The Dark Side

Now, please pardon the poor photo above. It's a scan of a photocopied version that appeared in my zine Dr. Squid #10. I cannot locate the original photo, so just have this to go on.

It's my sister and I as Princess Leia and Dark Vader, Halloween 1977.

Now, you can't tell from the photo, but my outfit was an enhanced version of the ol' Ben Cooper costume.

We did buy that costume, but quickly ditched the smock in favor of my mom's black turtleneck, cape, black gloves, black pants, dark brown snow boots and a calculator duct-taped to my chest.

Yes, I said a calculator duct-taped to my chest.

This was serious.

My dad also took the plain plastic mask and attached it to a helmet made from cardboard. It was held together with staples and colored with magic marker as I recall, but it was super duper cool!

I'll never forget running into another Darth Vader that night.

I was coming down the walk at a house in the neighborhood, which seemed to be teaming with little trick-or-treaters, when I saw him. I could tell he was trying to be Darth Vader, but he'd made his own costume, including his own mask based on a giant pair of sunglasses. In retrospect it was kind of cool-looking, sort of like an armored bug alien head or something. But it just wasn't Darth. Besides, I had taken the official Darth mask and IMPROVED it. We each looked each other up and down and I can't recall who said it first but one of us shouted a muffled, "Who are you?!" It turned out to be my friend Chris from around the block.

While I can't recall the exact wording we used (c'mon it was over 30 years ago!), I recall there was an exchange of words over who looked better, and both of us left each other convinced we were the best and the other guy's costume sucked.

Ah...sweet memories....



That winter, my sister and I made a Darth Vader snowman! Note all the multi-colored buttons making up Darth's various electronic doo-dads.