(Because I figure I can justify posting the things pertaining to my actual Halloween costume on actual Halloween because Halloween is all Whimsical and stuff, even though some of the pictures and stories are from Saturday night. I’m trying to costume-sort okay. Do not judge. Also, this one has cocktails and costumes. So.)
As usual, when I am actually showing my real life on this blog, it’s because we’re all in costume. One of my friends (the Cho of Dora and Cho’s Cupcakes) found a Pinterest advocating a True Blood Halloween party and immediately declared that we needed to throw one; as it’s the Halloween season, I was fully prepared to do such a thing. Also, I knew that I could force everyone to dress up (which makes parties more fun for me).
We didn’t end up following the Pinterest, really; we made drinks, or I made drinks, and we did make cupcakes, but mostly we just dressed up, took pictures, watched The Cabin in the Woods, and I pretended to be British all night. Nonetheless, I’m pretty sure you can figure out that drinks, cupcakes, dress-up, pictures, The Cabin in the Woods, and Britishness is my idea of a perfect party, and since it was True Blood, and since I am counting this as my requisite supplementary out-of-my-own-closet Halloween costume (I end up having one a lot of the time, and it’s always literally just stuff I have laying around) and everyone else had such costumes, I feel okay about making this a personal blog tonight. Costumes win all. Oh, and IRL friends who happen to see this and aren’t TV-current, just… skip the giant blurbs under every photograph probably.
Left to right in this particular picture: the above-mentioned friend’s boyfriend (he was a something commander for Halloween and smeared blood on his mouth for the party) and the above-mentioned friend (she was Hello Kitty for Halloween and put blood teeth dots on her neck and inner thigh for the party, not that you can see them in this picture), my lovely basically-everything-to-my-everything-lately friend (you may recognize her as my Tara, and you’ll see more of her in the bunch of pictures tomorrow, too) as Pam, me as (who else) Nora and oh my gosh it was so hard to explain Nora to people without spoiling things for them (“is she good or bad?” multiple of them asked, as nobody in this group is through the current season yet. “Both,” I replied), and then two of my very lovely other friends respectively as a fangbanger and her vampire. More on them…
…right now! I figure this can also count as a post because, being me, I managed to toss an impressive amount of headcanon/near-meta into this costume party. It was decided once they arrived, all decked out (she came with her bite marks, actually measured to the fake fangs he had in), that we needed to invent them a story. (Something commander vampire and Hello Kitty fangbanger had no such story, but theirs was impromptu. I invite my friends to make up such a story if they like, and maybe they did and and I just didn’t hear it.) Someone jokingly referred to him as some sort of captain, then someone else jumped in with “no, lieutenant.” I then immediately decided that there probably were lieutenants of sorts of the Authority, and he could be one of them. And then he was from Romania, 100+ but not much more than, and so he worked for the Authority and was… undercover somehow, because that makes it more exciting. And also being undercover leads to fangbangers. Anyway, because there is no such thing as timeline at cosplay parties, right in this exact moment let’s just say it’s pre-season 5, because really, when lieutenants happen to bring their humans in the presence of chancellors, well. If a chancellor asks to sample, within the rules of course (the imagined dialogue I made up and then put on Facebook: “You’ll follow the rules with her, won’t you?” “I helped write the rules. I think I can manage”), how can that be resisted?
Also, unrelated to this specific picture but related to the evening: upon hearing me address my mother as “your highness” (more on that in a bit), this friend of mine shrugged and asked me, “If she’s ‘your highness,’ how should I address you?” After prompting him with “Chancellor Gainesborough will do,” he actually proceeded to call me “Chancellor” for the rest of the night. More with the Wednesday posts on how much I actually really love being called by titles, but. I’m still smiling when I recall that.
(Despite the fact that my above friend is not current to canon technically, she knows… basically everything she might need to about season five, because I am a terrible person and spoiled her so I could capslock to her after every episode.) Anyway, we wanted to do a Pam&Nora picture or two, but we had… no idea how to pose. “Do they know each other?” everyone else asked. “I. They’ve met. They’ve met once, in the context of… stuff that wasn’t posing-for-photographs-able,” I said slowly, trying to avoid spoilers for them. (Because as much as I would love to, it would be impossible to recreate giant silver bullet and stake attacks there in the white-closet-doors entryway of photographic doom in my house. Also, our outfits were wrong for such a scene. And we didn’t have props. And yeah.) “Just put your leg up around her,” Cho called out, shrugging. And as we took the pictures, I realized this was… actually probably what would happen if someone said, “Pam and Nora! Take a cute picture!” Between Pam’s tendency to be provocative when egged on and the fact that Nora’s been told to play nice with her family and would therefore attempt to take that provocation in stride because since she’s been told, she’s determined to be a good auntie, it seems at least reasonable.
And then finally, my adults. These were actually their Halloween costumes two years ago, circa season 3 (because one of the fun things about living home still is forcing my parents to dress for Halloween) and they both work it, definitely. My father put jam and salsa and whatnot in a jar and carried it around, a la Talbot, but I like this picture with our cat better. Despite the fact that our cat is a cat and not a teensy wolf puppy like little adorable Emma Garza, I find this picture actually very appropriate to the Russell-tries-to-keep-pets situation. And well. My fierce mother, because Sophie-Anne was awesome.
Holy lord, and so we’re FINALLY onto the drinks now and out of my ridiculous personal life that really hasn’t changed in basic formula since I was in high school.
Fangbanger
1 shot lemon cupcake vodka
1 shot crème de cassis
½ shot grenadine
As much cranberry ginger ale as you damn well please.
This is basically the same as Fairy Blood, but using the cranberry ginger ale as a mixer instead of the Mountain Dew makes it less overwhelmingly sweet. (All of the mixer contents are variable depending on how large you want your drink to be and thusly how strong per swallow.)
Blood of Lilith
2 shots Smirnoff whipped cream vodka
2 shots crème de cassis
As much lemonade as you damn well please
You’ll notice this one has higher proportions of liquor. The proportions actually sort of matter for these drinks, or at least for this one: like Fairy Blood is supposed to be sweet, Blood of Lilith is supposed to be crazy-strong. That’s why there’s double the per-liquor liquor content. I’ve been told by some people that if you’ve already had some drinks in you that night, it’s too strong to finish if you make enough of one, but I guess I’m just insane, because I think it’s sort of nice. Very hamsters-inducing. And despite being heavy on the whipped cream vodka, it’s not nearly as crazy-sweet as a lot of my recipes, so that’s something.
Hadley
1 shot lime juice
1 ½ shot lemon cupcake vodka
1 shot regular vodka
As much cranberry ginger ale as you damn well please
(Also, if you don’t have lemon cupcake vodka [I ran out by the second time I was mixing one of these] you can use 2 shots of regular vodka and a half shot of lemonade.)
This one is a Hadley because it was my mom invented it, or anyway she instructed me on ingredients for her specifications, and since she was Sophie-Anne while instructing me, well, I just had to suit it to her highness’ tastes. That’s only polite and proper.
(I can’t imagine that Nora ever met Queen Sophie-Anne — clearly, vampire monarchs weren’t exactly required to check in with at least chancellors of the Authority in person, and chancellors didn’t really do a lot of in-person checking in at all in the before — but I’m sure she’d have at least feigned respect by way of trying to accommodate tastes, were they around. Maintaining such an image of, if not reverence then at least decency toward, is useful.
Also, somehow being Nora while making drinks felt right. Like, clearly she wouldn’t be actually mixing human liquor [she’s far enough removed from that herself to not particularly be interested and she wouldn't have reason to be either] but I’m pretty sure that being basically spoiled with what I imagine to be choice blood donors for most of one’s unlife would lead one to being what is equivalent to a liquor snob, or a liquor expert at least, just in terms of, uhm. Human blood. She’d be good at knowing exactly what/who would suit someone and then acquiring it for them.)
Tomorrow, proof of the giant cosplay project that has been dominating my life! And of the awesome people who are also playing with me!
–your fangirl heroine.
