the triumph of the five-minute costume

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Captain Lightening Bolt.

I came home from school to be told that Cal refused to wear his butterfly wings for the Halloween parade at school, so I knew that we were in some trouble if we wanted to try and go trick-or-treating that evening. So we just started randomly grabbing at stuff. The black shirt and pants, Cal already had on. To that, we added Cal's rainboots. A red stocking cap of Joe's that he got for a "Lust in Space" party in med school. Some construction paper. And thus, Captain Lightening Bolt was born. Not as cool as being bitten by a radioactive spider or being accidentally exposed to the blast from a gamma bomb of his own invention, but whatever. Captain Lightening Bolt, he is the Joe Six-Pack of the superhero world.

If you can believe it, this is the first time I'd ever been trick-or-treating outdoors (growing up in New York, we always just trick-or-treated in apartment buildings), so negotiating the temperature issue was a little bit of a sticky wicket. In the end, we just slapped a vest on him and kept it unzipped so that the lightening bolt icon could show. He looked like the most flamboyant cast member of "The Perfect Storm."

We only managed to hit about seven or eight houses before toiletting concerns drove us home, but considering that Cal insisted on sampling the wares after hitting each house, the sugar bolus was sizeable.

And in the end, despite insisting all night that he wasn't wearing a costume, he was just wearing clothes, I think he had a pretty good time.

(Full photo set here.)