A Bunch of My Costumes
80s Plastic Greg Costume
Any child of the 80s remembers those cheap plastic costumes from the big box stores. You wanted to be your favorite cartoon or movie character but what you ended up with was a sad reproduction that forced you use every bit of your imagination to complete the transformation.
A thin plastic mask was held on by a tiny elastic band but a tighter bond was created when the tiny nostril and mouth holes proved ineffective and made the now damp inside surface stick to your face. But the worst part of all was the abomination you wore on your torso. A one-size-fits-strange jumpsuit that for some inexplicable reason had a photo and name of the character you were trying to impersonate right on the chest! The good costumes at least gave you limbs that looked the character but the some just put blocks of colors on them.
I attempted to recreate this underwhelming experience with my Greg costume. If you look closely I’m wearing the same shirt three times. It’s very meta and very strange.
Who has two thumbs and likes ruining a perfect Greg costume? This guy! (His name is also Greg.)
(Left) Me in the 80s dressed as Stripe from Gremlins…obviously! (Right) I still have my ET costume from 1982! Note the graphic on the chest with logo and the neon green legs that ruined a four-year-old Greg’s dream of being a short, beige alien with a potbelly.
Attack Ad Costume
The year was 2008, Obama vs McCain. The political attack ads were ugly, very ugly. I got to thinking, why should politicians be the only ones attacked? How about unsuspecting partygoers? Well, that’s exactly what I did. I creeped on the social media profiles of everyone who RSVPed to my friends’ Halloween party, pulling down pictures and posts. I was looking for anything that I could use against them. I created an attack ad image for all of them and placed them in a TV screen that I wore around my waist. The top of the TV flipped up so I could quickly switch out the ad for each political opponent. At the bottom of each ad I included the legal disclaimer that it was “Paid for by friends to elect Greg Dietzenbach”
The best part of this costume was that I didn’t know a lot of the people going to this party and they didn’t know me. So when they arrived at the party they saw me wearing a suit with a “Vote Dietzenbach” pin and then they looked down to see an ad of me attacking them. In their mind, the sole purpose of this complete stranger’s costume was to specifically attack them. It was confusing and hilarious. It turned into an incredibly uncomfortable yet hilarious joke. The biggest surprise of the night is that I ended up making several new friends.
Here are all the attack ads I created. I purposely made this image too small to read because it’d be unfair to attack them twice.
Co-Worker’s Car Costume
For my company’s Halloween party I went as my co-worker’s Buick Park Avenue. This burgundy behemoth had become a legend among the people at my work. Why you ask? It turned like a garbage barge and sometimes smelled like one too. If you tried to use the passenger window it would drop dangerously down into the door like some kind of a reverse guillotine. To create it I took several pictures of the Buick and photoshopped them into a flat layout that could be folded up into the shape of her car. The hardest part of the costume was traveling to several thrift shops before I found the perfect velour suit to match the interior. When I got in the driver’s seat to move the car for the above photo I disappeared into the seat and, weirdly, felt as if I was a newborn reentering the womb.
Joker Stairs Costume
It was the Fall of 2019, everyone was talking about the Joker and those damn stairs. I hadn’t watched the movie but I wanted to try and recreate the famous scene. I made the cardboard stairs and the creepy glove puppet the night before the Halloween party. I made the trailer the next day just to amp up the bizarreness of it all. See the original trailer here.
