This shot was taken on a warm day in late October 1975, out in front of Forest Park Elementary during the annual Halloween parade. As you can see, the nation was still deep in the throes of the boxed mask-and-Rayon-outfit craze – one that started sometime in the 1940s and didn’t fizzle until about when Green Day signed with Reprise.
Ah, the synthetic odor of those masks. The edges of the eye holes carving bloody circles into your face. The stapled rubber band holding it on to your head catching in your hair or (even worse) breaking mid-candy run! The cold-flop sweat beading up on your face after just 5 minutes of wearing the thing, the smell of your own stale Snickers breath and yet! And yet.
That’s me as Donald Duck. Mom went all-in by making me felt duck feet (as well as some sort of tumor-shaped head covering – waste not, want not I guess). Mickey Mouse is my oldest and dearest friend Don Arnold. We met a year earlier, in 1st grade, and we still hang out to this day. I get him and he gets me. We talk about history, about restoring “old shit” and bringing things back to life, making things work how they were intended to work – forever. This summer I gave him an old Telechron wall clock from the 1940s for his office. On my birthday this year, he sent me a hand-typed letter.
A HAND TYPED LETTER.
That says so much more about a human than any Instagram feed ever will.