Not Growing Out of It

I'm constantly teasing my mother about how she used to tell people "It's just a phase, she'll grow out of it!" when it came to my fascination with horror and effects. Asides from Mom, my dear friend Lizzie can certainly appreciate the long-standing joke. When we were young teens, I engineered an act for us to do for our junior high talent show that involved multiple deaths and managed to get us thrown out of the show.

Lizzie's great though, and she comes up with some rather unpleasant ideas herself when it comes to brainstorming for projects. Even though we're both now in our mid-thirties, she gets a kick out of coming over to my place to die.

As for the munchkin in the photo... whenever there are small children on a set, I let them help me with the makeup. It's a good way to prevent them from being frightened by the finished product. Hey, that's how I started!

In my younger years I would torture my family by spreading my sick little projects all over the house. It didn't help matters that I had a little brother to practice on every time I got the urge to do something disturbing with makeup and corn syrup.

Considering I was pretty young at the time, I didn't have enough of a budget to cover things like adhesive remover. It's a wonder that my brother still talks to me after all the trauma I introduced into his childhood.

One day I built a couple of styrofoam zombies (Barney and Claudia) and propped up in the formal sitting room in the house. Of course, Barney was rigged to vomit blood and the chair he was sitting in was upholstered in light-colored velvet. I was soon thereafter banished to the garage. (Funny how twenty years later and I'm still building creatures in that garage.)

Once in a while I'd get the opportunity to really do a number on my mother, usually towards the end of October. On the left is a "Jack Attack" I did on her when I was about fifteen.

Now, back to the garage...

Mom loves telling the story about how I scared the daylights out of the serviceman who came once a month to check our water softener unit in the garage. The "regular" serviceman was already pretty accustomed to my weirdness, so I never gave a second thought about suspending latex guts and paper mache body parts from the ceiling to dry.

The unsuspecting new guy, on the other hand, screamed like a girl when he flicked on the lights and saw my latest pieces hanging in the garage. According to Mom, who was home at the time, he was a big black man who quite literally turned white.

While I may have gotten booted out of my middle school talent show for being too graphic, I was given a lot more liberty in high school. Many of the teachers there already had a pretty good idea what to expect from me, being that my mother was working at the same school and had plenty of tales to tell by that point.

So I was active in the drama department, and also with a brand new micro-class on television production... where I learned that a werewolf's best friend was stop-motion animation.

My sophomore year I was recruited to help out with the "Superlatives Show", which was a mock academy awards ceremony for the seniors who were the "Best Dressed", "Most Athletic", etc... They wanted the presenters of "Friendliest" to dress up as Freddy and Jason, and they needed makeup.

So this was an opportunity for me to torture a classmate with a three-hour makeup job. I used a simple latex and tissue build-up, then rotted out his teeth and whipped up a bladed glove for him. A photo of the character ended up in the local newspaper.

Once I graduated from high school, I bartended for a while and did some shows here and there as the opportunities came up. I worked at a couple seasonal haunted houses, since October seemed to be open season for anyone who knew their way around a sewing machine and a makeup box.

While I was bartending there was a photographer who would come in frequently and he asked if I'd be willing to model for him. He wanted to build up his portfolio a bit with some "cheesecake" shots. I told him I would, but I also made it clear that I would do my own wardrobe, hair, and makeup.

You can imagine the shock he had when I showed up painted head to toe in silver with metallic scales on my face and chest. I gave him something really interesting to spice up his cheesecake.

I quit bartending when a Wardrobe Mistress position became available at Terror on Church Street in Orlando. It is there that I met a whole gaggle of freaks who were into the horror genre as much as I was, and quite a few of them went on to join us with Siren projects when the Terror attraction closed down in 1998.

In 1996 I was re-introduced to Duckie, who was also working at the Terror attraction. We'd met before when I was doing a Rocky Horror review show many years earlier, but never really paid much attention to each other back then. We decided to partner in producing a few stage plays, and we've been wrecking havoc together ever since.

So much for "growing out of it".