I’m not going to read that article, because… well, because… OK, I cannot actually articulate why I don’t want to click on that link. I’m not gonna. But I will share a story that is not about Nazis.
My wife has a thing for cows. Not “a thing” in bizarre sense of the word, but the general “Oh I think [X animal] is sooo cute!” sort of way that people have. So one year she decided that she would make me a cow costume to wear for Halloween. She worked on it for many weeks.
It was made of the heavy fake-fur material rather than cloth, stuffed with wadding/quilting material to bulk it out, and it was ludicrously hot to wear, especially since it came with a hat/hood made of the same material. The hat had horns, because some cows have horns. Mostly male cows. The suit also had bright pink udders, because that too is a cow thing. Mostly for female cows, to be sure.
I was totally game for all this because at the end of the day I am a very tall, grim-looking man who is generally confident enough to take a lot of ribbing. My one change to the costume was to add a bladder inside the suit that fed out through one of the udders – I would fill the bladder with Bailly’s Irish Cream and then offer to spike people’s coffee with it. It was delightfully disturbing.
The costume was finished the night before Halloween, and the next day was a work day. And a Friday. At the time I worked at a very large federal headquarters and I was pretty well-know and had been with my team for several years. I felt pretty comfortable wearing the silly costume in to work, wandering around the cubicle-farm for an hour or so and offering to spike people’s coffee.
I was not the only person in costume. Far from it - it was Friday, and Halloween. I’d say that maybe one in ten people had a costume or some piece of “themed” clothing. Lots of folks were pointing at me and smiling, which of course was the point.
But as I went along, standing in line to get a donut or just walking down the hall, I started to sense that I was being paid more attention to than even my height and the ridiculousness of the costume explained. It was a silly costume but there were better ones on display, and even my mixed-gender thing shouldn’t be sending people into spasms of gut-busting laughter…?
Well, you can probably see where this is going. The date was October 31, 2003, and the “Fur and Loathing” episode of CSI had aired the night before. At the time, the series was nearly at the height of its popularity… although my wife and I had never actually seen an episode.
It made for a series of really weird conversations while people asked me about conventions and used the word “yiff” while I kind of stood there and wondered what the living Hell was going on. Hours later a co-worker mercifully pulled me aside and explained the situation, at which point I decided NOT to wear the costume to the cafeteria for lunch.
