I drove around in the rain and horrendous traffic tonight doing my food shopping for our party so I don't have to deal with it Saturday. We're still cleaning house (dusting, uggh!), still doing a bit of decorating (got lots of orange mini lights this year, looks awesome and will look great in the photos). This is our 11th consecutive Halloween party and everyones food tastes have changed drastically over the years (are we all getting old or what?). Our main party staples used to be lots of chocolate, Halloween candy like Indian Corn (tastes better than candy corn), Velveeta and rotelle dip (nightmare to clean up and takes about 3 hours to melt in a crock pot), chips and more chips.
Somehow we've evolved to things like fruit and cheese, crackers and carrots. Our music has evolved also, from just Halloween staples (Monster Mash, anything vaguely Halloween sounding), then to 80's dance stuff (my choice :-), and lately to a combination of alternative stuff, dance, acid jazz, and a few spooky Halloween picks thrown in. I've spent the night listening to hours of my own CD's and downloaded dance mixes, etc. trying to mentally pick through it all. I've always obsessed like crazy over picking just the right music, though a lot of times I'm not sure anyone is even listening. Having a CD burner takes some of the stress off of me (recording 5+ hours of music can be a pain, I used to even have a mixer and mixed the stuff!)...
The last few years I've gone through and grabbed all of my favorites off of my tons of CD's and compiled them onto just a few to save time. Then each year I add some new stuff for variety and rearrange the stuff I already have.
MUSIC RECOMMENDATIONS:
For general eerie haunted house background, check out any of Midnight Syndicates CD's, Vampyre is their newest. You could just let it play over and over, or add the others for an evening of creepy music.
80's are always good, especially for dancing, snag "Best Of's" if you don't own too much original stuff. Good groups - Missing Persons, Flock of Seagulls, Book of Love, Devo, The Cars, Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, Nena, early B-52's, David Bowie.
For sophisticated crowds, for more talking than dancing, check out the Ultra Chilled compilations, cool acid jazz with a beat. Also Massive Attack, Delerium, Supreme Beings of Leisure, Mono.
For a Goth party, the compilation This Is Goth is good. Groups like Switchblade Symphony, This Ascension, Mira, Shroud. Portishead is a spooky non-Goth addition.
Good general purpose party music: Garbage (Beautiful Garbage excellent), Bif Naked, Sinead O'Connor, Poe's Haunted, the Snealker Pimps, Dido, the Breeders (Last Splash is still the best), the B-52s's Cosmis Thing is a party on a CD, a little Alice Cooper (Nightmare of From the Inside) add a little spookiness, as does Siouxsie.
FOOD FOR ADULTS (easy to serve stuff, feeds about 30 people):
Green or red grapes, with bags of already cubed cheeses
Baby carrots (already peeled and washed in the bag) and a veggie dip
Popcorn (buy it pre-cooked if you don't want to smell it all night)
Flavored chips that don't require dip are easy
Crackers and dip (I got Wheat Thins and some of that Brummel & Brummel fruit spread)
Got to have a couple of bags of Halloween colored M&M's
One or two more bags of miniature candies (stick with chocolate, Snicker's, Reese's, give the leftovers to the trick-or-treaters)
We tell our friends this is a BYOB party, but we get a couple of liters of Coke and Diet Coke, plus a bag of ice for everyone.
Plastic cups, plates and spooky paper napkins for easy cleanup.
For some reason I hardly ever do Halloween costumes actually based on anyone in particular, ditto for this year. After physically injuring myself walking all four corners of Memorial City mall (which is half in the dark due to construction), and going into every store that might have any kind of women's clothing, I end up buying and outfit at Foley's that's twice what I wanted to spend and not "really" a costume, but it was too cool to pass up. Sheer black lace, high necked blouse and matching long black lace skirt (by Be, a new brand for Foley's). Never could find any big clunky Goth shoes like I wanted (for less than $100), so it's back to my own pointy boots this year, hope the hooks don't snag on the skirt.
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I tried two slightly different versions of eye makeup (so I'm lopsided in the pics above), and I found a pair of cute black cat ears that I'd bought a few years ago and never worn, I think they look cute with the wig. (And they might help keep it on ;-) I'm glad the party's at our house, I'd hate to go traipsing out in the rain with this whole outfit on, it's been flooding all week...
Another reason for the makeup test is to make sure nothing makes my eyes swell up, I have hyper-sensitive skin. So far, so good... I used to line the inside of my eyes when I was younger (while wearing contacts even), but alas no more. Just lining the inside corners is a gamble.
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Makeup used for this experiment:
For shadows on eyes, MAC Black Tied (glittery black), and MAC Electra (silver frost). On eyelid - Urban Decay Vapor (flourescent blue white), and on brow Anna Sui 002 (softer shimmery white, used on right eye). I tried the MAC electra for lid and brow but it was way too shiny for my prominent browbone (used on left eye). Looked good on the lids, but the Urban Decay popped more on my deepset eyes.
Lined with Lancome's eyeliner in Noir then covered over with MAC Nehru (matte black), and the inside corners with Almay's eye pencil in Precise Black. I'll probably do mascara or fake lashes for the big party, but didn't want to mess with them now. Eyebrows are done with Maybelline Natural brow pencil (I think I'll go with the natural arch, rather than the pointy one).
I'll use some real foundation and concealer too, for now I just went with Hard Candy's Crystal Pressed Powder which is almost white but not too clownish. Lips were done in and old Estee Lauder Double Matte color, Berry Buff. They had a little more shimmery one in a darker version of the same shade called Fatale which I almost used, but I think the matte looks better. And not that I actually need to accent my cheekbones, but I tried doing a little bit of shadow on my right side with another old Trish McEvoy color, Enhancer 8 (sort of a purple brown shade).
And despite all my best efforts at skin care this week... I have a damn pimple! (And yes, I know, I own way too much makeup ;-)
I've decided I shouldn't try to do Alice Cooper as a costume this year. I'm not thin enough yet (I've got the cheekbones, but I'm not gaunt enough to do Alice justice, IMHO), and I have a really killer leather motorcycle jacket and pants that would just really freak out my friends, but I need to stay on the Atkins diet a little longer to be able to fit back into them. This pic was taken in my 20's when I actually owned a motorcycle (a black Suzuki Intruder) and so of course I had to get the accessories to go with it to look cool.
I'd kind of like to do a Perky Goth sort of thing (ala Switchblade Sisters) with the pony tails and a cute outfit and shoes or boots with lots of buckles, etc. My hair is long enough, but it's pretty fine and so far I haven't been happy with how it looks pulled up. I'm terrible at doing my hair, I have no clue what to do with hairsprays and gels (I hate the stuff). I think it's because my mom always went to the salon every week to have her hair done so no one ever really showed me how. I looke around for a wig online and haven't found anything like what I'm looking for, though Divaluxe� has some nice clip-ons and falls (I think it may be too late to order them for this Halloween, though). I bought a terrific long straight black and electric blue wig last year, I think I'm going to play with it and see if I can style it the way I want it.
The shoes should be easy, and some kind of funky hose. I haven't found a dress I like yet, though. I dragged my husband to Erotic Cabaret Boutique� in Montrose this weekend and they had a few "maybes" but most of them were Extra Small. They had some really great long goth dresses and capes, but I wanted to do short this year. I even thought of braving a corset or waist-cincher to really look good, but I didn't find any short enough to let me breath. I think I'm missing a vertebra, I have the shortest waist I've ever seen, anything high-waisted hits me in the rib cage (sigh).
My back-up costume will probably be Magenta from Rocky Horror, I can do a very convincing version of her. I used to go and hang out with the local RHPS cast in high school and college, and back when I had time to sew had made a black satin maid's dress and even the gold space outfit (both long gone). I looked for a French maid's outfit, but the only ones they had were way too sheer. I always wait till the last minute to get my costume together. I got lucky last year and found a great dress at Foley's (on sale even!) that I used for a "classy Elvira" outfit. I got the beehive wig and everything, it was a pain in the butt from the wig down to the heels, but it looked really great.
Most of this week I've been in kind of a somber, serious mood (PMS, threats of hurricanes, who knows...) and I've had three Switchblade Symphony classics on the turntable (and in the car)�
The Three Calamaties
Bread and Jam for Frances (this is killer Halloween party music)
Serpentine Gallery
Follwed up by two by Mira� (Projekt Darkwave group)
Mira's self-titled debut
Apart
By Thursday I felt the need to perk up a bit and have been spinning the following on my CD turntable:
Pizzicato Five's CD single Five by Five , which isn't actually my favorite of their
many EP's, but I was in the mood to hear Twiggy vs. James Bond
Sacrebleu by Dimitri from Paris, more clever loungey
dance music with a sophisticated French twist (good party music)
Macy Gray On How Life Is (you either love her or she annoys the
shit out of you, but then I think all five of these artists are sort of
that way, I have a friend who actively despises Pizzicato Five)
Sons and Lovers by Hazel O'Connor, star of the New Wave classic Breaking Glass, which also has a killer soundtrack album
And the fabulous best of album, Death to the Pixies
I saw 17 year old Avril Lavigne and her band on one of the late night shows (Letterman?) last week and was stunned by how "real" she seemed compared to most of her musical contemporaries. The drummer had scrawled "Pixies rule" across the front of his drums and it made me very nostalgic, especially watching Avril hop up and down hyperactively like I used to circa '80 when I went out dancing. I had heard one of the songs (Sk8er Boi) from her debut album Let Go on the radio and the DJ didn't say who it was, but from what I'd read about her, I figured it must be her. Not to sound old, but it was so nice to see a young white girl who dressed, danced and sang like a normal teen girl. She didn't dress like a porn star, she didn't try and sound like Mariah Carey, her music seemed very honest and straightforward, like she actually was listening to the lyrics. I hope her style (of being herself) catches on.
OK, I've begun the month of October by exceeding my website bandwidth for September (usually doesn't happen till October, damn...). Oh well, it's hell having a popular website sometimes. Being masochistic, I'm still adding pics to the site...
Looked at my referral logs, for some reason I'm getting hits from Jehovahs-Witness.com (huh?), but also from the Democratic Underground which is very cool.
Finally got my husband to toss enough stuff out to get my car in the garage. We set several things out by the curb, they were gone before we finished. Here are our yin-yang cars stuffed into our not-so-roomy garage (the black one is mine, of course).
Again we're ready for a hurricane that never made it. According to the news, it's moving into pretty much the entire Louisiana coastline as I type, we're supposed to get "thunderstorms" this afternoon. Spoke with my poor friend in New Orleans earlier tonight on the phone, luckily her husband is off Thursday so he'll at least be home with her and their three cats to run around and put buckets about the house (it's a 100 years old, it's got a few leaks). Hopefully they won't catch it too bad.
It's been a strange week, I've had three watches stop working. I think I own six, 4 Fossils, a Citizen and a Bewitched watch I don't wear. One of the working Fossils has a silver on silver Batman insignia on it so I don't wear it much either (too hard to read). You know you're a Goth when you manage to kill a watch that works off of light - my poor brand new Citizen, no battery needed, ha! The saleswoman assured me it really didn't need much light to stay charged, but apparently it needs more than I can give it. It's my "dress" watch (and again sort of hard to read) so I don't wear it every day. I've been charging it with with my table lamp the last few days.
We had to rush our 16 year old Lab mix to the vet's at 2:30 in the morning last week, she developed a urinary tract infection out of nowhere (she just had her physical days before and was fine), so we got to wake the vet up to come in and check on her. It's an excellent clinic, like 2 miles from our house and someone's there 24/7. She seems to be feeling better now after about a week of sulfa drugs and spoiling.
My aunt Connie died last week. Her husband died last year and her sons moved her from Beaumont to Houston, and she pretty much gave up eating and passed on at the age of 79. They brought her back to Beaumont for the funeral. She was a nice lady, though I haven't visited her much on a regular basis since I lived with my parents. She was my dad's only sibling.
What else... we have gotten all of our Halloween stuff down from the attic (see pic above behind car), I guess now that the storm seems to be passing us by we can start decorating the house. Went by Old Navy the other day and they had Halloween clothing! I bought a couple of pairs of lounge pants, one with spider webs and one with JOL's, very cute. They had some darling tees but they were a little too junior-cut for me.
Off to bed, I've been up since noon and that's a long day for me. Also my back is killing me for some unknown reason, I feel like I've eaten too much or missed a BC pill or something. Bleccch...
Well, we're all in limbo again for the newest hurricane, Lili. The weather "forecasters" (ha!) have been changing her course on an hourly basis it seems... Last word was she'll plough right into the middle of Louisiana, but we'll still get lots of rain and high winds. Or she, might head more towards Texas.
Who knows... we've got our batteries and bottled water (and non-perishable snacks and junk food). I have to get up early in the morning so we can finishe clearing the garage out (never finished from Isidore), to try and squeeze my car in. I've been packing boxes and padded envelopes the entire day (with a one hour break to watch Buffy), for my Ebay auction stuff, so hopefully I can get all of it out to the post office before the floods and other exciting stuff begin.
Stay tuned, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel...
FYI ladies, October is Breast Cancer Awareness month (see the link on the right sidebar and ones below). Sort of a busy time to get a physical, but a good time to make an appointment if you haven't been to the doctor in awhile. Once a year, whether you need it or not... Ironically, mine and my husband's annual physicals were scheduled for September but the doctor couldn't make it so now we're at the end of October.
To all the young people (and too busy people) out there, if you've got insurance take advantage of it and get all of your annual checkups. Being self-employed now, I no longer have nice, affordable company insurance and have to pay for my own now, so use it while you've got it. I've lost too many relatives and friends too young to diseases that could have been prevented.
The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation�
National Breast Cancer Awareness Month�
Help fund mammograms with just a click�
