Back in my days of doing community artwork (let’s call them ye olde community art days of yore…), my good friend Magi & I decided a big community Halloween bash was the order of the day. Halloween has always been a big deal in Paisley (and getting bigger! – check out the Paisley Halloween Festival 2019 https://bit.ly/2pm1I52 ) and in the community I was based in at that time everybody got involved making costumes and turning out.
So anyway, we carried out an extensive decorating job of the big community hall that was available to us and with the help of the local young team, we produced huge cane sculptures of devils and ghosts and some donated white yarn helped create a massive spider’s web. Of course, we also deployed the strobe lights and dry ice machines liberally…
Some of the costumes that year were excellent. There was a fantastic ‘Statue of Liberty’ – very simple mint green sheet with a cardboard crown. There was a baby ‘Dennis the Menace’ wearing a wig made from what looked like the inside of a small plastic football with black paper spikes attached all over it. In addition, there was a toddler dressed in a Santa suit and devil horns – ‘Satan’s Little Helper’…
The day before the event Magi remembered where she could get a full sized skeleton. It was in a local school depository and all we had to do was collect. We nipped out in her car – a cool, two door BMW. As I say, it was a lovely car and had five seats, but the boot was not the biggest and following discussions with the caretaker at the warehouse, we were now fully informed that a full size anatomically correct skeleton was very expensive and we had to take extra care not to damage it. Well, from a purely practical point of view we decided that the safest bet was to sit our new pal in one of the back seats, upright with his own seat belt. We then drove back to the community hall, taking our time through the busy traffic in the town centre. Please note – this was a good few years ago, well before tinted back seat windows were ‘de rigueur’.
On the way we pulled up at traffic lights at one point. We were laughing and congratulating ourselves regards our ingenious solution to the packing problem as another car pulled up beside us. The driver of the car looked across and did the classic double take as he noticed our fellow traveller. He tapped his window and caught our eye. He then made a concerned face pointing at our ‘passenger’. We smiled and shrugged our shoulders in a kind of ‘what can you do?’ way. At this he reached across into his glove box, lifted out a small sign and put it against his window…‘Doctor on call’.
Enjoy all that spookiness when you’re out there guisin’!
Alan
Alan@Engage Renfrewshire 