by Mamrie Hart
Maegan’s anxiety had finally calmed and she squeezed my leg to assure me she was all good. That is until ol’ Beetlejuice decided to come into the audience to ask for a volunteer. We were practically sitting under our seats to avoid him, when his hand reached out and led Maegan onstage.
Despite the admirable attempt at stage makeup and gunked-up teeth, this BJ was no Michael Keaton. It was actually Captain Giggles, the shy bartender. It was kind of sweet that he needed the safety net of his terrible costume to be able to talk to her. It was like Mrs. Doubtfire without the prosthetic boobs and toying with your children’s mental health. And that, my sweet readers, was the day Maegan met her husband.
I kid! That was the day Maegan had sex with her first Mexican bartender.
Still kidding! That was the day Maegan started washing down her Xanax with tequila. This concludes kidding.
The next day we rolled our hungover selves into a cab. This time there weren’t any retirees with Drambuie. It was just two shocked women in awe of the night before.
We boarded the plane with our flight must-haves (Us Weekly and Doritos) and found our seats. And don’tcha know, when the stewardess came by to grab our drink orders, Maegan ordered a water. A water! On a flight!
She had stared danger (and a knockoff Beetlejuice) right in the face and come out having a great time. I, for one, still needed a margarita. Those swingers were weird, y’all.
Quickshots: Costume Hall of Fame
In the previous chapter I told you guys my lucha libre costume disaster. I’m not going to lie; that one was a doozy. But that wasn’t my only foray into Halloween costume fuckups. Here are my top low points, in chronological order.
Let us throw back a shot for each!
Halloween 1988 Was Bananas
Most five-year-old little girls want to be princesses, or mermaids, or princess mermaids for Halloween. But not me! I had a very specific vision in mind: I wanted to be Miss Chiquita. Yep, as in the little lady on the blue label on bananas. All I knew about her was that she wore a huge fruit hat, but that’s all I needed. I could tell from that quarter-of-a-square-inch sticker that this woman was regal as fuck. Especially her posture.
I told my mom my plans, and her eyes lit up. “Well, Mamrie. Chiquita banana is not a real lady. But she is based on a woman named Carmen Miranda.” She went on and on telling me about how Carmen Miranda was an Argentinean actress in the ’40s and at one point she was even the highest-paid woman in US cinema. (Looking back, did my mom have a lady boner for Carmen Miranda? Because she sure did know a lot about her.) I was very impressed, and so my decision was made.
There was a costume contest at the local fire department, and I was out for blood. I knew I had to have the best costume, so Mom and I worked together to arrange something fittingly regal. For the dress, I wore a light blue genie costume that I had from a previous dance recital. For the hat, my mom bought a bunch of plastic fruit, which we glued to a cowboy hat. The top even had one of those paper accordion-style pineapples. Pretty brilliant.
I was confident that I was going to win, but I wasn’t taking any chances, so I went the extra mile and created a song.
When they called out my age group, I sized up the competition. Cat? Get real. Pirate? Ahoy, idiot! And don’t get me started on the toilet paper mummy. I was gonna crush them harder than an Adderall the night before a final. We started walking around in a circle for the judges, and that’s when I broke out my secret weapon. I put on my best samba strut and sang, verbatim: “Chiquita Banana puts the mambo in the fiesta! Chiquita Banana puts the mambo in the fiesta!”
It was catchy as hell, and I still get drunk and perform it at parties sometimes. I could tell I was killing it because I looked over to see my mom bragging about me on the sidelines. “Yes, isn’t she amazing? Mamrie insisted on being Carmen Miranda to pay homage to the legend. So mature for her age.”
We lined up to receive our awards and I could almost feel the Little Caesars gift certificate in my hands. The fireman walked right up to me, extended his arm . . . and handed it to the cat. The fuckin’ cat. Real imaginative. But, you always learn something from defeat. Especially at a young age.
And that, my dear readers, is when I learned you will get ahead only with mediocre, generic bullshit. I kid! Seriously, the cat did win but I learned zero lessons whatsoever. I was robbed!
Halloween 1992 Was Out of This World
The first few years I lived in North Carolina, I would still go up to New Jersey to see my childhood bestie, Kara (#Baltimorelayover #neverforget). In fourth grade, I went up over Halloween weekend because she was throwing a party. I prepared a sick martian costume (with all this cool glow-in-the-dark puffy paint on it) and knew I would win her costume contest. Finally, redemption for my Carmen Miranda fiasco!
The only problem was that Delta had lost my luggage and it wasn’t going to be delivered in time for the party. After some serious cursing (I had just learned the word bastard and loved it, although I still needed help with context. I told the airport employee to find “my bastard luggage”), Kara’s mom, Terri, took control. Terri was determined for me to still live my Halloween dreams of being a martian, goddammit.
Terri was the young, cool mom. She smoked Kool cigarettes; had bleached, teased Jersey hair; and would drive us around in her used Jaguar while listening to Rod Stewart. She looked like a rode-hard-and-put-away-wet version of Christina Applegate during her Married with Children years. To this day, I think my sister still wants to be Terri Dreyer. Terri obviously had Kara really young, because I have a distinct memory of her turning thirty on one of my visits. She always had a different boyfriend whom she and Kara lived with, which might sound sad, but said boyfriend was always trying to get on Kara’s good side and ended up spoiling her. The bitch had a tree house with electricity. Electricity. Her tree house was more livable than most of my neighbors’ homes in North Carolina.
Being the coolest, Terri let me raid her closet to put the best martian ensemble together. She dressed me up in her wackiest clothes and even had a silver metallic Tina Turner–esque wig to complete the look. I trusted her to make me look good, and felt confident walking into that party. And it was a great Halloween party, full of classic activities: We bobbed for apples, danced to the “Monster Mash,” what have you. Finally, the time came for the costume contest. There was no parading for the judges, although I was prepped with a martian-themed song and dance, obvi. Everyone just wrote down on a sheet of paper who they thought had the best costume.
I was nervous. Maybe I should’ve performed my original song titled “Outta-This-World Kind of Girl” to seal the deal. I paced back and forth around the party. Which wasn’t that easy to do because Terri had put me in these crazy thigh-high boots with toilet paper stuffed in the toes to make them fit. Once the votes were in, Kara announced the winner.
“Listen up, youse guyz, the winner of the costume contest is . . . Mamrie!” I couldn’t believe it. I had actually won! I graciously accepted my Halloween gift bag, complete with fake shrunken head, and took a bow.
It was only after the party that I learned just how insane my winning margin was. Apparently I got nine out of the twelve votes. That’s right. Seventy-five percent of the entire party agreed that I, the “hocker,” should win. Yep. All the boys at the party voted for me, thinking that my martian outfit was actually a hooker’s. Hell, a win’s a win!
God bless a fourth-grader’s spelling, and God bless Terri for helping make that win possible with her slutty, slutty wardrobe.
Halloween 1993 Was More Than I’d Wished For
There were some great moments in 1993. The gang from Saved by the Bell finally graduated high school. I choreographed my cheerleading squad’s halftime dance to “Whoomp! (There It Is).” And I had the best Treasure Troll collection in my county.* I was so obsessed with Trolls, in fact, that I had my heart set on being one that October 31.
My fr
iend Nick was throwing a party and, classic me, I waited till the last minute to get my costume together, but I knew it would be easy. I had seen Troll wigs at the mall and would wear a little belly top and shove a rhinestone into my belly button. Easy peasy.
The day before the party, I asked my aunt, who was watching my siblings and me for the weekend, to take me to the mall to get the wig. She pursed her lips. “Oh, Mame. No can do. I’ve gotta make dinner for you and your brother and sister.”
“Them? Oh, they’re fine. Dave will just want to eat frozen pizza and Annie is already stunting her appetite with menthol cigarettes.”
“What was that?”
“I said . . . Annie can just make a sandwich.”
After a thirty-second stare-down, my aunt still didn’t budge. “If you want to be a Troll doll for Halloween, I can help you with your hair. I can tease it to stand straight up and then we’ll spray it purple.” My own hair, huh? I doubted her at first, but then I remembered that she had been a beauty queen back in the sixties. She could probably work wonders with a can of Aqua Net!
What I didn’t know was that when my aunt said she could tease my hair straight up, she didn’t mean like a Troll. She meant like a straight-up beehive. I had a purple beehive. She didn’t want me wearing a belly top in the cold, so I was forced to wear a Troll sweatshirt and leggings. Between the frumpy outfit, purple beehive, and my prescription glasses . . . I didn’t so much look like a Troll as I looked like a woman from a Far Side comic.
Halloween 2003 Gave Me the Blues
I’ve never been one to try and pull off the sexy look at Halloween. This may sound surprising considering my aforementioned stint as a “hocker,” but it’s true. When I went to college at Chapel Hill, every year our main party drag, Franklin Street, would be filled with sexy versions of everything. Sexy librarians. Sexy policewomen. Sexy pediatric heart surgeons. The way I looked at it, why waste your sexy outfit on the drunkest day of the year? At the end of the day, if you wanted to get laid, YOU WOULD GET LAID.
Given how ambivalent I was about trying to slut it up, my junior year my roommates and I decided to go as the Smurfs. I’m talking pre-CGI hanging out with Neil Patrick Harris Smurfs. The classics. I took charge of putting together our costumes. Obviously we would need white sweatpants and royal blue shirts. I broke out my very limited sewing skills and transformed white pillowcases into hats and shoved in pillow stuffing to keep them tall. We obtained some white slippers and blam. The only thing left to do was paint ourselves blue from head to toe.
This seemed easy in theory, but shit, to get an even color on our bodies took a lot of coats. Racists who do blackface are the worst of the worst, but I gotta give it up for their endurance. If they only used that stick-to-it attitude to learn about equality, the world would be a better place.
After the paint finally dried, we ended up looking like this:
And we wondered why we didn’t get laid. We were fucking terrifying. Please note that we WERE blue. I swear.
We were ready to hit the town, starting at my friend Rachel’s party. Rachel lived in the Warehouse, a gorgeous building that I wanted to live in but couldn’t afford. It was the only industrial-looking apartments in all of Chapel Hill, and it was all exposed brick and tall ceilings and magic. It was the type of apartment that I imagined I would be living in once I moved to New York. This was before I realized that it costs about eight hundred dollars a month in New York to live in a walk-in closet with a rat for a roommate.
When we showed up at Rachel’s, the party was bumping. It was the perfect place to get our pregame on before hitting Franklin Street. And we needed to pregame hard because on previous Halloweens, the street was so packed it was difficult to get into a bar. By the time you made it one block, you were already sobered up. I decided to not take any chances, and so I created the “BarBack.”
What’s the BarBack, you ask? Well, allow me to explain (cracks neck and knuckles, then clears throat for just a little too long). The BarBack is for the drunk on the go. I took a normal backpack and threw in a waterproof cooler lunch bag filled with ice. Next, I tossed in a shaker and disposable shot glasses. Finally, I threw in the elements of a classic shot: the Kamikaze (vodka, Rose’s lime juice, and triple sec). And there it was. Now I wouldn’t need to worry about finding a drink, though I should have been concerned about losing my mind.
And lose my mind I did. I was so proud of my BarBack invention that I showed it to—and took a shot with—everyone I talked to at Rachel’s party. I was handing out shots left and right. I thought I was Tom Cruise in Cocktail, except I hadn’t accidentally gotten Elisabeth Shue pregnant. At least to my knowledge.
Needless to say I got positively blackout drunk that night. I had spent hours on my costume, only to remember wearing it for about an hour. I do very clearly remember sitting on the curb on Franklin Street, throwing up on my white slippers. My poor roommate Erika, who was Smurfette for the night, had to deal with me and she was pissed, and understandably so. There is nothing worse than looking forward to something, only to have your idiot friend get too drunk so you have to go home early. I felt terrible. But not as terrible as my brain felt the next morning! Just to paint you a visual: Imagine a girl painted blue, asleep on her kitchen floor, with shrapnel from a Totino’s pizza feast all around her. Waking up with cheese on your shoulder is bad enough, but throw in a roommate with a chip on her shoulder and it’s brutal.
After an extremely hot forty-minute shower (apparently, just because paint is “washable” does not mean it won’t stick to every single arm hair like superglue), I worked up the courage to talk to Erika. I sat nervously in the living room and waited for her to come home from the gym or some other place equally productive, only adding to me feeling like shit. When she finally did come home, we talked it out. I probably cried because that is what I do when I am anxious, violently hungover, and fresh out of Totino’s. Plus, we were twenty-one-year-old girls. It’s a fact that every conversation between twenty-one-year-old girls ends with some sort of tears. She was pissed but quickly got over it, because that is what friends do. She went off to study or do something else superhuman in my eyes as I settled in for a marathon of Trading Spaces. And then my flip phone rang. It was Rachel calling.
“Mame! You were the hit of the party last night with your Kamikaze shots.”
“Oh yeah? That’s good to know! ’Cause I took a million of them. I am definitely paying for it today.”
“Well, that’s not all you’ll be paying for. . . .”
She went on to tell me that my blue ass was so drunk that I kept losing my balance and walking into walls. Her beautiful, freshly painted walls were now stained with royal blue.
Nowadays the Smurfs are more popular than ever. Every toy store has an aisle filled with Papa Smurf figurines and Brainy Smurf Trapper Keepers. But what you won’t find is that discontinued blue creature who only lived for one night. The legendary Hot Mess Smurf.
“But Mamrie! Where are all the pictures of you when you were a kid?” I can hear you screaming into this book. Look, I couldn’t find them. My family doesn’t keep organized picture albums to reminisce about by the fireplace. To get any old pics, I have to wade through random shoe boxes with photos just thrown in haphazardly. That is who we are! Don’t judge us.
But to make it up to you, here are a few more pics from Halloweens past, specifically college.
My sophomore year, my suitemates and I went as the Royal Tenenbaums. I even had Richie’s falcon, Mordecai, a fake chicken painted brown and wired to my arm. Seeeeeeexy.
And here is my senior year of college, when we went as Sexy Tetris. Tetris because that game rules. Sexy because we were wearing it.
Alabama Blizzard
4 regular tea bags (or you could use flavored, whatever tickles your pickle)
8 oz bourbon
3 oz lemon juice
2 tbsp honey or simple syrup<
br />
3 cups frozen peaches
Put the tea bags into the liquor for 1 hour. Think of the tea bags as someone in a bad marriage. You don’t want them staying in there too long or it’s going to end up bitter. Then combine everything in a blender and blend! Add ice or water, depending on the consistency you want. Ideally, this is served in a leftover mason jar from your perfect cousin’s perfect wedding. Extra point if it has a twine bow. This recipe makes about four servings, ’cause let’s face it, making frozen drinks is annoying. If you asked for one while I was bartending, I would shoot you a look so evil that you would’ve thought I’d just been asked my weight.
“Sweet Home Alabama,” by Lynyrd Skynyrd, is a southern anthem. As soon as its iconic guitar riff starts, people start hooting and hollering without a second thought. There’s something about those down-home lyrics that conjures up memories for people, like riding down the road in a pickup truck with the summer air blowing in their hair. For others, it’s drinking beer with friends at a summer barbecue. For me, it’s forty hours of community service.
This story, like most that end with the cops, begins with a road trip. And just like any good road trip, it’s gonna take a while to get there. So, buckle da fuck up!
It was my sophomore year of college, and fall break was coming up. Unlike spring break, no one gives a shit about fall break. It’s the Kelly Rowland to spring break’s Beyoncé. It’s basically a four-day weekend, so most students just stay on campus. At best you go home and see your folks and make out with your high school boyfriend to reaffirm that you “still got it.” But I’ve never been one to half-ass something, so I decided to make the best of my fall break and road-trip it to Alabama to see my friend Virginia. No, that is not a riddle. A lot of girls in the South are named after states. Even more are named after their mothers’ maiden names. You roll up onto a college campus in the South and it’s all, “Hollingsworth, hurry up!” or “Don’t forget the Solo cups, Scarborough!” I’m personally glad I wasn’t named after my mom’s maiden name, Mayhall. Mayhall is an adorable name said normally, but when people yell it when they’re drunk, they sound like donkeys in heat. It’s tough enough being named Mamrie. I never got to have those personalized stickers and pencils that kids coveted. I’ve never rolled up on a beach souvenir shop and found a tiny surfboard key chain with my name on it. The closest I got was a spoon with Mamie Eisenhower’s name on it that my mom added an R to. But it wasn’t the same as a key chain, not that I needed a key chain as an eight-year-old. I did, however, need a key chain ten years later, when I drove eleven hours south to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. (Go ahead and put on a helmet, ’cause I just busted out a beautiful Segway.)
