Halloween Obsessiveness: Uma's "Poison Ivy"
Friday, October 30, 2020 at 4:00PM We thought it might be fun if Team Experience shared a few of our favourite Halloween memories with you.
by Nathaniel R
Some years ago I quit Halloween. It wasn't for lack of loving the holiday (have pumpkin patch sized love for it!) but for personal sanity. Favourite costumes over the years included Pinnochio, Peter Pan, Glinda the Good Witch (with my ex as The Wicked Witch and my best friend as The Tin Man, pictured left), Medusa (with an elaborate snake wig), and Mr Green in a group Clue costume. Letting Halloween go wasn't quite a cold turkey move but I knew I had a problem.
To surely every therapist's delight, the problem came from childhood...
Growing up my mother would make matching costumes for all four kids in our family (I'm the baby). One year we were aliens. Another sunflowers. Etcetera. It was never as simple as ghosts, or some such. Our church would hold a party and there'd be a 'best family costume prize'. We kept losing to the Snow family. My mother was super competitive about it and was very upset one year when they'd repurposed their bumblebee costumes from the year prior into spiders and won again. To my wee eyes they were impressively constructed but she was inconsolable. She'd made everything from scratch laboriously. Again.
This rubbed off on me.
To this day I've never bought a Halloween costume but fretted over the construction of one with zero sewing skills. Go shopping. Buy plentiful accessories. Procure glue guns and makeup. Monkey with it obsessively. This kept escalating until the mid-Aughts. But the warning sign was surely one week in 1997 when preparing an Uma Thurman / Poison Ivy lewk. By Halloween night I was as nuts as Dr Pamela Isley.
Nathaniel as Uma as Poison Ivy in the late 90s...
I bought a dark green leotard and matching tights. Found women's sandals with huge blocky heels which I spray painted green. The red fright wing was cheap enough but it was finished it off with an insane amount of $$$ spent at a craft store on decorative foliage and berries and what have you. Creating the hair horns for the wig was a nightmare so traumatic that I've blacked out all recollection of how I accomplished it, only remembering that I spent the entire evening worrying that they'd fall off or unravel (which they're already doing in that photo!).
The double eyebrow, long before drag queens were always upping the ante with creative face-painting, was inspired by one specific look in the film because I didn't know how to manage the more famous arched leaf eyebrows.
To my horror a professional drag queen at the local bar also came as Poison Ivy that night. To her horror my costume was better. Throught the night I tried to work in Uma's campy lines from Batman and Robin (1997) while awkwardly flirting with drunk gays. Turns out Akiva Goldsman dialogue must never be uttered without delusional movie star confidence! But the look itself was a hit. I'd dedicate this night's particular costume win to my mom, but she wouldn't have approved of any such condragulations.
Have you ever been a super villain for Halloween?
More Fav Halloween Costumes from Team Experience:
Reader Comments (11)
Why does Akiva Goldsman have an Oscar for his shitty writing yet there's so many others that still haven't won Oscars? This shit is wrong.
Plus, I can't take anyone seriously who writes stupid lines like.... "HI FREEZE! I'M BATMAN!!!!"
Once I tried to be a scary scarecrow.
I buyed a piece of cloth with the appearence of an old sack and wove the part of the lips to look more horrorfic but I used a clear tone of green to the cloth, a friend lent me a blue sky jean overalls and I completed the outfit sticking yellow raffia in the extremities, a checkered flannel shirt and a straw hat.
When I appeared in front of my coleagues with the costume I hearded many of them saying: "Aww, so cute"
"CUUUTE?!": I thought. And when I looked myself in the mirror I confirmed it. I looked dressed for a Spring festival instead of Halloween
¡PLOP!
I was Mr. Freeze one year. Bathrobe version was much easier than the full freeze suit. My required bald cap to achieve the look would no longer be neccesssry.
In college, I went out for Halloween as a baby. I folded a white top sheet into a diaper that sagged inappropriately.
You and Uma look like camp perfection,the dedication with the leaves on the shoes,marvellous.
We need a gay Batman movie!
Lovely piece!
Batman & Robin was released when I was seven and I adored it as a child. I was too young then to unpack why, but, with time, it all became clear: camp, Camp, CAMP!
Does the Wicked Witch of the West count as a super-villain?
Do vampires?
Horrors Halloween costume are useless if make up
is not good. to help your Halloween one should be focusing more on make up not costume... as it says good make up without costume is good ... but good costume with bad makeup is bad
I was a crazy fan of poison ivy. Unfortunately, they don't make movies on her character. Miss those days.