Hardcore Halloweening

Last week I bought a TRON: Legacy identity disk toy.

Not the regular, Frisbee-looking one, but the “deluxe” one that lights up and makes noises. It looks like the real thing (if it were real). Perfect for a TRON Halloween costume.

Yep, it’s July, and I’ve already begun the Halloween planning.

Halloween is serious business for this nerd.

A day filled with dress-up and mischief, the one entire day I can put my nerd stuff on full display wherever I go, and not feel like a dork the whole time. I’m an out-and-proud nerd, but even I know to put it away some times and act like a normal.

But not on Halloween.

Not ever.

Nerds and Halloween go together like a sonic screwdriver and a lock.

I’ve been back in the Halloween swing for the past 10 years.

My fiancee’s favorite holiday is Halloween, so we always find something to do. And we think of costume ideas frequently and warehouse them until we decide. We have decided this year yet, but with both of us being nerds, there’s so much we can do.

Halloween’s different as an adult, since you can drink and 75 percent of the costumes have “sexy” jammed in front of it. But I like the nerd stuff best. In the childhood days of Halloween, everyone’s a nerd that day since everyone’s running around as superheroes and cartoon characters.

I took off from Halloween for a few years starting in high school, but by junior year of college, I had to get back in the game. First was a devil costume of red smoking jacket, matching facepaint and light-up horns. The next year, I bought a suit of gladiator armor and wore it all day – to breakfast, to classes, to doing a Tennessee Williams scene in acting rehearsal.

A friend and I rented Batman and Joker costumes one year, so I lived out my dream of dressing in head-to-toe purple. The only real downside was how much the white clownface makeup sweated into my eyes at the party, but it was so worth it when we started doing fight choreography in the club. I’ll never get to do that costume again, though; the fiancee says it’s too scary.

Things only got more intense once I started dating her.

Suddenly the world of couples’ costumes was opened to us. Mars and Venus was the first year. We also did American Gladiators once; she had a homemade Hellga costume, and I found a skimpy shiny outfit and blonde wig. The only topical costume was Kanye West and Taylor Swift in 2009, the MTV moonman award fashioned out of foil and an action figure. We’re an interracial couple, and Kanye and Taylor was the first interracial costume idea we’d ever done. (And no, we’re not touching Othello and Desdemona, or O.J. and Nicole Simpson. But going as President Obama’s parents in 2008 would have been clever.)

Halloween as a non-white person can be a tricky enterprise.

So many characters up for grabs are depicted as white, so sometimes folks see my face before they see the costume. (Remember last year’s Community episode where everyone mistook Shirley’s Glinda the Good Witch costume for Miss Piggy, and Chang’s Peggy Fleming outfit as Michelle Kwan?) Last year the fiancee and I went as Cinderella and Prince Charming, and I lost count of how many times white people asked me who I was, or guessed that I was Nelson Mandela. (Cindy’s right next to me!)

The kids knew, though, since race is something you learn.

My skin color didn’t matter to a little girl dressed as a princess who saw me in my jacket and sash, gasped and hugged me tight at the knees. And I’m not slamming all adults; one year we went as Alice and the Mad Hatter while Halloweening in Walt Disney World, and people confused us with park staff. Should have used it to our advantage.

Much of my Halloween renaissance can be attributed to Henri David, a jeweler and society savant in my hometown Philadelphia who’s been hosting a hotel-huge party there for more than 30 years. The slogan for his parties is, “Come not as you are, but as you want to be.” And people do, arriving in everything from fetish gear to Smurfs to a gang of I Love Lucys, superhero splendor, gaggles of drag queens and, once, a man dressed as a marionette puppet with a giant papier-mache master rigged to him with working strings.

I’ve made it to the overwhelming bustle of the Greenwich Village parade in New York dressed as the Marquis de Sade in velveteen pantaloons, stockings and a riding crop. Maybe I’ll take that with me if I ever make it to West Hollywood.

But it’ll be tough to beat last year as Cindy and the Prince, trick-or-treating with a friend’s kids, leaving fairy-tale glitter on everyone’s doorsteps.