When You Break the White Light, You See the Many Colors In It

Sorry for being so late, but here's how Halloween turned out:

In honor of the late, great Christopher Lee, I decided to dress as Saruman the White.

Not that anybody outside my family could tell. I was mistaken for Gandalf 90% of the time. The other 10% had me as Moses, Father Time and - showing just how many people don't understand religion - Jesus.

As for what went into this, well for the most part, I enlisted the help of my aunt who likes to make Reneissance Fair and similar-style outfits in her spare time (she made me an Organization XIII cloak back in 2007, which I still have). This time, I had to provide the fabric, but we were able to find everything from a bargain shop for less than $80 - and really high-quality fabric as well. These pictures don't do this beautiful garment justice and I hope to use it often in the years to come.

The staff was created by my wife and I (well, mostly her because she loves this kind of stuff). The main body is PVC piping which already came black, but we painted over because of white serial numbers. We used smaller pipes in the bigger pipes to not only create the tapering effect on the bottom, but also to allow the top half to detach for easy fitting into cars. The spires are simply painted board, using a pattern we found online (it doesn't 100% match, but it's good enough). The orb is a plastic Christmas ornament that I filled with white paint (though apparently it didn't dry all the way before I glued it to the top, since during the night all the waving and shaking I was doing had dislodged some wet parts and coated the inside of the pipe).

My wife helped me with the fake nails, which were harder to remove than previous times I had used them. And then there's the beard...I hated the beard. It was a store-bought thing I found last-minute. I could never make it look right, it didn't sit right (I couldn't make any real facial expressions without it slipping off of my upper lip), I couldn't get the black coloring in there the correct way. On top of that, it came with a wig. My original idea was to straighten and color my own hair, but even though the straightening looked good, the white spray turned me grey, so I used the wig as a last resort. Bleh.

And I'm still upset I couldn't find a fake nose that looked like Saruman, so I just went with my own, that looks nothing like it.

So, as usual, we went to the Roger Williams Park Zoo Jack-O'-Lantern Spectacular, but after that, we went to this club called Aurora that was doing a sort of Halloween variety show (it was kind of an old-timey burlesque, and it was rather entertaining). We stayed until after 1:00, and I was top 5 in a costume contest (where I was, again, misidentified as Gandalf) - I lost to a woman dressed as Jareth from Labyrinth (since the winner was chosen by applause, I assume more people were Bowie fans than Rings fans), but everyone was really nice and loved my whole character thing.

I ended up staying awake past 3:00 (technically 4:00, since the clocks changed as I was watching it) trying to get the damn nails off. Luckily, I had taped every Simpsons Treehouse of Horror ever earlier that day, so I had something to do while I was waiting.