The 31 Days of Halloween, Oz Style: Day 21

The next best, most unusual Oz costume may not be specifically Ozzy, but it's pretty close! Yes, you can show up at your Oz Halloween party dressed as a "haunted tree"! The warnings on this tree aren't quite exact, but they sure give you the right idea. Alternatively, if there is a standard, wooden tree somewhere in the vicinity of your party, maybe it wants a costume. The good news is, you can give it one! This sign is authentic and authorized, and looks just like the one in The Movie.

The 31 Days of Halloween, Oz Style: Day 20

It's time to talk costumes. There are quite a few Wizard of Oz costumes out there, and currently even a few still from Oz the Great and Powerful. There are also "sexy" versions of most Oz characters, and Oz costumes for dogs. Not long ago, one of the big costumers even started marketing an Aunt Em costume. But what may be the best Oz costume of them all is the yellow brick road. Yes, you can actually put on a costume that invites people to nat only walk all over you, but even skip and hop and dance. As I write this, I am convincing myself that this may not be the best idea for a costume ever created...

The 31 Days of Halloween, Oz style: Day 1

It's a long-held tradition among many blogs to celebrate October and Halloween with daily Halloween-themed posts throughout the month. I've never done it, but due to the lack of my Halloween shop last year (and the delay in getting it ready this year; son, I hope), I'm going to give it a shot. This will be weird and scattered, but could be a lot of fun. So I'm going to start with the thing that takes the most lead time: Patterns! Yes, you can buy costume patterns for all kinds of Oz costumes. Here's one for toddler-sized costumes from Simplicity, with links at the bottom to other ones. If you poke around, Butterick and McCall's also have some, but Simplicity seems to have the best selection.

Yesterday's Ozzy Halloween Encounters

A surprisingly busy and diverse flow of Ozziness for Halloween yesterday:

• Things got off to a very good start when one of the teachers at the middle school I was subbing at was dressed as Dorothy.
• Not necessarily related to Halloween, but during lunch I heard some familiar music and went to investigate. Sure enough, "The Merry Old Land of Oz" was playing in the cafeteria. Lunch was nearly over, and all the kids were gone, so this may have been for the benefit of the cafeteria crew.
• Our first costumed denizen of Oz during trick or treating was a zombie Dorothy. Okay, she may have just been a zombie (she was wearing white sneakers, so no proper footwear), but she was definitely wearing a costume Dorothy dress. And when we told her that we give out double candy to Oz characters, she quickly decided that she was indeed Dorothy.
• We had not one, but two green-faced witches. Yup, that counts as the Wicked Witch of the West.
• We also had a father-son Scarecrow duo. They didn't look much like Ray Bolger, but considering how many different ways the Scarecrow has been drawn over the years, I chose to give them the benefit of the doubt (and the extra candy).
• Finally, one guy came with a pumpkin for a head. I chose to declare him Scary Jack Pumpkinhead and gave him an extra. (Can you tell that our standards for a costume being Ozzy are pretty low?) Of course by that point the hoards were trickling off, and it was pretty clear we were going to have a lot of candy left over, so I had no problems being generous.

More C-Oz-play

Jen is at it again, having found a pretty unlikely mashup with The Wizard of Oz. (You'll have to scroll down a bit to see it, but trust me, you'll know it when you see it!)

C-Oz-play!

Besides writing the fabulous blog Cake Wrecks (all about bad cake decorating), Jen writes at EPBOT, a more personal blog about crafts and geekery and Disney and other things in her life. Well, today she showed off a bunch of cosplay pictures from last year's Dragon Con. Dragon Con is a huge convention that covers multiple genres and takes over much of downtown Atlanta for a weekend. As you can imagine, the cosplay is fantastic. And what does she open with? Post-apocalyptic Oz characters, of course! Go, my job here is done, go see!

My Ozzy Halloween Eve

Yesterday wasn't even Halloween, but it turned out to be very Ozzy. First of all, I was subbing at one of the local middle schools, and they had a pep assembly. The ASB officers were running it, and one of them had a blue checked dress and sparkly red shoes. That was the only Oz costume I saw at work, but Laura saw more! As a reporter for the loral paper, she had to find all the local costumed characters, and lucked out at the local beauty school! Here's the photo of the whole crew:

This will probably run in Monday's paper, and if not, well, it's here now! Then, after we picked up my car from the shop (it really needed a tune-up and some major work on the electrical system), we realized we had enough time to go get some badly overdue haircuts. Guess where we went? Yup, the local beauty school! I got my hair cut by the Wicked Witch of the West. I was a little worried during the shampoo.

Snip snip here, snip snip there...
Laura, meanwhile, got hers cut by the Cowardly Lion, with final inspection by the Scarecrow. They all posed for this great picture.

Tonight, we are planning for as many as 1500 possible trick-or-treaters, and as in years past, I suspect we'll see a handful of Dorothys, and maybe one or two others who can pass off as Oz characters. I'll give you a full report some time tomorrow. If you're going out tonight, remember to have fun, but you'll have more fun if you play it smart and play it safe so that you dan't get hurt.

Wicked Cosplay in Tampa

I'm at the Oz convention in San Diego this wekend (hey, how come you're not here?), and I'll be hosting the costume contest this afternoon. I wonder, however, if I'll see any as spectacularly authentic as what Jen over at Epbot saw last weekend at Tampa's Fanboy Expo. It sounds like the con itself was pretty badly handled, but as you go through the report and the cosplay photos she took, you'll see that that didn't stop the enthusiasm. And then you get towards the end and the whole reason I'm telling you about it here...

Oz Costumes at DragonCon

DragonCon is a huge many-medias convention held every summer in Atlanta. How big is it? They have something like thirty-seven (!) tracks of programming, they take over FOUR huge downtown hotels, and they have their own parade on Saturday through downtown. And a MAJOR part of this convention is cosplay. Well, my friend (who I've never actually met, talked to, or otherwise communicated with, but I suspect we'd get along just fine if we ever actually do meet) Jen, who runs a number of blogs (notably Cake Wrecks) always goes, and always takes lots of pictures, and always highlights the best on her Epbot blog. This year, part four of this year's best cosplay features two sets of Oz costumes. And these are not the type you normally see at the various Oz conventions I've been too. So go take a look!

Tonight's Trick-or-Treaters

We're not officially closing up shop tonight quite yet, but it's getting close to the end, and they're definitely coming in at a mere trickle now. We've given away well over eight hundred pieces of candy (we lost count some time ago, not that it was totally accurate at that stage anyway), breaking last year's record, and as always it was a lot of fun to see what all the kids in town are wearing. But this year, a surprisingly small number of Oz costumes. We only had one Dorothy (we've had at least a half dozen in previous years), and a handful of lions who may be (but probably aren't) cowardly. And that's it. So, what Ozzy stuff happened to you tonight? Feel free to leave a report in the comments.

Winkie Convention Countdown: 7 Days to Go

Wow, only a week to go now? How time flies! And I'm definitely starting to run out of things to say. Still, I should be able to come up with something each day. So today, I want to reminisce about my costumes. I'm not a big costumer, but I've worn a few in my day. I already told you about my prize-winner in 1989 and my first costume, in 1983, but here are a few others I've worn:

• Captain Salt. I had a black costume frock coat, I managed to find a good beard, and Karyl supplied a hat. Frankly, I thought that was one of my better ones. Somewhere in the depths of my collection are pictures of me in that costume out on the dunes of Asilomar, with the Pacific Ocean in the background.
  
• Ippty, the scribe of Rash from The Hungry Tiger of Oz. By coincidence, Susan Hall also dressed as Ippty that year. So we did a joint presentation, each claiming to be the real Ippty, a la "I am Spartacus!" (Just between you and me, however, I think her costume was better.)
  
• The Army of Oz. This was a joint costume Laura and I did a few years ago (I'm sure we blogged it somewhere, feel free to browse). She was the officer, I was the private.
  
• The Soldier with the Green Whiskers. This was pretty much Karyl's baby, I was just the model for it, although I seem to recall supplying the pants. Also, we borrowed a prop gun from a stage presentation of The Marvelous Land of Oz from years ago, which just added to the affect.
  
• The Oogaboo Army. This was another theme costume that a whole bunch of us Oogaboos wore.
  
• Pokes. Again, a bunch of Oogaboos being silly. We dressed as the Pokes from The Royal Book of Oz and did things real slow, said "Cheese" about a minute after someone took our picture, dropped off to sleep at random moments, and the like. Hilary dressed as a pet snail! It was a lot of fun.
  
• Kermit the Frog as the Scarecrow in The Muppets' Wizard of Oz, another Karyl creation (she went as Miss Piggy as the Wicked Witch of the West and won a rare special prize). In fact, here's a picture of me:
  
  
• And, of course, you all recall Ozzy McTavish, right?
  

Winkie Convention Countdown: 20 Days to Go

The Winkies have always (well, almost always) had a pretty spectacular costume contest. We often get about a dozen people in some great costumes, of characters you may never think of. Heck, more than once (including me last year), we've had characters you may have never heard of before. I didn't usually participate at first, unless my friend Karyl had an idea, just because I had no ideas and/or transportation was an issue. But in 1989, I had a thought that struck me out of the blue. I was working my way through college at a drug store that also had a pretty good variety store in the basement, and one June, the Halloween supplies came in. While inventorying it, I had a thought, and asked if I could buy a few of them. I ended up buying some gray make-up, a top hat, gray hairspray, and some gray clothes dye (okay, that last one wasn't part of the Halloween stuff, it was just something the store sold). My dad had a gray suit he could part with, and I used the dye on a white shirt, white socks, and white gloves. I already had a black umbrella and silver-and-gray tennis shoes. Put it all together, and I was Benny the statue of a public benefactor brought to life in The Giant Horse of Oz.

Since the Club was in one of its growth periods at the time, we had a huge turnout for that convention. Naturally, we also had a huge turnout for the costume contest. And since this was 1989, there were an awful lot of costumes in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the famous Judy Garland film version. I think we had about a dozen Dorothy's, including one gentleman who came in gingham shorts and ruby topsiders! The local press was there as well, and guess which group of Dorothys got all the attention? Those of us dressed as characters from the books kind of got shunted to the side a bit, but we had our day in the sun — literally! Since Asilomar is right on the Pacific coast (it even has its own beach), the convention is usually pretty cool and overcast all weekend. Not this year! For the first time since we'd been coming there, the sun decided to come out and warm things up considerably. This was not a good thing for the college kid covered from head to toe in gray! Thank goodness for the umbrella, which I could use as a parasol, but it still got pretty hot and uncomfortable in that get-up. And there were lots of requests to pose for pictures (which was easy for me; I was playing a statue, after all), mingling with the other characters, and the like. But yeah, as soon as I could get out of there, I headed back to my room and took a very thorough shower.

Two more surprises came from that contest. One was that I won! Seriously, I didn't go in to win, as my main goal is to have fun. But my fellow Winkies voted me best costumed adult. The other surprise is that I still found gray make-up in my ears taking my shower the next morning.

Steampunk Oz

Jen, who runs the always entertaining Cake Wrecks blog, has another blog that's about whatever else she wants to talk about. This past weekend, she was at Dragon*Con, an annual convention in Atlanta that's one of the most well-respected cons in the country. Jen took lots of pictures. Today, she has up her steampunk costume gallery (she's a big fan of steampunk). Go, take a look, and make sure you keep looking even after you think you see why I pointed it out to you. Yes, lots of Ozzy steampunkiness there!

The Ballad of Ozzy McTavish

I actually got to wear a costume at the Winkie Convention this year. But it's going to take some explanation as to how it all came about, so I'd better start explaining...

It all started at the 2009 edition of Seattle's premiere comic book convention, Emerald City Comic Con. As I've become a bit of a coattails comics collector (Laura's the real comics geek in the family), I've always had a good time there, and not just because of the name. I mean, Seattle has been called The Emerald City for almost thirty years now. But last year's con had an item I really, really wanted: a specially commissioned "Emerald City" baseball jersey. So of course Laura and I asked around, but found that they were only available to long-term convention volunteers. So I was out of luck. "Hey, wait a minute," I thought to myself, "if I can't get one, maybe I can at least borrow one for the convention." So I sent off some e-mails of inquiry, but didn't get a reply until after last year's Winkie Convention. But at least they were promising, and Jim, the ECCC organizer, promised he'd get it to me for 2010 if I reminded him in time.

This year, our timing was much better, we got it all figured out, and I was able to borrow Jim's jersey for the weekend. My first thought is that I would just wear it for some time during the convention, and that would be it. "Hey," I then thought to myself, "what if I had a hat to go with it?" I poked around and looked at the website for the Eugene Emeralds, thinking one of their caps might work, but nothing semed quite right. Then, just a few days before the convention, I remembered a cap I bought many year ago from Books of Wonder that would be perfect. It's black with Denslow's lion intertwined with the "O-Z" logo in emerald green (sadly, no longer for sale there), and it would go great with the green-on-black jersey. Trouble is, most of my Oz collection is still in boxes after the move, and it took me a little while to find it. But find it I did, and everything got packed away for the trip.

You'd think that would be it, wouldn't you? Well, so did we. But if you're doing nothing but driving for a day and a half, you tend to think of things you'd never thunk before. Somewhere in southern Oregon, the name "Emerald City Green Sox" popped into my head, and I decided I wanted to turn it into a full-blown costume. Fortunately, all I needed was a bat and a pair of green socks. And how hard could it be to find either one?

We'd driven so far that first day, and had no time when we arrived to go shopping. But we were far enough into California that we found we had plenty of time before we had to get to Asilomar, so we made a few stops along the way. One national name-brand chain department store had a nice, inexpensive plastic bat and some promising socks on sale in many colors — except green, of course. Hmm. Well, we had a way to go, and we knew there was at least one more branch of this store near Asilomar, so we decided not to get anything there but move on to the other one. Good news, they had a better bat! This was a big, wide fungo bat, which would make for a more comical prop (and, unlike the one I found earlier, didn't also have a ball, which I really didn't feel it needed). But still no green socks in the men's department. So Laura dragged me to the women's department, and we found a pair of green socks, in a pack with a bunch of other colors. Well, I hemmed and hawed a bit, but finally decided to give it a shot. They weren't quite as bright green as I was hoping for, but as a spur-of-the-moment last-minute costume accessory, they did the trick. And sure enough, they had enough stretch in them that they fit (although I didn't find that out until the morning of the costume parade).

All my character needed now was a name! "Ozzy" came naturally, of course, as that's a not at all uncommon baseball knickname, particularly Ozzie Smith. But I didn't come up with a last name until very late when "McTavish" popped into my head. So, Ozzy McTavish, center fielder and power hitter for the Emerald City Green Sox, was born. And here's what he looks like!

Photo courtesy Jared Davis

Here's an action shot, better showing off the hat:


Photo by Laura Gjovaag

It is an extrememly good thing that I came up with Ozzy, too, since there were only two other costumes! What has happened to the proud Winkie costume tradition? Ah, well, at least I was there. Now all I need is for someone to actually write Ozzy into an Oz story of some sort.

Halloween encounters of the Ozzy kind

In my real life, when I'm not reading Oz books or working on my Oz website or something else Ozzy, I'm a substitute teacher. Today, I was working at a junior high school. I saw at least three Dorothys (one of them was one of the secretaries!), one or two Tin Woodmen, and possibly even the "sexy" Cowardly Lion. One of the teachers also dressed up as the Tooth Fairy, but I swear that the crown she stuck big white cutouts of teeth onto was a Glinda crown.