Costume seemed a bit out of place

Back about 43 years ago, there was a movie called “Start the Revolution Without Me.”
(Please, stay with me on this, though I’m not sure I would if I were in your shoes.)
It was a funny movie, starring Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland. The premise, such as it was, centered on a “Corsican brothers” sort of plot with two sets of twins and lots of mistaken identity.
Fun, but pretty forgettable.
Yet there was one scene that burned itself into my memory.
The British actor Hugh Griffith, playing France’s King Louis XVI shows up at a ball dressed in a ridiculous outfit. He’s a bird or a fish or something. And he goes around muttering to all his royal guests, “I thought it was a costume party.”
I laughed out loud.
But I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be in the same situation.
Last week, I found out.
Young staffers at the newspaper proposed that we all come to work on Halloween in costume. There’d be a competition. There’d be lots of trash-talking and teasing. And it seemed like a real boost for employee morale.
So I not only gave the idea a green light, I also agreed to show up in costume on Halloween.
Okay, so what does a guy dress up as on Halloween when he’s on the eve of his 65th birthday? An old guy? Sorry, but that’s the outfit I wear to work most days.
But after kicking around a few ideas, the answer seemed clear.
During the past 15 years of squeezing in international press development projects, I’ve accumulated a lot of unusual stuff.
To be more specific: People have given me hats.
Skull caps, wildly ridiculous creations made of felt, working men’s hats, festive hats. Who knows why exactly, but I have been given hats.
And one of them seemed to be the perfect germ for a costume. It’s a hat that looks as if it would be worn by a member of the Taliban or at the very least by a jihadist sympathizer.
It was given to me by a shopkeeper in Afghanistan when I was there a few years back, working on a project.
Why did he give it to me? Probably because I had paid too much for some pieces of lapis lazuli, a camel blanket and an old dagger at his shop. His Afghan guilt reflexes kicked in, and he tossed the hat into the mix to salve his conscience.
He also wrapped up the goods — most of them, the camel blanket was another story — in a black and white patterned scarf identical to the ones worn by men all over Afghanistan.
So then I had it. An Afghan hat and an Afghan scarf are two quick steps toward a Halloween costume as a jihadist, or — more accurately — as the Indiana version of an Afghan shopkeeper.
The rest of the costume came together quickly. Sandals and socks, which I had seen often in Afghanistan. An old wool vest from Traverse City, Mich., that somehow seemed appropriate. And a kind of surplice made of muslin — that’s muslin, not muslim — that my wife stitched together on the sewing machine.
All in all, it was a pretty cool package.
Or so I thought. Then I turned into Louis XVI.
At the start of the day on Halloween, there was a meeting of an ad hoc group that’s been trying to jumpstart downtown redevelopment in Portland. The group is informal and has no authority, but it does have some heavy hitters involved.
Trouble is, none of them were feeling festive on Halloween.
So there I was at 8 a.m., walking into a business meeting dressed as a Hoosier impersonation of a Taliban while everyone else in the room was in much, much, much more appropriate clothes.
And that old movie flashed back on me. I thought of Hugh Griffith as Louis XVI. And all I wanted to say was, “I thought it was a costume party.”[[In-content Ad]]