2006 in Review
- Details
- Category: In Review
- Written by Guy Wolford
2006 - The year that almost wasn't.
2006 was a tumultuous year here at boo and we didn't even work on our Halloween haunt that year. A lot of personal issues hung like a dark cloud over our yearly festivities but a week or so before Halloween, we decided to give it a go, and just bring all of the props out of the loft for tradition's sake.
All of the props left their storage places on October 29th and 30th, a mere two days before their October 31st run date. This meant a lot of untested props and no time to check everything for continuing functionality. We were pleased to see that almost everything held together in storage and functioned perfectly right out of the gate.
Halloween morning we arose at 10 am to rain. Heavy rain. We threw on some rain proof clothing and headed outside to drag our more water resistant props into position. We couldn't bring out any of our electronic props or any lighting, it was just too rainy. We soldiered on, only getting the cemetery, fountain of blood, and other static props up and running. The rain, sensing our urgency I suppose, decided to let up at about 2PM. We hurried outside to place lights and run electricity. Just as we were about to test lights, the sky opened up again but only lightly and temporarily. During this time also, we learned one of our 2 foggers was not going to function. We were stuck with just one of our foggers in functional condition for the haunt. We also were miffed to find out that 4 actors we were counting on for the evening had decided to skip out on us, we did not find this out until 30 minutes before we opened the haunt.
Alas, we soldiered on.
Our actors that did arrive were greeted with terrible cold and damp conditions, which immediately sidelined one of our graveyard stalkers due to the nature of her costume.
Our cast, the smallest we ever had for a boo haunt was spirited and eager. We pulled off some fantastic scares and as usual we met with excellent community feedback. It was that feedback that as always is the second best reward for our efforts. The first being our almost psychopathic love for Halloween. This year inspired Jen and I to strive to a few new goals: To be a little more waterproof next year, and to design our next year's haunt to require fewer actors while delivering bigger and better scares.
I personally in 2006 learned a lesson about "latex rot". One of our key outfits year after year is "Bludie" who is an evil EEEVIL clown. Bludie's mask is suffering from a severe case of latex rot due to years of use and poor storage. Bludie is the reason that I was using rubbing alcohol on my face and hair to remove latex for at least a whole day after our haunting was complete.
Even with all of the drama of the actors, machinery, and weather-related kind; Halloween 2006 will still be filled with many happy memories and can still be considered a gigantic success.