La Esposa and the Glory Hole

First off, this post is about a costume party and an art class, so if Google got you here by finding this title and you were looking forward to something way racier, sorry.

This weekend Pants and I went to a Cinco de Mayo costume party. It was actually Tres de Mayo, technically, but we'd been planning our costumes all week. Costume mania is not a new thing for me. I've written at length about this elsewhere, but it's something I keep coming back to because conceiving of, constructing, and wearing costumes was, and is, for me a strange and conflicting addiction.

My mother comes from an acting background and was a world-class little kid costume maker. She believed in absolute realism, not cuteness. My best examples of this are Martha Washington and Gloria Estefan. With my mother's aid, I became both of these women in appearance if not entirely in spirit. My third grade Martha Washington had powdered, white-streaked hair and realistic aging make-up, but she was also missing four teeth due to preventative dentistry and my own freak-show genetics. Hence, rather than the feminist tour-de-force I might have made her on stage, our former First Lady slumped and scowled and nearly melted her make-up off with the heat of her atomic blush of embarrassment.

My fourth grade Gloria Estefan faired little better. This was for the birthday party of my mortal enemy, who, in compliance with the rules of girlhood enemies, invited me to her party as a kind of moving target. I didn't want to go, but the theme was rock stars and my mom got me all pumped up with the idea that she could make me whoever I wanted to be-- Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, anybody. We even sat down and watched some MTV together. I chose Gloria and we spent the week's last $20 bill renting a huge, flouncy black flamenco skirt from the costume shop and she curled my hair and created cheekbones with blush and even drilled a little beauty mark on my upper lip with the end of her mascara wand. Needless to say, the party went badly. I learned two things that day: never out-dress your hostess, even if you wouldn't mind seeing her chased down by wolves, and never try to wash off mascara with a handful of water from the tap-- it just makes a mess.

Pants and I thought and thought about what we should be for Cinco de Mayo. Being honkies, pretty much anything we could come up with carried a tinge of racism, but we decided to leave that issue at the feet of the party's hosts. Pants eventually decided to be a cholo, inspired by the roving band of small town thugs that likes to tag the fences and sidewalks of our neighborhood. This was a risky choice, as it meant many suspicious fashion purchases and the obvious risk of righteously offending any number of our neighborhood's residents. Luckily, my costume provided a bit of cover.

I kicked around several ideas before settling on my final choice. I've always wanted to do a Frieda Kahlo costume complete with the unibrow and mustache and a monkey on my shoulder, but I tossed the idea as being a bit too erudite. Can you imagine how snotty the explanation would sound? "You know, famous Mexican painter? Hopelessly in love with Diego Rivera?" I also tossed the idea of going against gender lines as Emiliano Zapata because the affront to machismo would be thunderous. My other favorite, a Dia De Los Muertos skeleton was wrong because it's a fall holiday, which is like dressing up for Halloween in June. This is how I finally settled on dressing as a Mexican wrestler.

Pants went on a detachment to El Centro, California a few months ago, and the place is so remote and so boring that the Navy has spent a fortune tricking out the rec rooms with all kinds of video game systems and giant TVs with the latest movies. The hope is that you will avail yourself of these entertainment resources and not be tempted to pile into a car and head on down to Mexicali for donkey shows and God knows what else a border town has to offer to bored young men with cash. For once, I pleaded with Pants to listen to the Navy and stay away from Mexico, so when he eventually defied me, he knew he had to come back with something good to appease my wrath. He brought me a black spandex mask with yellow flames on the cheeks and a giant shiny, red cross on the forehead and swore he left town by sunset. Good enough.

Most of Saturday was devoted to costume construction. We hit up Wal-Mart for sparkly cape material for me and giant fake diamond earrings for Pants as well as a massive, short-sleeved plaid shirt to be button only at the top, blingy wrap-around shades, and waterproof liquid eyeliner for a scrolly cursive neck tattoo I drew on him that read "Raquel por vida." At Target, I found neon yellow fishnet leggings, and at the thrift store, we found Dickies pants for Pants in waist-size 42 so he could sag them below his actual ass and puff his boxers out the top. Finally, at Sally Beauty Supply, after wrangling with a very confused and very pregnant cashier, we found 40 cent hairnets. She kept protesting about Pants's military-issue buzz cut, "But your hair's not poofy... these are for poofy hair." Neither of us wanted to explain that this was for a costume.

Side story: Once in Kingsville, Texas Pants and I attended a Halloween costume party as a white trash couple (racial stereotypes go both ways! generalizing for everyone!) named Buford and Sue Ella. Buford had a glorious feathered mullet wig, tight flannel shirt with the sleeves ripped off, ridiculously tight cut-off blue jean shorts, unlaced work boots, and an eyeliner-drawn fu manchu mustache. Pants's personification of Buford was so thorough and so alien that our dog wouldn't stop barking at him. For my part, Sue Ella wore a lacy pink camisole with the words "Dirty Bird" printed across the chest, tight jeans with thong straps showing, a semi-discrete three-month pregnant belly, pigtails, and a very realistic black eye. I topped off the look with an empty flask in my back pocket.

By the evening's end, I was the only sober driver with a flock of six drunk pilots to ferry home, and since ours was a training town for the INS, a packed car with bumpers sagging low on a Saturday night was a prime cop target. We got pulled over and I had to step out of the car and into a flashlight beam. This is when good stage make-up is not handy. After painstakingly establishing my sobriety, the cop then wanted to speak discretely about the state of my relationship, and I had to explain that no, this is a costume, and we were coming from a costume party.

"And what are you, Ma'am?" he asked.

"Um, white trash, sir?" Luckily we didn't dwell too long on this uncomfortable exchange because that's when he caught sight of the flask in my back pocket and we were back to the sobriety question.

So back to Saturday. After the shopping run, I spent an hour and a half creating a huge Virgin Mary tattoo all down Pants's forearm in colored permanent markers. The results, if I may toot my own horn, were stunning, and I'm convinced that were it not for my intense needle & blood phobia, I would be an up-and-coming star on the tattoo circuit. Pants then tattooed my wrestling name on my bicep-- "La Esposa," which literally means "the wife" in Spanish, but also has a handy misogynistic double-meaning as "handcuffs" or "shackles." When one is arrested in Mexico, they put the wives on you. Then I tattooed his knuckles and his neck, we donned our costumes, scared the dog, and were ready to go.

This is the part where I get panicky, the going out the door. We've got a pack of surly teens that live directly across the street, who I guess don't have cable either because they're always lounging in their driveway smoking cigarettes and holding court with a bewildering array of visitors who never get all the way out of their cars. It was decided that I would walk out first and shield Pants while he locked the door if he would in turn walk first to the pick-up and unlock my door. This would have been fine if I didn't also forget my purse.

By the time we made it to the party house, I had calmed down from my initial bout of agoraphobia, but as we were pulling up I spotted some of the other party-goers. The wives were wearing knee-length floral sun dresses and the husbands had on T-shirts and sombreros. Oh God. Fully sober and in broad daylight, I walked into a tastefully decorated house and loaded up a small plate of taquitos dressed as a Mexican wrestler. One of my mom's handier nonsense phrases from when she used to swim laps without her contacts on came back to me, "If I can't see them, they can't see me."

All conversation in the backyard stopped as Pants and I made our entrance. Pants is made for these moments and immediately shouted, "Orale!" and a huge round of laughter and applause went up, but until my fifth margarita I felt acutely naked and was grateful for the mask. Luckily, most people had a sense of humor and my explanation of my signature wrestling move, a slow strangulation called "the Engagement," went over well. We won a bottle of expensive tequila for the costume contest.

The Glory Hole

One of my favorite school-related words is "elective." This is how I used to entertain various wild hairs and desires during my undergraduate years while still staying true to a major and a four-year course of study. Electives in that sense were like sanctioned affairs from a marriage, and I had passionate flings with studio drawing, astronomy, and Spanish, and even convinced the Fine Arts dean of my school that I was in the process of leaving English so that she would allow me another semester in the art lab.

Now that I'm working on a whole master's degree that feels like an elective-- for God's sake, one of my final projects has been a giant visual presentation on Turkmenbashi, the former dictator of Turkmenistan-- "elective" has taken on even more fanciful and exciting connotations. To whit: I intend to take beginning glass-blowing next spring. Seriously.

I can think of no better use of my criminally cheap graduate hours than sticking a pole into a blob of molten glass and attempting to blow it into a pretty shape, and not, say, a blindness-inducing scatter bomb. In conducting some research on the class, I came across a web-based slide show in which the instructor talks about the history of glass-blowing and the lovely resources at our school. Right there in the middle of his interview, in reference to the white hot oven the students use, he says "then we stick it in the glory hole and see what comes out." Wha--?? There was a widely recognized "glory hole" in the men's room at my undergraduate institution, and I guarantee you it was not for making vases. Perhaps this art class will be more interesting than I imagined...