Tag Archives: costumes

Dressing up

Leave a reply

I’m missing Halloween at school this year. I’ll be out of town for a meeting and so it will be the first Halloween in years that I won’t be dressing up. It’s funny, I feel both disappointed and relieved about this.

Disappointed more for the opportunity to see my students letting loose with their imaginative costumes. Relieved because while I take the time to really dress up, I’m not a huge fan of it. In fact, I’m going to a fancy birthday party this weekend and I don’t even like dressing up for that.

To me, dressing up is a major effort, and when I’m not wearing clothes for comfort, when I’m putting on a costume of any kind, be it Halloween, formal wear, or even a tie, I feel like I’m putting on a persona that doesn’t belong to me.

I know some people love it. I know people seek out opportunities to ‘put on’ another outfit and it excites them. Not me. I feel fake. I’ve never enjoyed using clothing to somehow change how I’m presenting myself.

I recently found an old photo of me at my uncle and aunts wedding. I was probably 4 or 5 years old, and the moment I saw the photo I remembered hating my outfit. In the photo I look miserable, and you can’t see my bow tie because I’m pulling on it when the photo was taken. I don’t remember anything about the wedding itself other than it was in Trinidad and I had never seen large hills (growing up in Barbados) and so I was amazed by the ‘mountains’. Besides mountains, the only other childhood memory from that trip is hating to be dressed up. So even in some of my youngest memories, dressing up wasn’t something I enjoyed.

No Halloween dress up for me this year. I’m sorry I won’t be there for the kids, but a little part of me is celebrating that I don’t have to dress up.

Halloween fun (again)

Last year I shared my Halloween Fun post about the high school principal’s costume contest. The theme was TV shows/sitcoms from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. Well our Carol Burnette Show lip sync of a skit was the clear winner, and so this year my team got to pick the theme. We chose Super Heroes.

We lost a principal, Rissa, to retirement and Judy stepped in. Stephanie, who chose the theme, also chose The Greatest American Hero as our hero. We decided that all 3 of us would play the hero, rather than playing different characters in the show, and yesterday we took a few photos in costume at lunch.

After 20 minutes of photo editing in PowerPoint (where I took the background off of a few pictures), and a few more minutes finding a couple computer screen wallpaper backgrounds to superimpose us onto, I had what I needed to embed us into the opening credits of the show.

When I got home from I spent about 40 minutes in iMovie and came up with this:

A few editing tricks I used were: a simple smashed glass sound byte and an image of a broken glass sticker for the crash; slowing down the video clips of the hero flying; and, reversing the clip of the hero falling back so it looked like he was getting up.

The odds of us winning the contest 2 years in a row is almost zero, and this was far less effort than we put in last year, but we had fun and I think we will get a few laughs with our attempt.

Happy Halloween to you all, enjoy the festivities.

—

(Setting this to publish at noon, after our submission to the contest.)

Halloween fun

For the past few years our high school Principals and Vice Principals have run a fun Halloween costume contest. It often includes elaborate photos and even skits. The theme this year was TV shows/sitcoms from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. I have two other principals in my building and one of them suggested we get together to compete. The Carol Burnette Show was selected and we dressed up for a Momma’s Family skit about playing the board game ‘Sorry’.

We decided to lip sync a part of the skit. I set up two cameras, and with the help of a teacher at lunch on Friday, we ran through the skit twice (a bit more than that with a false start the second time. It took less than 30 minutes from set up to finish.

Saturday morning I spent just over 2 hours editing and here is the result:

It’s fun putting together something like this. I watched it later and had a few more ideas to add, but rather than spending way too much time making minuscule adjustments, I ended up deciding that it’s good enough. It was fun and it’s done.

Happy Halloween everyone. Enjoy the spirit of dressing up and having fun with it.