Actors Saved From Halloween Costume Horrors

By Kendra Bobowick

“Not all ghosts are scary, sometimes ghosts are good,” said acting teacher Martha Bishop on Sunday, October 18, as she warmed the audience gathered for C.H. Booth Library’s Young Adult Mask & Wig Players drama group readied for its performance. The group was presenting Freaky Phil’s Costume Shop, written by one of its performers, AnnaMaria Marini.

Tristan Villamill, who had the title role of Freaky Phil, was already quietly crawling from behind a screen as Ms Bishop spoke. He stashed himself beneath a folding table heaped with costumes and moments later burst upward. The play soon began with a cluster of girls entering Phil’s shop searching for costumes. As he shot up from beneath the table, they screamed.

His stitches were drawn in makeup along his cheek, his posture drooping with the weight of a threatening voice. He insisted on selling the magical garments to unsuspecting young ladies AnnaMaria, Meghan Marini, Mary Kate Holmes, Zoe Brodsky, and Caitlin Filiato.

Working with Phil was his henchman, played by Sarah Greenwood. She shuffled and crowded the girls, giggling over her words and fantasizing that they were lollipops or gumdrops — sweet and edible things.

The costumes came with what turned out to be a curse. The henchman warned: Follow the rules including “be nice” and “be clean.”

Stepping into their new attire, the girls admitted they “had a bad feeling about this…” Soon, Meghan Marini’s vampire costume prompted the thirst for blood. Other characters swooned from the spell, except for one witch who said to Phil, “I am nice, and clean…” and she broke the spell. They play ended with several remarks including, “You never know what can happen on Halloween.”

Before the skit Ms Bishop helped set the mood. She told a ghost story that began, “There was a young man …”

That young man, Brad, had failed to catch a bus home on a cold and snowy night. He called his mother who threatened and eventually did contact the sheriff’s office when he failed to return home. For hours he stumbled through what he had hoped would be shortcuts that turned treacherous. Brad sank through icy streams, tried to climb embankments, and became lost in drifts. Snow kept falling.

Scrambling to pull himself out of a ravine, he felt a warm snout brush his hand as his fingers sought a hold on the ground above. His black and white Collie that had been missing for weeks was standing above him. “Lady, I knew you would come back!” he shouted. She helped pull him up.

The day grew dark. He was cold, his feet were wet, and he was without shelter. Across the field was a barn, but he faltered under exhaustion. Lady prompted him to move. She led the way.

Inside the barn she kept him warm.

“He talked to Lady, she licked his face, and laid next to him,” Ms Bishop whispered. Out searching for Brad, the sheriff turned his headlights across a field.

“Was that a black and white collie?” He followed the dog, and soon his headlights fell on the barn. Getting out his flashlight, the sheriff pulled open the barn door where he found Brad bundled in hay. He carried Brad to the car, and then brought him home.

Surprised to hear the sheriff’s story, Brad’s mother asked him, “Did Brad tell you about Lady? Lady was Brad’s dog...” Inclined to chase the boy’s bus to school, Brad’s parents had tied the dog in the yard. She broke free and was hit by a car and killed months earlier. “We didn’t know how to tell Brad. We said she ran away.”

The moral? Anything can happen on an ordinary day.

Offering her audience another story for the season, “extras” in the play sat in the rows dressed in pointy black hats and makeup. They went back with her to the 1970s:

“I had a good ghost experience,” she said. She lived in a townhouse and was home with her two German shepherds and one cat.

“The gate creaked; I was reading a book and the temperature dropped, the lights flickered and went out and my two big dogs got on the couch and whimpered.” She told the audience that her cat crept cautiously along the back of the couch until it was “under my hair.” She wondered, “Was the curtain moving? I was terrified.”

Soon the cat went back to the other side of the couch and her dogs hopped back onto the floor. The lights returned and the temperature warmed up again.

“I have no explanation,” she said. “What scared me was me. I thought something bad might happen. It’s one of those stories that’s good to tell.”

Following the performance, Ms Brown explained, “We love having the Mask & Wig Players program in the library.”

What started as something small about five years ago has grown. Contact the library at 426-4533 for more information on the young adult drama group.