Halloween. Along with Meg, I was also thinking of my favorite costume, and I came up with 2 favs from long ago- first was the japanese woman costume that my Dad made for me on the ancient old sewing machine, before I could even sew myself. The fabric was black with huge gold polka dots, and the kimono had giant wide sleeves. I don't remember anything else about it but I'm sure it was cool. The second costume I remember from childhood was the soda bottle costume. My friend and I were bottles of Sprite. This was when they had those funny flip top lids that looked like baseball caps, so we wore green baseball caps, and I believe we wore them backwards. Could we have started the trend? That was 1966 or 67, I think.
When I first came to work here, 10 years ago, we used to have a contest between departments for the best costume. Of course, R&D won most often until we got a little too intellectual. The year we lost, our theme was "women in art". We blew up prints of famous paintings with women in them and cut out the faces to be replaced with our own. I of course was the dour woman in American Gothic. My friend Margaret was perfect as Andy's Marilyn. One of our crew was the curator and guided the visitors through the gallery, but alas, the building maintenance crew showed us up by dressing as a country band with Mike dressed as Dolly Parton. You can only imagine how much more interesting that was. The performance aspect of the costume contest was the most fun for everyone I think, and another alas, the contest hasn't been the same for several years. Our last R&D performance was as pieces of cake, where we all ran in, formed a giant layer cake and lit a center candle (Al) while singing Happy Anniversary. That year coincided with the 20th anniversary of the company. Tomorrow is the last day of work for more than 100 employees here in Vermont. It will be a very sad day.