Halloween

If you’re a hardcore fan of Matt Clapp, you may know that at one point in the near-distant past of graduate school, I dressed up as a certain Muppet with orange hair for Halloween¹. Well, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the effect, and I liked the idea, so I decided to try again.

So I present to you the new and improved Beaker. Hair and nose are more reddish, but much more muppet-like this time around.

I’ve added a picture of the real Beaker here for comparison. Not bad eh? If you don’t know, Beaker was the assistant to Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, the brilliant Muppet scientist. Beaker’s expression is due to the fact that he has the classic grad student role–the go-to guy for handling dangerous acids, extremely high voltages, or Muppet-eating animals.

At the costume party I went to, old friends and new seemed to receive the costume well. Some commented that my eyes were perfectly Beaker-like with no costume help, which goes along with past comments that I’m like a muppet in everyday life. Notice the classy gaffer tape name tag. Less apparent is the gaffer tape used in place of buttons on the cheap costume-store lab coat. The name tag is covering the original HI-larious silk-screened name on the lab coat, “Dr. Seymour Bush, Gynecologist”. So it wasn’t just that I needed to tell people who I was supposed to be, I needed to, um, change the tone of the costume from the original.

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¹ Original costume included a valiant attempt to dye my own hair orange (failure, hair was too dark and ended up looking like I was starting to rust.) I also couldn’t find a suitable costume nose, so I used a small Nerf ball with a nose notch cut out. It fell off constantly. This was later put to good use as a cat toy for housemate Peter the Cat. The high point of this costume was “borrowing” a lab coat from a certain professor who shall remain nameless, and then spilling wine on it at the party.