I understand. It’s so hard to resist.
There’s two of you. You want to dress up for Halloween as a pair, either as friends or a couple. You both like the Muppets. You’ve both had a couple drinks.
You’re talking over your costume options, and one thing leads to another, and before you know it, you’re looking at yourself in the mirror, and you look like this.
And you say to yourself, where did I go wrong? It’s enough to make you start reconsidering your relationship, possibly your entire life path.
The sad fact is that humans were not meant to dress as Ernie and Bert. There’s just a fundamental wrongness about it, and there are no rubber duckies or stripey shirts that can fix that.
There are two basic routes to being Ernie and Bert, both of them unwise. One is the Big Floppy Head strategy. You make yourself a brace of Big Floppy Heads out of paper mache, or cloth, or foam rubber, or whatever you have lying around the house, and then you go out onto the street and you scare the bejeezus out of everybody.
This kind of costume has the same problem as some of the Cookie Monsters we considered in Part 1: You can’t see out of it, you can’t eat, you can’t drink, and you can’t make conversation. You are an accident waiting to happen. You are the butt of a joke you can’t even hear.
Big Floppy Heads also have a problem with stability. Bert’s head is especially top-heavy, and tends to blow over in a stiff wind. If you’re outside, you’ll probably spend half your time readjusting your head. This will impress nobody.
Unwise strategy #2 involves smearing yellow and orange goo all over your face.
It’s an effective costume, sure. But if you were at the party, would you talk to these guys?
And this is not an effective pick-up line: “Hey ladies, how’d you like to go back to my place and help me clean all this junk off my face?”
If you’re forced into it, my advice is: At the very least, negotiate your way into the Ernie role. Bert has some inherent design problems as a costume — bulbous nose, pointy head, receding hairline, unhealthy yellow skintone. You will not be at your best. If you’re Ernie, at least you get a normal head shape, and you can try to pass your orange skin off as kind of an extreme tan. Plus, you could probably work a “rubber duckie” euphemism into the conversation, and see where that gets you. It’s not primo material, but keep it in mind. It may be all you have.
In general, your plan should be: Lean towards the fuzzy. Cookie Monster, Grover, Oscar… you’ve got some cuddle factor there, you’ve got something to work with.
As Ernie and Bert, all you’ve got to look forward to is an evening of tedious hand-up-the-ass fag jokes, and then it’s home to scrub the goo out of your eyebrows.
Halloween only comes once a year. Use it wisely.
Next in the Muppet Fan Halloween Parade:
Strong enough for a woman, but made for a man!
