Way-Out Wednesday: Oh A Wiseguy, Eh?!

Welcome to a tardy Way-Out Wednesday!



Completely off topic, but saying the word "tardy" simultaneously makes me A.) snicker uncontrollably, like I'm getting away with saying something slightly unkosher, because apparently I'm in 7th grade and B.) gives me the heebie jeebies because it freaks my mind with a "holy shit, I'm late to class!" mini flashback feeling, because apparently I'm in 7th grade.

Speaking of rocking those "back in the day" flashbacks, today's pick for Way-Out Wednesday totally makes me want to be a kid on Halloween again. Also, today's pick totally makes say who am I kidding, I'd buy this for myself NOW for Halloween, even if I AM about 18 years past my trick-or-treating expiration date. I am, of course, talking about this fantastic Vintage 50's Tough Guy Thug Mask:





Badass, no? Why, soitenly! The 10 year old version of me was never cool enough to wear a mask like this for Halloween. Hell, the 33 year old version of me isn't cool enough to wear a mask like this. Cosa Nerdstra. Maybe if I get the old-timey gangster lingo down and add just a little bit o'moxie, I might stand a chance at pulling it off--or else it's coitens for me. Aha! See that? See what I did just there? My inner thug is ready to...you know... pop a cap? Whatever. Now you try, or you'll be sleeping wit da fishes, ya big galoot!



Yep. Just as I suspected. Still not cool.

Tricks Or Treats!....I Got A Rock.

Happy Halloween! I hope everyone has a rockin' night, chock full o' candy, treats and no tricks! Seems everyone and their mother has been writing about Halloween over the past few weeks. Well, OK, so have I. And, quite honestly, I'm a little sick of it at this point. So instead of ghouls and zombies and classic horror, I'm going the squeaky clean route (WHA?!) and posting some wholesome, vintage pics of Autumn over the years, courtesy of Life magazine. Enjoy... and have a killer night! Mwuhahaha.... (Ok. That's enough of that.)




Fall leaves, 1937.





'Tater Harvest, October 1949.





Apple Pickin', Sept. 1950s







Upstate New York, 1960s





Pumpkin Faces, Naples 1950s




The view from my front porch 3 evenings ago.




Happy Halloween!

Everybody Scream, Everybody Scream! In Our Town Of Halloween...

(Yes, those are part of the lyrics to "This is Halloween" from Nightmare Before Christmas, one of my top 3 favorite Tim Burton flicks. LOVE.)

With Halloween coming closer, I thought you'd dig some vintage Halloween pics, just for fun! I apologise for today's image-heaviness, but these next 10 pics are fun, in a "clowns are never fun" kind of way. (Some of the pics are pretty big, but some are stupidly small, so hopefully the even balance won't make your computer have a seizure.)

The photos were taken in September of 1960 by photographer George Silk of kids in Connecticut and were published in the October 31, 1960 Halloween edition of Life magazine.

Aqua Blue Heaven Friday? Make That Halloween Friday!

Attention, please. Attention, please! We interrupt this program to bring you breaking news! Aqua Blue Heaven Fridays has been temporarily cancelled! It will be replaced with what is now being called "Halloween Fridays". Please do not be alarmed. There is no need to panic! We come in peace and bring you tidings of great things to come! We'll now return to your regularly scheduled program. That is all. (And buy war bonds!)

Welcome to what used to be Aqua Blue Heaven Friday! OK, so don't freak. It still is, but starting today and for the next 4 fridays, I'm going to be swapping out the aqua theme and doing all Halloween-themed fridays! I'll still be showcasing vintage items, just ones that have to do with Halloween. You know me: I love themes! I love making lists! I love collections! And I love this time of year! So it only seems right to get a little wacky this month. Calm down, I'll be bringing back aqua starting the first friday of November and all will be right with the world as you know it again. Change is good, right? So they say. I dunno, I fear change but somehow this one is gonna rock! Or so I say.

So let's move on with the very first Halloween Friday! Today's Halloween theme is the pumpkin and the jack o-lantern, because, of course it should start out that way. Enjoy, boils and ghouls! (Ha! And just think: it only just begun. The bad puns only get worse from this point, and you have a whole month of dealing with them! You're welcome.)




Vintage Autumn Pumpkins Novelty Print Blouse.





Vintage Corocraft Rhinestone Pumpkin Pin.





Vintage 50's Autumn Harvest Novelty Print Tablecloth.





Vintage Mini Halloween Cake Toppers.





Vintage 60's Electric Jack O'Lantern Lights.

And The Winner Is...

...Lizzie AKA Fuzzylizzie! Step right up and claim your fabulous vintage angora sweater from last Tuesday's giveaway! Lizzie, just drop me an email with your name & address and we'll get this show on the road. Mucho thanks to everyone to played along!

I'll be running October's Vintage Giveaway a little early in the month (most likely in the next 2 weeks), so you have plenty of time to use it. Here's a hint: it's vintage Halloween-themed. *enter creepy organ music here* Get ready to rock, kids. So stayed tuned!

Redneck Christmas

I was at Walgreen's today, stocking up on the last of the street-legal "fun drugs" (Midol and Pamprin. Just TRY to step to this tough broad. I even take my Pamprin with chocolate milk. CHOCOLATE MILK. You heard.) And I was staring at the 75% off Halloween crap, wondering if I did indeed need the family size bag of Twix like I thought I did (though the junk in my trunk would disagree), and on the other side of the Halloween aisle is Xmas stuff and I had a moment of "WWJD?". Would Jebus feel like I was cheating on him by ignoring the Xmas aisle altogether and loading up on cheap Halloween garbage I really didn't need, but come on it's 75% off, and Xmas is still a long time away. And we all know that Halloween is anti-Jebus and while he is my homeboy (random shout-out to 2001!) and all, the dark lord of $1.88 Clearance Mini Snickers calls to me, too. All this wondering if I hurt Jebus's feelings by not being ready to acknowledge the Xmas candy aisle made my brain hurt, so neither cheap Halloween crap nor early Xmas crap was bought today. But I did stop at the liquor store on the way home, so it all evens out and I'm pretty sure Jebus is indifferent to the noon liquor store run.

But on the way home, I noticed some of my white trashedy neighbors putting up their "Jesus is the Reason For the Season" seasonal flag and blow-up Winnie the Pooh snow globe (that I secretly want to pop in the middle of the night, is that somehow wrong?). I still have my Green Eggs & Ham pumpkin outside, what am I supposed to do with THAT monstrosity? The 15 year old inside of me wants to roll it out into traffic or heave it from the overpass onto an 18-wheeler below, but that is against the law. And if there's one thing I never worry about, it's abiding by the rules. But Xmas lights on the front porch already?! I have the spirit of Jebus Clause, really I do. Hell, even my Dad has Xmas lights up around his porch all year long. Well, they're not so much "Xmas lights" as they are plastic hamburger and french fries novelty lights from the 80's that were there when he bought the house 5 years ago. And it's not so much a "house" as it is a trailer, but you get the idea. Nothing celebrates "the reason for the season" better than novelty lights in a trailer park.

Zombie Dance

Happy Halloween, boils and ghouls! (Thank you! I'll be here all night! Don't forget to tip your witchtress and please try the boiled brains!)

Meh. Too much cheese for the morning. I apologise.

Today is the last entry for the month's ongoing saga, "the ABC'S of the Gashlycrumb Tinies". I'm half sad that it's come to an end, but more than half happy to be done with it already. Kind of like getting your teeth drilled, if you happen to enjoy that sort of thing. Perhaps I'll do it again next Halloween, but let's hope I forget. But you know what? Xmas is coming and what could possibly be more fun than doing a blog revolved around "The 12 Days of Christmas"? Getting your teeth drilled, for one.



So on that note, it saddens my heart (two sizes too small) to bring you the last dead Tiny. Until next year, fellow freaks and geeks.

Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin.

(That's the best way to go, really.)



Z is also for zombie.

Here's a list I just made up off the top of my head, in no particular order, of must-see zombie flicks. It is Halloween after all, in case you didn't know. So here they are: the good, the bad and the cheesy.

1. White Zombie. One of the first real zombie movies ever made that we know of, dating to 1932. How cool is that? It's good to know there were freaks for the horror business even back then.

2. Teenage Zombies. Nothing but the best from 1959. Come on now, how you can not love a plot that involves teenagers stranded on an island who get rescued from a mad scientist by a zombie gorilla and then get rewarded by meeting the president?

3. Night of the Living Dead. A classic from '68 that pretty much influenced all future horror/zombie movies. Buttloads of lame remakes done in 1985 and 1990.

4. Heavy Metal. With a soundtrack including Devo, Blue Oyster Cult, Cheap Trick and Journey, you know it's gonna rock your face off. 1981

5. Redneck Zombies. Never saw it, but with a title like THAT, it'll be my life's work to find it and watch it.

6. Zombie High. Will those slutty teenagers ever learn? 1987

7. Pet Sematary. I and II. Undead zombie pets? Awesome. 1989 & 1992

8. My Boyfriend's Back. We get it. Slutty teenagers. Alright already! 1993.

9. Dawn of the Dead (2004 remake of 1978's) and Shaun of the Dead (2004), 2 of my favorite new zombie flicks. Zombies in England? That's hilarious for some reason that I can't quite explain.

So that's it for now. I'm stopping at 9 which is essentially 10, because I'm half-assing it today. Someone's got to spike the punch.






* "Zombie Dance by The Cramps"

You Dress Up For Armageddon

Y is for Yorick whose head was knocked in.



Y is also for yum. As in de-lish. As in scrump. What am I talking about, you say? No one's ever really sure, are they? But today I'm talking about CANDY! What with the Halloween coming up and all, I thought it apropos to give props to it. Another mini tribute to retro candy and candy from our youth. I'm "hommaging" my ass off lately, have you noticed? I should stop that.

1) Candy Buttons.
The idea works in theory, but really, they kinda suck. Paper would get stuck to the back of each little dot but you'd eat it anyway because you were a dumb kid and that's what you did.



2) Wax Lips.
What a stupid invention. "Good news kids! I bought you a hunk of non-flavored wax loaded with red food coloring #23 so you can gnaw on it all day until you get lockjaw for hours of fun! Yay!"



3) Pixy Stix.
I have a better idea. Why not just mainline pure, uncut sugar straight into our veins?



Makes a damn fine sammich, too. (If you don't know where this is from, you're dead to me).




4) Gum Cigarettes.
Not to be confused with those ripoff candy stick cigarettes, which were LAME. If your mom was cool, she'd get you the bubble gum cigarettes that had a little stash of white powder (powdered sugar I hope?) wrapped within the paper, so when you'd blow on it (I said blow on it), a little white puff cloud would come out like real smoke. Awesome. But leave it to those damn hippie liberal types to think bubble gum cigarettes were a bad influence on children. They ruin all my fun. I can honestly say that the memory of chewing gum cigarettes as a kid was NOT the influence it had on me later in life to smoke. Now the Licorice Crack Pipe is another story...



* "You Dress Up For Armageddon" by The Hives.

Unfortunate Jake

U is for Una who slipped down a drain.



U is also for undead.

I went to a Cub Scout Halloween party this week (you know I know how to party my face off) and all the little munchkins got to dress up in their costumes and play obnoxious games and go into sugar-overload right before bedtime and it was a HOOT as you can imagine and don't act like you're not jealous because I know you surely must be. Remember when we were kids and you'd start working on your costume like a month before Halloween? You'd never submit to a store-bought plastic one. But now, just about every costume on a kid is from the store and I didn't see one single vampire, mummy, ghost, zombie or any other undead creature of doom. I demand to know what GIVES? What happened to creativity? What happened to wanting to have the kick-assingest costume ever? Usually I'm the first to support laziness and slacking, but when did people get so unmotivated to do anything out of the ordinary? I do not approve. And also BAH HUMBUG.

Also at this par-tay, every year the Scouts has a theme and all the boys decorate a pumpkin according to said theme. This year was "Books and Fairy Tales", how hard can THAT be, right? And also, you can go crazy loco with your pumpkin, because that's such an easy theme to get wacky and creative and crafty with. Most of the pumpkins were half-assed and not at all related to the theme and that makes me sad. Won't someone think of the children?! Granted, there were 2 Tin Men and a Pinocchio which were cool, so I must give props when props are due.

However, we are the types to do something not ordinary and our pumpkin won the award for the Most Spectacular Pumpkin Of All Time Or Ever Will Be And No One Can Ever Make A Better One. Or something like that. And it took all of a few moments of thinking and about 10 minutes to make. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Shazam! Our Green Eggs and Ham pumpkin, (which has also come to be known as the Infected Ham around here):



We cut out egg shapes from green felt, a little outlining, a glued-on pom pom "yolk", bada bing bada boom, done. And THAT won. Wow. It's not even that good. Fools! I've tricked them with my craftiness. First stop: pumpkin contest win. Next stop: world domination.



* "Unfortunate Jake" by the Frantic Flintstones.

Suicide Doors

S is for Susan who perished of fits.



S is also for Salem. As in Massachusetts. Not to be confused with that darn retarded cat from Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

Salem is a lovely and charming town, best know for a little blurb in history called the Salem Witch Trials, perhaps you've heard of it?



I haven't been there in years, not since my sister was doing her fancy-pants medical school learnin' in Gardner and we zipped off to Salem to do all the Salem-y things you'd expect: visit all the cheesetastic museums, did gravestone rubbings and went on haunted walking tours that sucked because A.) we were not haunted and B). there was walking involved. I've been a-itchin' to go back ever since but am far too busy with my Very Important and Meaningful Life. Slacking won't take care of it itself, you know. And anyway, I'm sure the people of Salem really want another out-of-state jackass in their town at Halloween the same way I really appreciate all the New Yorkers here up in my grill looking at leaves changing color and acting like the mountains are exciting and wonderful, because apparently there are no leaves in the state of New York to look at.

Ghosts in the graveyard or a random thing flying past the camera? You be the judge.



(While googling Salem, the interwebz thought perhaps I was searching for Salem cigarettes. "Who isn't?", I asked it back.)

Haunted Happenings is a good place to start, if you yourself are an out-of-state jackass looking to annoy the local Salemfolk. The site even tells you what events and outdoor tomfoolery are for the over-21 crowd, which of course is probably where I'd want to be firmly planted and not, say, at the Little Witches and Wizards Sock Hop.







*Suicide Doors" by Reverend Horton Heat.

The Monster Mash

You should know that October is my most favorite of months, not only because of crunchy leaves and pumpkin pies and all that Martha Stewart-y happy horseshit, but largely due to the Halloween factor, what with all the strange and unusual. I myself am strange and unusual and it's only fitting that I punish you all with an entire month's worth of blogging devoted to things of creepiness and weirdness and whateverthehellelse.

If you've never heard of the writer Edward Gorey, I demand you look into him. He's known for his grim illustrations and penchant for bleakness, and if Wikipedia is right (which it rarely is), it claims he was also a pop culture junkie, so he might have been my soul mate or BFF 4-Evr. You know, maybe if he wasn't born, like, 50 years before I was. Anyhow, he wrote an awesomely wicked and wonderful book in 1963 called The Gashlycrumb Tinies. The interesting thing about the book is that you'd never in a million years guess it was from '63, what with it's very modern "humor" and Emily Strange-esque charm. A simple book, Gorey tells the tale of 26 children from A to Z (each representing a letter of the alphabet, like A is for Amy, etc.) on each page and their untimely demise. Reading is fundamental, suckas!

So starting tomorrow and for the next 25 after that (give or take a day, due to either my forgetting to blog or giving-in to slack), I'm going post a Gorey illustration a day and do an alphabet game of my own, Halloween-style.



(Dude, you KNOW I'm corny, don't front like you're suprised.)

Just A Girl

It's officially September and you know what that means? Yeah, me neither. But Halloween is next month and I'm getting obsess-y about it, because, you know, you need lots of time to do it right and not half-assed, like going out to Party City and buying a pre-made cheesetastic costume that looks like a white plastic apron that says, like, "Marilyn Monroe" on it. Hells but no! Homie don't play that.

So every year friends of ours throw a badass Halloween party with a theme and you have to dress up, "or else", apparently. One year's theme was "Dead Prom"- a little cliche, but easy and fun. Like me. Heyyy-yo! (These are the Monday morning jokes! Yeah, I know. Sorry). So anyway, this year's theme is "Dead Celebrities". The more tasteless the better. Well that's right up my alley! (That's what SHE said. Ok, that's enough).

So the ball and chain says he wants to be Buddy Holly, easy, we have a closet full of clothes for that, skinny lapel, skinny tie, black frames, done. And another pal of ours says he'll be the Big Bopper and I'm all, great, so that leaves me with Ritchie Valens, then? Well THAT'S not fun, what the hell? Jerks.



Besides, I've already done the dressing-up-as-a-guy thing before when I went as Gomez Adams and I said I wasn't going to dress like a dude again. Unless it was RuPaul. Besides not being a 7-foot tall fabulous gay black man, the similarities are endless. Or maybe Andy Kaufman as Tony Clifton. I haven't gotten my eyebrows OR lip waxed in a while, so I'm already halfway there. But the last time I checked I'm still a chick and can't I just feel pretty, dammit? When do *I* get to be the pretty pink unicorn & rainbow sparkle princess?! I never get what I want! Daddy, *I* want a golden goose! (Hey, Veruca's not a half-bad idea. Anyone know of she's still alive?)



More thoughts:
*Johnny Cash and June Carter, the 70's version would be splendid, no? A long, flowy number that looks like the Chiffon Fairy had one too many lime and tequila shooters and hurled a frothy green catastrophe of ruffles and lace in the form of a 70's gown oughtta do it.

Or

*JFK and Jackie. Did I mention that bad taste is encouraged in this sitch? Simmer down already, don't get all "Oh NO SHE DI'NT"! Because "Oh YES I DID"! Geeze. Settle down, Beavis.



Or...? Or...? I'm out of ideas. If any of you nerds that I love so have a swell idea, by all means help a sister out! (Speaking of nerds, are any "Star Trek" actors dead yet?)