Stay Signed In
Do you want to access your site more quickly on this computer? Check this box, and your username and password will be remembered for two weeks. Click logout to turn this off.
Stay Safe
Do not check this box if you are using a public computer. You don't want anyone seeing your personal info or messing with your site.
For the past 7 years, Halloween has become a staged theatrical excercise based on a TV or movie themes,... something that little kids didn't have to be frightened about but would and could enjoy watching with their parents while receiving candy.
Many moons ago we did the typical horror display with severed arms, legs and heads hanging out of garbage cans, fake blood everywhere, an axe, a noose, HORROR music BLARING from our balcony, flames flickering, chalk outline of dead bodies on our driveway, tomb stones, skeletons, etc. .... and then there was me,.... the mother of this houshold and the culprit behind all these ideas,..... I would stand very still as the Grim Reaper next to the garage door, where all the little kids HAD to walk past,.... and as they walk past, I would move in robotic style and scare the little daylights out of the little kids, (some vulnerable adults too). In my younger days I used to do robotic mannequin modelling in store windows,... and used this technique to my advantage to build and work on those allowing room to be frightened and spooked on this SCARY night! It worked! But my heart sank everytime a little girl or boy would not come to our door because they were too frightened OR watching them run down the our driveway dropping their candy because I spooked them. Something had to change. I didn't want to loose the 60 kids we DID get coming to our door. That was the last of our INTENSE fright nights. The following year we introduced the ADAM'S FAMILY! This TV show was still in keeping with a bit of the scarey halloween traditions,... but with my husband (Bob) as Gomez, me as Mortissia and the less frigntenging TV show theme song blaring from our balcony, it created a less frightening atmosphere. Some little kids, who remembered the latter years,... were still intimitated,... but there were those who had more courage to appoach our door now and collect their candy. We started to draw cowds of 100 - 150 kids.
Then came HARRY POTTER! What a hit THAT was. Bob went all out in constructing and building props while I scurried to put costumes together. We drew 200 - 230 kids that year. We figured we were on a roll now. Little kids were not running away from us anymore,... and after all it is about the little kids!!! That was the year of illusion and magic!
Along came PIRATES!!!! My husband buildt props again that year, but we kept it simple and instead relied on smoke machines and pulled in all our man power to play a bunch of drunken pirates singing YO HO YO HO. The rest of us dressed up as a few of the main characters ie.,..Bob as Barbossa, my dauhgter (Tori)/Elizabeth, her friend Erin/Will Turner, my son Spencer/a soldier, and me, as CAPT. JACK! We drew crowds of up to 300 kids that year. Flames were blazing and the POTC theme song blaring. We were so excited and thrilled, that Tori (who is in threatre and film) and I (who WAS in threatre) were not satisfied and thought we could push the envelop a step farther. So the following year (2004) we got the whole family involved (including Erin who is also in theatre) to ACT OUT 3 of the scenes from the movie. Since Pirates was still such a hit,.... we did Pirates again, and this time blocked off our driveway because we decided to incorporate a real sword fight scene. I wanted actual swords for the cling clanging effect but didn't want to take some little kids eye out that night either. I am amazed my husband and I (who did the sword fight) did'nt kill eachother. One of our neighbours took it upon themselves to even blocked off our street to keep most cars from entering and possibly bulldozing some child watching our show from the road. How many kids that year you ask??? We peaked at 350!!!! This of course is NOT including the parents that come out to take their kids around door to door.
2005! That year we thought we would do something for the adults,.... INDIANA JONES!!!! Tori and I paper mached this LARGE soccer ball we purchased at Costco, which served as the big BOLDER in the first Indy movie. Since we have a sloped driveway,... we used that to our advantage and had the ball (attached to fish wire) roll down the driveway from the garage behind INDY (played by Bob's older son Paul) as HE ran down the driveway himself... Tori also put a CD together with the INDIANA JONES theme song and I came up with the script and put myself down as 'lighting crew'! Bob went all out with building the holy grail and a pully for a ghost like image to appear out of a box with smoke machines blowing!!!
So now, here we are, 2006,... and what do we do to peak ALL other years!!! We did have something in mind, which I am not going to share 'cause we could still use it for 2007,.... we were anticipating costumes from Florida that never arrived on time!!!! So we got desperate and were running out of time. Since the Pirate movie 2 was a bigger hit than the first and everyone seems to like Pirates these days,.... we settled on POTC 2, but this year as our 'TOPPING' decided to do voice over dubbing from scenes we decided to re-enact, ( that way my GIRLY voice wouldn't distort the vision of Capt. Jack Sparrow that I tried so hard to perfect this year and Tori, who decided to play Will Turner, would look and seem more like him too). So,... since props were made and bought from the previous years,... Bob only had to build a dock and focused on getting the accoustics and audio to perfection. I perfected ALL the costumes, (including JACK'S) and went on Ebay to order pirates hates. Tori edited small protions of the scenes we chose to do for the voice overs. The role of Elizabeth was given to Erin this time, Spencer was Commodore Norrington and Paul played Ragetti ( you know the 'eye ball pirate'). I must say it was one of our best shows yet. And some kids even voiced that opinion. I had one gentlman ask if we had a 'program' for the next showing. I beamed from ear to ear. Someone asked if Tori was a real guy, and I had girls looking confused and lost at me. Little kids acutally came to shake my hand,...how cute is THAT! So,.... for your viewing enjoyement, Tori has put together a video of our 2006 Halloween night. Please drink rum responsibly!
Back
