bloodygranuaile (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bloodygranuaile) wrote2007-02-11 11:55 am
bloodygranuaile) wrote2007-02-11 11:55 am
Masquerade Ball!
Yesterday was loooong, but awesome.
Somehow I woke up at nine (!), so had a leisurely morning and was still in Tilton Hall at about noon. Spent the afternoon with a variety of interesting tasks. This included making polyvinyl tentacles and duct-taping them to the edge of the doors leading out onto the terrace so that they reached into the room when people opened the doors. Also had way too much fun painting blood spatters on the sheets of paper cut out from the books yesterday that we scattered on the tables in the mad scientist area.
The room's four corners all had different themes: the mad scientist corner, the steampunk corner, the lacy sitting area, and the opium den.
I didn't have anything to do with setting up the opium den (except scattering extra book pages on the windowsill), but it was pretty awesome. The couches were draped with red fabric, and there were empty bottles labeled "Absinthe" and "Laudanum" on the windowsill.
The lacy sitting area consisted of two lace-draped couches, a bunch of chairs and a lace-draped coffee table with book pages, rose petals, a fake candle, a destroyed book full of chocolate, and the "Necronomicon" chained down.
The steampunk corner featured silver cogs on the walls and a bunch of random designs made out of that corrugated-cardboard-like stuff that teachers edge blackboards with. Except this was corrugated side down, and the visible side was silver, and it didn't have those dippy wavy edges. We also had a wonderful cluster of variously shaped bits of silver piping arranged on a coffee table with a fog machine underneath it.
The mad scientist table was undoubtedly the most fun. Pages and pages and pages of cut-out book pages splattered with red paint, or with phrases like "IT COMES, IT COMES" finger-painted on in the same paint. The cut-book candy dish had brown handprints on it like old old bloodstains. And the table all the way in the corner had a black light on it, and containers full of glowing liquid (highlighter fluid), and many of the pages had random runes and occult symbols drawn on them with black-light marker (although there was a heart that said "Happy Valentine's Day" hidden in their somewhere), predominantly courtesy of Josh. There was also a cardboard window-box in which Liz had painted various insects and butterflies, mounted on the wall with gorilla tape (if it weren't for gorilla tape, there would have been no Masquerade Ball).
All this would've taken long enough to put together, but there was also the rest of the room. I mentioned the polyvinyl tentacles. Well, the glass windows at the main entrance were also completely covered up with polyvinyl, and hung with yellow Christmas lights. The window looking out over the green featured a polyvinyl clock and fence silhouette. The window looking over the street featured a polyvinyl silhouette of Sherlock Holmes, one of Cthulhu, and one of a guy with a cane and top hat, I don't know if it was supposed to be someone specific or not. All the windows were hung with yellow lights. There were fog machines in the steampunk corner, the mad scientist corner, and the opium den. The support pillars were hung with red and white tulle bunting. The piano was covered with lace, pages, petals, and candy (in a cut book, of course). All the tables for the food were covered in black tablecloths, with red tablecloths over them, and strings of pearls along the edges.
And we had fucking awesome lampposts. Much of Friday had been spent painting the wooden bases and the long pipes for the posts black; my first task yesterday was to tape the black paper tops on the light bit. These consisted of Tupperware containers, upside down, the caps glued to wooden slats that fit into the tops of the pipes. They looked very lamppost-y. I was given the task of tying red and white tulle bows around the posts; Dave Harvey and company got landed with the task of trying to make them glow (ha, ha). But they looked awesome. One was set at the base of the stairs on the first floor, with a sign on it for the Ball. Then we had cobblestone-patterned paper at the base of the stairs, on the landing, and leading into Tilton Hall, where the other six lampposts were set up on either side of the "road" right at the entrance.
There were two lights they decided to turn off for the Ball, but there was no switch for them, as said lights are never supposed to turn off. Since it costs too much to call Physical Plant to come and unscrew the lightbulbs (as they have to bring a cherrypicker), SPOC decided to do it themselves. This consisted of gorilla-taping several wooden dowels together to make a 24-foot pole, putting a plastic cup on the end with a tape loop on top of it, standing on an upside-down garbage can, and trying to stick the lightbulb onto the tape enough to unscrew it a bit. It took about half an hour per light. It was interesting to watch.
The piece de restistance was the gigantic portrait of H.P.Lovecraft over the mantelpiece. And I mean quite gigantic. Liz painted it, copying off an actual photograph of Lovecraft (and not the portrait that's alway's shown, either; an unflattering straight-on picture I'd never seen before). In order to get the picture up on the wall, the back was covered with tape loops, the bottom of the picture was lined up with the top of the fireplace, and a squad of nerdy SPOC boys armed with the long black pipes for the lampposts ran the rest of the picture up against the wall. It looked a little silly, as the lamppost pipes had the tulle bows on them already. Then we did the same with the cardboard frame, and then Liz painted a little plaque that read "H. P. Lovecraft, University President, 1857- " and stuck that on the bottom of the frame. The fireplace was filled with two long rows of pillar candles, which were actually lit, yay.
We made a huge mess doing all this, obviously. Cleanup took quite a while. And we ended up with a shitload of cardboard to recycle, so Liz sent me down to the loading dock to get a cart for it, but as I didn't know where the loading dock actually was, Mo came with me. I think this was the first time I've actually used the UC elevator.
Sometime that afternoon Tasha and I took a break to pore over the Insanity chapter of the Call of Cthulhu book. It is amazingly thorough.
Sometime around five me, Liz, Adam, and Dave made a last-minute Price Chopper run for more candy, highlighters for the mad scientist corner, and containers to put the highlighter fluid and the candy in. Then, as all the assembly and cleanup had been done, we got to go get dressed. We were told to be back there by 8, which gave me about two hours.
Wolfed down dinner and practically ran back to Wright. Changed into my skirts (two of them - black velvet on top, green one underneath - yes, I take playing dress-up too seriously). I had been wearing my black backlace corset all day, on the grounds that since it's such a royal pain in the arse to get on and off I might as well get as much wear out of it as possible. I had even managed to tie it myself that morning. At any rate, I'd been wearing it over my black buttondown all day, and now managed to take the shirt off from underneath the corset without removing the corset. (Whee.) Then had to relace the corset, which was a pain in the arse as one of the tassels had fallen off, but as I was standing in the bathroom with my back to the mirror trying to see what I was doing, Charlotte came in and tied it for me. Black ankle boots, fresh makeup, black lace gloves, Isis pendant, and the chandelier earrings Leah gave me came next. Then there was the task of doing something with my hair, and after some fruitless fiddling about, I put in in a high ponytail, twisted it around and doubled it back up so that it twisted around on itself, and fastened it that way. It started falling out later but whatever; I can't do hair, I don't really care. Tied a green pashmina around my shoulders, tossed on my wonderful floor-length handmade black cloak, grabbed my camera and keys and cloakedly hurried back to Tilton.
When I got to Tilton Hall people were unwrapping the masks and de-sticking-to-each-other the top hats on the table on the landing. The masks were merely a bit wasteful, as each mask was individually wrapped in plastic. But they were sequiney Mardi Gras masks and they were exceedingly popular, so that was okay. But the top hats--oh my God. It was nearly impossible to pull them apart. Between each hat was a strip of tissue paper, and these had so much static that when you pulled it out of the hat and put it on the table, more often than not it would literally jump back up off the table and fly to the hat. Pain in the arse. Then we amused ourselves stacking the top hats in pyramids.
Then people started showing up. Oh, the costumes! Obviously the SPOC people tended to dress the best, being nerds and therefore most likely to dress up in ridiculous costumes. Liz' hat was awesome; it was actually a white straw hat with a black lace shirt artfully tied on top of it. Mo had a beautiful blue dress with purple underskirtness at the bottom, and flowers worked into her hair. Tasha was the only person who managed to find a dress with the customary long sleeves that are somewhat poofy at the top; it was green velvet, and her black corset over it. Some girls wore Ren gear rather than Victorian gear (one girl I don't know had a hoop skirt which was pretty awesome; another girl named Hannah whom I only know very briefly has an incredibly awesome leather cincher). There was a girl with a full white lacy late-Victorian/WWI-era summer dress with matching white hat with flowers; she won Best Dressed, obviously. And another girl that I may or may not have met but cannot really tell went as V, from V for Vendetta, which she also wore on Halloween and Guy Fawkes' Day, but is an incredibly spiffy costume nonetheless. Most of the boys were wearing some variant of a tuxedo, as men's formal wear hasn't changed much since the Victorian era, with varying degrees of Victoriana accessories (top hats, gloves, capes, canes...). There were two major exceptions to this: one guy went as Bert the chimney sweep from Mary Poppins (complete with cap, soot on face and corncob pipe), and Duk. Duk was wearing a cut-up white tshirt inside out, some vaguely militaristic-looking black wedding jacket, and a kilt. And a sequiney butterfly mask, for most of the evening. It was hysterical. Some guy went as the Phantom of the Opera. Josh was occasionally the Invisible Man. The rest of the time Josh was just kind of vaguely Gothy-Victorian looking, in black pants and jacket and a deep purple shirt and a black hat that he kept doffing at people in a manner very reminiscent of Moody, augmented somewhat by the fact that Josh has black hair and very white skin. At the beginning of the dance and for the costume contest he wrapped his face in white gauze, but apparently this was too much of a pain in the arse to keep on all night.
Anyway.
Some of the music was good but much of the music was bad, but I didn't really care as I spent much of the dance manning the hats-and-masks table with various SPOC members. It was too much fun watching people come in and out. Although James dragged me up to the dance floor for long enough for me to show off the immense amounts of twirl I get out of both my skirts. Held a brief "spin-off" with Hannah and James' insistence. Won. Got some chocolate (I've decided I like rum balls) and went back to man the tables. One of the other infrequent times I was on the dance floor I took my pashmina off and apparently shocked James, Duk and Tasha by proving that I do indeed have shoulders.
Ally claims I am actually in SPOC now, as I helped host a SPOC event. If this is the case, I am quite undoubtedly the single most clueless SPOC member, as I really have no idea what else SPOC does. Is there a mailing list I should be on, or something? And I only met (and many of them I have still not really "met", just sort of "seen") most of the other SPOC members yesterday.
While I managed to get through most of the setup and dance able to completely ignore that I wasn't part of the group actually running the show, since I knew enough of the people there, I was rather sharply reminded of it at one point when a guy named Lou came and introduced himself to me on the basis that I was the only SPOC person there that he didn't know and had never seen before. (Oh, yes, that's right, this thing is run by an organization, not just various nerds.) He asked how long I'd been involved in SPOC things and I was like "Um... since yesterday, actually." It was slightly awkward.
Lou also looks like Jesus. I know just about every group of people has someone that looks like Jesus, but this guy seriously looks like Jesus. I was impressed.
The fire alarm went off in the middle of the costume contest. Everyone kind of stood there and looked around for a while like they weren't really sure if they were supposed to leave or not--this included me; considering the Cthulhu theme of the evening I found it entirely probable that it was part of the show I just hadn't been told about. But no, somebody had been smoking too close to the doors by the fire alarm. Oh well. So we all left, but almost everybody came back in instead of leaving, which was good.
Oh, what else happened... the chocolate fountains made sure that chocolate got fantastically splattered all over the table they were on, which amused me, because I like splatter. And I think one of the couches in the opium den got broken. Towards the end of the dance I went to take a nap in the opium den, and slept until the dance ended. (The Elder Gods did not come and eat us. I was disappointed.) They opened the doors for cleanup, and so it was freaking FREEZING, and there was no way I could clean up in my full costume, clutching my cloak as close to me as possible, which is what I would have to be doing in that temperature. So I told Liz I was going to go back to Wright to change into pants and real shoes and a sweatshirt and I'd be back. However, they were locking up the UC as I left, which meant I was locked out, and as I do not have a single one of these people's phone numbers (James wasn't there any longer) I had no way of making anyone let me in, so I just went to bed. Oh well.
All in all, this was the most fun I've ever had related to a dance.
For those of you on Facebook, there are pictures there. Mostly of set as opposed to of people, as the people pictures were all blurry, I think partially 'cos I was on the wrong light setting, but maybe because I just don't bloody know how to use a camera. But whatever.
Today, I am tired. That is all.
Somehow I woke up at nine (!), so had a leisurely morning and was still in Tilton Hall at about noon. Spent the afternoon with a variety of interesting tasks. This included making polyvinyl tentacles and duct-taping them to the edge of the doors leading out onto the terrace so that they reached into the room when people opened the doors. Also had way too much fun painting blood spatters on the sheets of paper cut out from the books yesterday that we scattered on the tables in the mad scientist area.
The room's four corners all had different themes: the mad scientist corner, the steampunk corner, the lacy sitting area, and the opium den.
I didn't have anything to do with setting up the opium den (except scattering extra book pages on the windowsill), but it was pretty awesome. The couches were draped with red fabric, and there were empty bottles labeled "Absinthe" and "Laudanum" on the windowsill.
The lacy sitting area consisted of two lace-draped couches, a bunch of chairs and a lace-draped coffee table with book pages, rose petals, a fake candle, a destroyed book full of chocolate, and the "Necronomicon" chained down.
The steampunk corner featured silver cogs on the walls and a bunch of random designs made out of that corrugated-cardboard-like stuff that teachers edge blackboards with. Except this was corrugated side down, and the visible side was silver, and it didn't have those dippy wavy edges. We also had a wonderful cluster of variously shaped bits of silver piping arranged on a coffee table with a fog machine underneath it.
The mad scientist table was undoubtedly the most fun. Pages and pages and pages of cut-out book pages splattered with red paint, or with phrases like "IT COMES, IT COMES" finger-painted on in the same paint. The cut-book candy dish had brown handprints on it like old old bloodstains. And the table all the way in the corner had a black light on it, and containers full of glowing liquid (highlighter fluid), and many of the pages had random runes and occult symbols drawn on them with black-light marker (although there was a heart that said "Happy Valentine's Day" hidden in their somewhere), predominantly courtesy of Josh. There was also a cardboard window-box in which Liz had painted various insects and butterflies, mounted on the wall with gorilla tape (if it weren't for gorilla tape, there would have been no Masquerade Ball).
All this would've taken long enough to put together, but there was also the rest of the room. I mentioned the polyvinyl tentacles. Well, the glass windows at the main entrance were also completely covered up with polyvinyl, and hung with yellow Christmas lights. The window looking out over the green featured a polyvinyl clock and fence silhouette. The window looking over the street featured a polyvinyl silhouette of Sherlock Holmes, one of Cthulhu, and one of a guy with a cane and top hat, I don't know if it was supposed to be someone specific or not. All the windows were hung with yellow lights. There were fog machines in the steampunk corner, the mad scientist corner, and the opium den. The support pillars were hung with red and white tulle bunting. The piano was covered with lace, pages, petals, and candy (in a cut book, of course). All the tables for the food were covered in black tablecloths, with red tablecloths over them, and strings of pearls along the edges.
And we had fucking awesome lampposts. Much of Friday had been spent painting the wooden bases and the long pipes for the posts black; my first task yesterday was to tape the black paper tops on the light bit. These consisted of Tupperware containers, upside down, the caps glued to wooden slats that fit into the tops of the pipes. They looked very lamppost-y. I was given the task of tying red and white tulle bows around the posts; Dave Harvey and company got landed with the task of trying to make them glow (ha, ha). But they looked awesome. One was set at the base of the stairs on the first floor, with a sign on it for the Ball. Then we had cobblestone-patterned paper at the base of the stairs, on the landing, and leading into Tilton Hall, where the other six lampposts were set up on either side of the "road" right at the entrance.
There were two lights they decided to turn off for the Ball, but there was no switch for them, as said lights are never supposed to turn off. Since it costs too much to call Physical Plant to come and unscrew the lightbulbs (as they have to bring a cherrypicker), SPOC decided to do it themselves. This consisted of gorilla-taping several wooden dowels together to make a 24-foot pole, putting a plastic cup on the end with a tape loop on top of it, standing on an upside-down garbage can, and trying to stick the lightbulb onto the tape enough to unscrew it a bit. It took about half an hour per light. It was interesting to watch.
The piece de restistance was the gigantic portrait of H.P.Lovecraft over the mantelpiece. And I mean quite gigantic. Liz painted it, copying off an actual photograph of Lovecraft (and not the portrait that's alway's shown, either; an unflattering straight-on picture I'd never seen before). In order to get the picture up on the wall, the back was covered with tape loops, the bottom of the picture was lined up with the top of the fireplace, and a squad of nerdy SPOC boys armed with the long black pipes for the lampposts ran the rest of the picture up against the wall. It looked a little silly, as the lamppost pipes had the tulle bows on them already. Then we did the same with the cardboard frame, and then Liz painted a little plaque that read "H. P. Lovecraft, University President, 1857- " and stuck that on the bottom of the frame. The fireplace was filled with two long rows of pillar candles, which were actually lit, yay.
We made a huge mess doing all this, obviously. Cleanup took quite a while. And we ended up with a shitload of cardboard to recycle, so Liz sent me down to the loading dock to get a cart for it, but as I didn't know where the loading dock actually was, Mo came with me. I think this was the first time I've actually used the UC elevator.
Sometime that afternoon Tasha and I took a break to pore over the Insanity chapter of the Call of Cthulhu book. It is amazingly thorough.
Sometime around five me, Liz, Adam, and Dave made a last-minute Price Chopper run for more candy, highlighters for the mad scientist corner, and containers to put the highlighter fluid and the candy in. Then, as all the assembly and cleanup had been done, we got to go get dressed. We were told to be back there by 8, which gave me about two hours.
Wolfed down dinner and practically ran back to Wright. Changed into my skirts (two of them - black velvet on top, green one underneath - yes, I take playing dress-up too seriously). I had been wearing my black backlace corset all day, on the grounds that since it's such a royal pain in the arse to get on and off I might as well get as much wear out of it as possible. I had even managed to tie it myself that morning. At any rate, I'd been wearing it over my black buttondown all day, and now managed to take the shirt off from underneath the corset without removing the corset. (Whee.) Then had to relace the corset, which was a pain in the arse as one of the tassels had fallen off, but as I was standing in the bathroom with my back to the mirror trying to see what I was doing, Charlotte came in and tied it for me. Black ankle boots, fresh makeup, black lace gloves, Isis pendant, and the chandelier earrings Leah gave me came next. Then there was the task of doing something with my hair, and after some fruitless fiddling about, I put in in a high ponytail, twisted it around and doubled it back up so that it twisted around on itself, and fastened it that way. It started falling out later but whatever; I can't do hair, I don't really care. Tied a green pashmina around my shoulders, tossed on my wonderful floor-length handmade black cloak, grabbed my camera and keys and cloakedly hurried back to Tilton.
When I got to Tilton Hall people were unwrapping the masks and de-sticking-to-each-other the top hats on the table on the landing. The masks were merely a bit wasteful, as each mask was individually wrapped in plastic. But they were sequiney Mardi Gras masks and they were exceedingly popular, so that was okay. But the top hats--oh my God. It was nearly impossible to pull them apart. Between each hat was a strip of tissue paper, and these had so much static that when you pulled it out of the hat and put it on the table, more often than not it would literally jump back up off the table and fly to the hat. Pain in the arse. Then we amused ourselves stacking the top hats in pyramids.
Then people started showing up. Oh, the costumes! Obviously the SPOC people tended to dress the best, being nerds and therefore most likely to dress up in ridiculous costumes. Liz' hat was awesome; it was actually a white straw hat with a black lace shirt artfully tied on top of it. Mo had a beautiful blue dress with purple underskirtness at the bottom, and flowers worked into her hair. Tasha was the only person who managed to find a dress with the customary long sleeves that are somewhat poofy at the top; it was green velvet, and her black corset over it. Some girls wore Ren gear rather than Victorian gear (one girl I don't know had a hoop skirt which was pretty awesome; another girl named Hannah whom I only know very briefly has an incredibly awesome leather cincher). There was a girl with a full white lacy late-Victorian/WWI-era summer dress with matching white hat with flowers; she won Best Dressed, obviously. And another girl that I may or may not have met but cannot really tell went as V, from V for Vendetta, which she also wore on Halloween and Guy Fawkes' Day, but is an incredibly spiffy costume nonetheless. Most of the boys were wearing some variant of a tuxedo, as men's formal wear hasn't changed much since the Victorian era, with varying degrees of Victoriana accessories (top hats, gloves, capes, canes...). There were two major exceptions to this: one guy went as Bert the chimney sweep from Mary Poppins (complete with cap, soot on face and corncob pipe), and Duk. Duk was wearing a cut-up white tshirt inside out, some vaguely militaristic-looking black wedding jacket, and a kilt. And a sequiney butterfly mask, for most of the evening. It was hysterical. Some guy went as the Phantom of the Opera. Josh was occasionally the Invisible Man. The rest of the time Josh was just kind of vaguely Gothy-Victorian looking, in black pants and jacket and a deep purple shirt and a black hat that he kept doffing at people in a manner very reminiscent of Moody, augmented somewhat by the fact that Josh has black hair and very white skin. At the beginning of the dance and for the costume contest he wrapped his face in white gauze, but apparently this was too much of a pain in the arse to keep on all night.
Anyway.
Some of the music was good but much of the music was bad, but I didn't really care as I spent much of the dance manning the hats-and-masks table with various SPOC members. It was too much fun watching people come in and out. Although James dragged me up to the dance floor for long enough for me to show off the immense amounts of twirl I get out of both my skirts. Held a brief "spin-off" with Hannah and James' insistence. Won. Got some chocolate (I've decided I like rum balls) and went back to man the tables. One of the other infrequent times I was on the dance floor I took my pashmina off and apparently shocked James, Duk and Tasha by proving that I do indeed have shoulders.
Ally claims I am actually in SPOC now, as I helped host a SPOC event. If this is the case, I am quite undoubtedly the single most clueless SPOC member, as I really have no idea what else SPOC does. Is there a mailing list I should be on, or something? And I only met (and many of them I have still not really "met", just sort of "seen") most of the other SPOC members yesterday.
While I managed to get through most of the setup and dance able to completely ignore that I wasn't part of the group actually running the show, since I knew enough of the people there, I was rather sharply reminded of it at one point when a guy named Lou came and introduced himself to me on the basis that I was the only SPOC person there that he didn't know and had never seen before. (Oh, yes, that's right, this thing is run by an organization, not just various nerds.) He asked how long I'd been involved in SPOC things and I was like "Um... since yesterday, actually." It was slightly awkward.
Lou also looks like Jesus. I know just about every group of people has someone that looks like Jesus, but this guy seriously looks like Jesus. I was impressed.
The fire alarm went off in the middle of the costume contest. Everyone kind of stood there and looked around for a while like they weren't really sure if they were supposed to leave or not--this included me; considering the Cthulhu theme of the evening I found it entirely probable that it was part of the show I just hadn't been told about. But no, somebody had been smoking too close to the doors by the fire alarm. Oh well. So we all left, but almost everybody came back in instead of leaving, which was good.
Oh, what else happened... the chocolate fountains made sure that chocolate got fantastically splattered all over the table they were on, which amused me, because I like splatter. And I think one of the couches in the opium den got broken. Towards the end of the dance I went to take a nap in the opium den, and slept until the dance ended. (The Elder Gods did not come and eat us. I was disappointed.) They opened the doors for cleanup, and so it was freaking FREEZING, and there was no way I could clean up in my full costume, clutching my cloak as close to me as possible, which is what I would have to be doing in that temperature. So I told Liz I was going to go back to Wright to change into pants and real shoes and a sweatshirt and I'd be back. However, they were locking up the UC as I left, which meant I was locked out, and as I do not have a single one of these people's phone numbers (James wasn't there any longer) I had no way of making anyone let me in, so I just went to bed. Oh well.
All in all, this was the most fun I've ever had related to a dance.
For those of you on Facebook, there are pictures there. Mostly of set as opposed to of people, as the people pictures were all blurry, I think partially 'cos I was on the wrong light setting, but maybe because I just don't bloody know how to use a camera. But whatever.
Today, I am tired. That is all.
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