HST 2015 Update #5 - Screams From The Crypt

I'm home!

What a great weekend at Halloween SwingThing! One big continuous party, like a trip to a theme park.

It felt very much like a theme park, actually. Very L.A., Disney-esque. Sunny, joyful, a mainstream celebration, with over-the-top attention to detail you'd get at Universal Studios Hollywood.

Very Jordan and Tatiana. Colorful, pop-culture-ish, "California happy" - even at a spooky Halloween event. Different from New York and Broadway where it rains and you wear black and entertainment has a dark, edgy side.

To enter the ballroom you had to pass, stooping to avoid cobwebs, through a winding haunted alleyway (designed and built by Rome Slater) elaborately constructed using pvc piping and black canvas. Giant fuzzy tarantulas crawling over your feet trying to jump up your leg, swinging skeletons bumping against your face, ghouls with glowing red eyes snapping and lurching at you, a bloody baby with a spinning head smiling demonically, and spooky voices and sounds creeping you out.

Then you emerge into the ballroom - totally transformed into a glowing, orange netherworld inhabited by ghouls, goblins, and zombies. Hideous bloody monsters with fangs and glowing eyes hang at either corner of the backdrop. You have to dance under their murderous stare.

In one corner enormous macabre Victorian faces emerge out of the gloom, with eyes that follow you - a whole cast of bone-chilling ghosts from the past appearing and fading into fog.

On the side wall blood suddenly appears, splashing and dripping to the floor, nightmarish messages scrawled in blood, "KILL THEM!" "MURDER!" "GO AWAY!" "HELP ME!"

Across the room holograms of ghastly blue specters materialize and fade; shrieking, reaching out from another dimension, eyes blazing, teeth like fangs, fingernails like claws swatting at the air, grabbing at you to pull you back into the underworld.

Table decorations a collection of flickering blue candles, skulls, caskets, brain matter in piles of moss.

But best of all - most ingenious - the ghosts!

Imagine standing in semi-darkness and suddenly a gust of wind at your neck as two apparitions blow by, suspended in space, floating above the ground, whizzing through space while spinning like whirling dervishes.

You can barely make them out. They seem to be man and woman in long Victorian tombstone-gray gowns, lit from below by an other-worldly blue light; zombie-like eyes - only the whites of the eyeballs, phosphorescent and blazing as they flit silently by you through the air.

This is what I mean by attention to detail. The ghosts were Jordan and Tatiana in stunning custom-made costumes, Victorian dresses, ghostly white and casket-gray, heavy, tattered and ornate.

And the cleverest part: the robes had a low bustle - a construction along the bottom hem - to keep the fabric stiff and circular because - get this! They were on Hovertrax! That's right, those motorized skate-board things - theirs with neon-blue lights - that speed around at 20 mph. So the dresses were constructed to completely hide the board from view, making it appear as though they were skimming just above the surface of the earth; and when they spun the skirts wouldn't swing but would retain their shape, in an other-worldly way. Like creepy dolls, or incorporeal beings risen from the crypt.

And their makeup. Eeeeeeeew!

Ghoulish doesn't do it justice. Mottled, clammy, dark eye sockets. Glowing zombie contact-lenses, all white with tiny pin-prick pupils.

This was the work of the MARVELOUSLY talented Elizabeth LaGue - hair and makeup artist for the Victoria’s Secret Runway Show, the
 Grammys,
 the BET awards
, and the 
Primetime Emmy's
 ...

That's our "Lizzie" LaGue, west coast swing dancer, and one of the litter of "puppies" who grew up together as child dancers in the southern California west coast community, a group as close as siblings, with lifelong bonds forged through the special understanding and closeness that came from being kids in an adult community.

In our community ... ahem, ahem ... with all its drama ... and all its artistic ... drama.

Liz did Jordan and Tatiana's hideous marvelous makeup.

And by the way - Liz is responsible for much of the hair and makeup you see at events. She's almost invisible - she's a worker. Working behind the scenes non-stop in a room at the hotel; coloring, cutting, styling hair, doing makeup.

And therapy.

The nicest, wisest, kindest, sweetest person you might ever meet.

This is a plug for Liz. She certainly deserves one. If you can get an appointment with her at your next event consider yourself lucky. She will make you beautiful. Or walking dead, if you prefer. She books months in advance. Contact her via email elizabethlague@gmail.com