Halloween ’06: ROOOWRR! Fear The Deepasaur!

Click here to skip my blathering & cut to the pix 🙂

Few things are sadder than a ‘Deep in September with no Halloween costume inspiration. I moped about, I tried to ignore it, I emailed my friends for suggestions. Nothing helped. Eventually I started poking through old photos from Halloweens past looking for ideas & then lightning struck – this photo, combined with the dragon I loved from Burning Man (and my subsequent dinosaur thoughts) re-ignited an old idea that I’ve pretty much ALWAYS wanted to do, but knew I couldn’t pull off: The Deepasaur! I mean I can’t sew – option 1. And I can’t weld – option 2. I’ve gotten pretty good at making spherical costumes 🙂 but I don’t know of any spherasaurs.

But suddenly I had an inspiration: – packing foam. cross sections. velociraptors! (ok ok – velociraptors were actually chicken size – dromeosaurs! utahraptors!)

Click here for more pics & “making of” pics

Rowwwwr! I was off to the races.

Immediately, I set about looking for a small plastic model & then tried copying his head out of clay….

Then came slicing & scaling up using an overhead projector. Then came the first brutal learning curve, that I had to carve both the top and bottom sides of each cross section for everything to match up right when you stacked them…. I never did get it good enough, but I learned a lot for next time.

After all the stacking of foam came the next huge challenge which was painting: painting a big sponge is hard. Eventually, my friend Catherine suggested house paint & eventually a few days later I wizened up & listened to her. The next big challenge descended on me right before I was supposed to take it out the Saturday before Halloween: connecting the tail. The tail was a HUGE problem & frankly never looked great. Eventually I made a system – but that first night it was so lame I made a diaper to wear to cover it. In fact I broke my dino’s spine as I was walking out the door*. After the first night, I realized the tail was just too damn heavy, so I made a new one the night before Halloween & painted it the morning before the Deepasaur went to work (so my co-workers could experience the joys of paint fumes!).

At work, I had real problems with keeping my tights up 🙂 & the tail truly sucked – but I fixed these when I got home & began terrorizing in earnest as befitting a Deepasaur**. This involved chasing little kids around on Fair Oaks (a fun kiddy Halloween near my house), ambush predating passers-by on my walk to the Castro & generally posing for lots of pictures. MUCH fun was had! In the Castro, people seemed to love the costume, I ambushed many many bystanders, got lots of questions, posed for TONS of pictures (but no one has emailed me any yet :-() and occasionally explained that I was not a Tigger…. or a salamander – some people demand their dino’s green or grey evidently 🙂 Anyway MUCH MUCH fun.

I was also truly happy when I realized that I had made the perfect Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos) costume – it is a big night-time parade on November 2nd in SF’s heavily Latino Mission neighborhood (my home). Thus, 2 days later, I made a “Dia De Los Extintos” sign & hit the streets for more terrorizing!

So that was Halloween 2006 – it didn’t turn out as good looking as I hoped, but it was as fun as I hoped & I learned a TON and now have whole new vistas and possibilities. And someday Deepasaurus 2.0 (aka Deepasaurus Rex) will rear it’s ugly head…. ROWR!

I LOVE Halloween.

‘deep

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*For a dino geek like me, this was pretty funny: one of the biggest problems was my stance – I was too upright & this caused the tail’s backbone to break. This is JUST as dino scientists have been saying for years about the problems with the old-school representations (from our childhood) of upright T-Rexes as opposed to the modern “leaned forward” stance.

**Deepasaurs are not quite raptors. Their necks are far too short. They aren’t quite Tyrannosaurs; their arms are far too MUSCULAR AND MANLY. (Speaking of which check out my legs. “No seriously, check me out!”) All in all we are kind of similar to allosaurs. Maybe next time I’ll add feathers as befitting the modern view on dinos…

(thanks to LeeAnn Heringer, Peter Wagner & Peter Khoury & everyone else who gave me pix for this!)