Shameless Plug

I almost never play the "buy me this" game with my journal, and on the rare exceptions I don't really expect anybody to buy me the thing in question. But here's the deal. Thanks to a ride from bakadragon (who, I find out, lives a comfortable 6 block walk from me -- or would be a comfortable walk if I didn't have to wade through the boiling hot soup we were breathing for air today), I made it to most of St. Louis Pagan Picnic Sunday. I might not have bothered, because the forecast was for even worse weather than we got, dewpoints in the 70°s and spot thunderstorms. But I am constitutionally incapable of turning kukla_tko42 down, and several members of her theater company had an emergency and were unavailable, so because I own my own horns and satyr pants and fit the build, I got typecast as Trump XV in her Living Tarot interactive improv theater piece. More about this when I get the picture to go with it, probably in a couple of days.

But anyway, her popsicle-selling and face-painting booth was right next to the booth for Curious Cat Clothing. Now, I've always loved Cat DeGuire's (sp?) work and workmanship. Heck, I approve of costumers in general. But there never was anything on her rack that jumped right out and said, "Buy me!", even though they do build stuff up to my size and beyond. But now, the gods help me, she's branched out into Hawaiian shirts, in some marvelous fabrics, including some delightful retro-kitsch. And one of them in particular, the one pictured at the right here, I'm orders from kukla_tko42, who said, "You have to have that. In fact, you need a whole closet full of those." Except of course, that I've been out of work since the end of November, my SSI application is going to be in the "waiting" stage for at least another two months, and if I had $60, I'd need to save it for something practical like next month's cable modem bill.

But, since I can refuse her nothing (as I have already mentioned), if somebody wants to buy me one of those shirts (fabric: Bathing Beauties, size: 3X), I'd be much delighted. (In the profoundly unlikely event that somebody agrees with her that I should own a full closet of these, I'm also attracted to the Pinup Island, Galactica, and Jazz Age Black fabrics.) If somebody would rather send me money to buy one, I promise that the next $60 will be spent on a Hawaiian shirt instead of being wasted on rent or utilities. (Insert wry grin here.)

Speaking of the shopping at Pagan Picnic, though, one other thing I feel like mentioning: I had a minor epiphany. I was wandering the length of vendor row (which was huge, and well frequented in spite of the weather, so I consider myself vindicated in saying that the last thing on earth Omnistic Fellowship and/or Yarrow Coven needed was CAST hanging around their necks like a millstone). One of the vendors was selling custom leather costume items, most of which were sort of vaguely BDSM themed, and I saw one piece in particular that kind of looked cool, like something I might have bought if I had real money still. It was a black leather face mask, sort of a skull-shaped domino mask, decorated heavily with pyramidal chromed studs/spikes including a prominent set of "horns." I remember thinking, "That's stylish, that'd be fun to wear" -- and that's when I had my mini-epiphany.

When we saw Monsters, Inc., I really, really identified with Sulley, but kukla_tko42 really, really, even more strongly identified with Boo. And her moment of revelation came when she realized that there are a lot of things, monsters and such, that seem scary to other people, but that are just cute to her, because when she was still in her crib that was how her daddy played with her, mock-scaring her with his extensive collection of sci-fi and monster toys.

Well, similarly, I'm a big guy, just short of 300 pounds and right around 6'0" tall. I'm bald, with a goatee. I wear a lot of black, but then, hey, most St. Louisans wear a lot of black; we're worse blackholes than they are in San Fran and New York. I'm a little loud, and prone to expressing myself forcefully. I have a semi-permanent squint with a beetling brow ridge. I know that I scare the heck out of people just by existing, even though I'm a harmless lovable old teddy bear; I make a scary enough first impression that many people never find that out. I try really hard to not be scary, especially around new people. But then I go and make it worse by wearing devil horns, or BDSM gear, or whatever other weird costume and it never, ever, ever occurs to me for a second that people would see that as anything other than fun and stylish -- because I practically grew up in science fiction fandom in the 1970s, where such things were common. In that subculture, those kinds of things weren't meant as anything threatening or scary, they were just "what the cool people wear" fashionable. My mini-epiphany was that there are all kinds of things that scare the mundanes that never occur to me, because in my own life I've hardly ever known anybody who thought those things were scary.