's something you learn after your second theme party: It's All Been Done Before.” - Prior Walter, Angels In America

We used to have parties, lots of parties. Post-show parties, theme parties. My first 1980s Revival Party was in 1989. Once upon a time that would have seemed cutting-edge, but seriously. We’re talking about parties.

I had a premonition of dread regarding NYE 2000, which had as much to do with my personal brain chemistry as it did with politics, culture, and the residual fear that Christ was returning and that we were all totally fucked.

We saw the Canadian art-house film Last Night at the Cedar-Lee in December 1999, an apocalyptic comedy with a mean streak of melancholy (speaking of which, Lars Von Trier entirely cribbed the premise for this movie for his Melancholia only eliminating any trace of humor) which left me feeling refreshed, and positive. The world might end, but it’s going to do that, anyway. At least we have had love.

The USO Hall

I looked forward into the 21st Century with a renewed sense of hope. And we all know how well that’s worked out.

To celebrate the end of the Millennium, on December 31, 1999 (numerologists be damned) we invited our friends to decorate our house for a Twentieth Century Revival Party, assigning a different decade to each room.

A salute to Spiritualism was featured in my office, a Roaring 20s speakeasy in the bathroom. There was a Depression-era soup kitchen in the dining room, in the living room a WWII USO party. Cold War martinis and Hawaiian appetizers in the kitchen, the basement was a psychedelic Sixties happening with brownies, both leaded and unleaded.

The password is "swordfish."

In the hallway upstairs I erected a stack of television screens which played a six-hour curated VHS video of 80s MTV clips. Remember when MTV played music videos? Of course you don’t, no one does.

And the wife’s office included computers featuring newfangled "webcams" of New Year’s Eves in New Orleans, New York and elsewhere, and guests recorded messages for a time capsule we will open on our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

We gathered in the USO Hall for the countdown to the new century (numerologists, shut up) and the best prank which did not happen was when Brian thought of going into the basement and killing the power exactly at midnight, only he didn’t and just told me about it later.

Video Killed the Radio Star

Practically everyone I knew at the time was there. Certainly, almost everyone engaged in our work with Bad Epitaph and Dobama's Night Kitchen. New Year's Eve is fun, but I don't think anyone wanted to be caught without something special to do that night and I am glad so many chose to come to our party, to be with us.

But that was it. Whether an effect of growing up, losing a child, or having living children, we stopped throwing parties at our house. We looked inward. Certainly, my wife and I continued to be social animals, but turning our home into the site of such loud, animated festivities became a thing of the past.

But who knows. We have teenagers now, and they may come up with their own ideas. After all, we are on the threshold of the "New Roaring Twenties."

Happy New Year!