Our most successful party to date yields many great pictures.

By Hannah Wallace

Woo!

Ghosts in the Ghetto tour from Hannah Wallace on Vimeo.

Sunday morning, after sleeping in his car parked on our Bradenton street, Scoops grumbled into our spare bathroom to wash up for the morning. Mr. and Mrs. Harrible were slowly packing up their air mattress; Little J had curled up on the couch under his trench coat; Krazy Kevin and Top Dog Tom, also having slept on couches, had both left at first light. A few clanks and crashes in the bathroom had me a tad confused, so I checked with the crazy Canadian when he finally emerged.

“Scoops, you OK in there?”

He responded in typical Scoops fashion (i.e. without concern for logic or context), “Who puts eyes on babies?!”

So, yes, the party Saturday was a rousing success. I don’t have a final tally just yet, but I know there were about three-dozen attendees, and about 30 or so folks in the house at once, damn near all of them in costume. Bruce the Kegerator was so overwhelmed by the attention that he wet himself. Our Dexter room, finalized in a storm of pre-party preparations Saturday morning and afternoon, was so well received that partygoers who were fans of the show stopped to take photos with the saran-wrapped corpse and plastic sheeting.

Our homage to Dexter.

Not that we can really take the credit for the party’s success. I now realize how much it helps to have a holiday like Halloween—a holiday that people set aside in their datebooks for some kind of celebration—fall on a Saturday. I suppose it never occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one who wanted the excuse to dress up and go crazy.

I'd say Krazy Kevin was just playing along with his hair rocker costumer, but...he always acts like this.

Best of all, seeing such a herd of hockey players and their families, kickballers, neighbors and longtime friends mingling seamlessly, clapping each other on the back and posing for pictures together, is, I think, my idea of heaven. And the costumes made it that much better.

 Ms. Conduct gals and their hubbies.

 Rockstars Kim and Kreg as another rockstar couple; Scoops gets his licks.

 CCB gets a little love from Batman.

And there were so many entertaining moments to be retold—my trying to give candy to the neighbor who was actually just trying to give me a bag of vegetables from his garden; Krazy Kevin ill-advisedly fish-hooking Top Dog Tom (and getting a beating for it); yet another partygoer wandering off into the ghetto night (and arriving home at 4 a.m., without explanation, after the cops had been called); Big J giving Top Dog Tom’s entire family a ride home when Tom decided he wanted to join in the slumber party.

With all that confusion, I suppose you can forgive that certain, more subtle aspects of our decorating had been overlooked. This is what led to Scoops’s accidentally brilliant non-sequitur when he emerged from the bathroom Sunday morning, having only then noticed the creepy addition to my father’s baby picture.

Later, he wrote a song about it. Expect “Eyes On Babies” to be the first single off his forthcoming album.

Eyes on Babies from Hannah Wallace on Vimeo.

(OK, I won’t be surprised if nobody finds that as amusing as I do. Maybe you had to be there—maybe it’s the thick Canadian accent—but wow, “Who puts eyes on babies?!” still makes me giggle.)

If we needed any more confirmation that the party was a success, we got it Sunday night, when fully half the Revolution hockey team came into the rink half dead, and we had to apologize to our team captain for everyone being so tired. Still, our exhausted revelers filled the locker room with stories from the night before. And in the end, the stories make a better catalogue of the event than pictures ever could.

But yeah, the photos are good, too.