Saturday, 27 OCT 12

It’d been a full day so far: Driving at “Editor for a day” with Car & Driver, Climbing with Daniel and Erin, and now going on a bar crawl dressed as “A Jewish Bob Marley” with Mike, who was dressed as a “Magical Space Wizard”.

How did I decide on that costume?

Simple: it was what we found on Mike’s floor that was still clean, combined with a Beanie we found. Mike’s Space Wizard costume? A walking stick, some random tie-dyed clothes, and a robe.

Yeah… we go all out for Halloween. Honest.

But I couldn’t be blamed – this was 100% last-minute, and we hadn’t even planned on going out this weekend at all. The plan was originally to do the weekend after Halloween as our main adventure night, but neither of us had anything really interesting to do… so why not?

And so, after spending about 20min “creating” our most-excellent costumes, we headed out into the night searching for a good bar to hit up.

Our original plan was to track down a band that Mike’d seen earlier in the day – There had been a Jazz festival going on in Somerville that afternoon, and after the festival itself ended all the bands went off to their own little shows at bars and coffee houses around town. This one was at Union Square right nearby, so we had jumped in and headed over. Unfortunately we found the bar packed full of un-costumed 40 year olds… not really our crowd, especially with our amazing costumes.

So we moved on – this time to a club/bar called Johnny D’s. I’d been to Johnny D’s a few times before – they’re a sort of jazz club, a small venue where semi-established bands play almost every night of the week. It’s usually pretty packed and has a light cover, but it’s always been worth it in my opinion.

Tonight was no exception – The place was packed, and the stage was filled with the seven or eight members of a cabaret band called “Booty Vortex”. An awesome name… made even better by one guy in the crowd dressed up as a literal “booty vortex” – A tornado full of butts. Yeah. He was awesome.

And the night followed suit.

It was Excellent – Booty Vortex is an amazingly fun band; they’d dressed up as Gilligan’s Island (except the dummer, who was Karl Drogan from Game of Thrones, thus showing off pretty much every part of himself) and were rocking out like tonight was their last show. It wasn’t, of course, but they played everything anyways – a few covers, but mostly their own rather excellent tunes.

And on top of that, the costumes around were amazing – one couple was dressed as the constellations Cassiopea and Orion, another group was each portion of the Candyland boardgame, and there was one guy dressed up as Dr. Facilier from the Princess and the Frog – complete with an amazing mask and a glowy cane. Even some of the standard-issue “sexy” costumes were interesting; this was the first year I’ve ever seen “sexy mummy” or “sexy fruit-viking” before.

But as every Bostonian party, this one ended a bit too early – 01:00 bar-close times are really annoying when the band is good and the people are interesting.

So, we moved on and found a place that wasn’t closing early. On the way we even had a mini-adventure – getting chewed out by a random girl for not recognizing her costume as being from the book Lolita. My comeback to her anger that we’d never read “a clear literary classic”? “Well, that’s true. But remember when you read Shingly’s guide to the Mechanics of Materials”? No? Well that’s what I was reading while you were reading Lolita.”

Our final destination was called The Burren – an Irish bar that thankfully didn’t close ’till a bit after 02:00. We partied here ’till we got bored a bit before the end – the band was rather horrible compared to Booty Vortex, but I did get to chat with a cute Aussie girl who’d just finished her PHD in water systems, so The Burren was redeemed in my eyes.

From there, the night ended as many Boston party nights do – Mike and I watching a few episodes of Archer before I gave up and passed out on the couch.