Halloween? Yes!
I had assumed upon moving to Beirut that one of the things I would be giving up would be Halloween. However, due to our slightly less than six degrees of separation from the U.S. Embassy, we found ourselves getting ready to go to a Halloween party on Saturday night. Luckily, just around the corner from us is a store of indeterminate purpose which seemed to convert itself into a costume shop for 72 hours. We were able to get zombie makeup, fake blood, a knife-type apparatus, and a bat costume for 24, 500 LL (~$16). When I was perusing the meager ghoul makeup selection, the proprietor said to me, “We have a t-shirt with [inaudible/incomprehensible] to go with that.” I thought to myself, “It sounded like he said ‘a t-shirt with breasts’, but I must be mistaken.” After about five minutes of rummaging around through boxes, he produced, surely enough, a polyester t-shirt with a pair of ample prostheses. We passed on that item.
Speaking of transgender costumes, earlier in the day I tried unsuccessfully to wriggle into a wedding dress of Amy’s that didn’t make the cut. I’m actually quite glad that option didn’t work out.
Amy already covered quite a bit about the party in her post, so some of the following might be a repeat. Our friend Caroline, who works at AUB, was kind enough to pick us up at the Kabab-Ji in Hamra. On our way we were considering trying to avoid the main street, but we figured what the hell. I was trying to act casual, but I was worried my expertly applied makeup would run because I was sweating so much. People stopped and pointed, parents held their children up to see, older siblings tried to scare younger siblings, people hollered and greeted us from across the street. It was quite hilarious and ended up being one of the highlights of my evening. I’m sure that nearly everyone on the street realized we were dressing for Halloween, but I secretly harbor the hope that there were at least one or two old-timers who had no idea what the hell was going on. At one point, some young ladies from Qatar stopped their car and got out to have their pictures taken with us. They kept saying, “We are from Qatar. We are not from Lebanon. We do not have this.” Based on the spectacle we were creating, neither did Lebanon (though to be fair, when we were dining off Monot on the 31st, we saw several people walk by the restaurant in costume).
During our photo op, our friend arrived, dressed as a gypsy, and we were off. The embassy is about half-an-hour outside of town and there is a checkpoint down the road about 500-600 feet before you reach the main gate. At first I was thinking, “Oh great…I’m sure the soldier on duty is going to love this,” but then my companions assured me that we obviously weren’t the first group of costumed freaks to come through on our way to the party.
I was wondering if we’d have any issues at the gate, considering we were all in disguise. Though they seemed to take as much time inspecting our documents as the last time, they seemed to recognize me from my passport photo regardless. They ushered us through and then put us in a car that drove us 50 feet to the building where the party was being held.
The party itself was upstairs at an establishment called The Bunker Bar. We re-met and met for the first time a bunch of embassy people and various other expats. As always, the question “so, like, uh, what are you doing here?” (“here” meaning Lebanon) was frequently asked. I should mention that all U.S. Embassy employees are required to live on the compound, and with very few exceptions they are required to get permission 24 hours in advance to leave. When they do leave, they’re required to be attended by a bodyguard at all times. I think this kind of living affects the embassy people in two principal ways: (1) it makes a couple of gringos like us moving to Beirut and living there under our own steam seem strange and unusual (or at least, you know, more so) and (2) it makes them kind of weird in sometimes delightful, oft-times disturbing ways.
I believe we all had a good time and I was surprised that so many people dressed in costume. At first I thought that they must have limited resources for such a thing on the compound, but then it occurred to me that the costumes probably get passed on from generation to generation. Two common costumes were members of the medical profession and what can best be described as Saudi-type arabs. I found this second costume lame at best and offensive at worst. While I am sure that it was an easy thing to put together, some embassy dude to throw on a keffiyeh and a robe and call it a costume just hits me wrong. Maybe I’m too sensitive or maybe it just smacks of the whole “Lebanon is a desert full of camels” stereotype. Seeing these guys did spark some Halloween memories. The first was going to a Halloween party at the Frying Pan in New York City in October 2001 (i.e. a little over a month after the September 11 attacks). As we were walking in, some guy was walking out dressed as Osama bin Laden and it made me sad and angry. The second, more light-hearted, memory is that of our friend telling us about dressing as a post-conversion Cat Stevens for Halloween and getting accused of basically doing what these embassy guys were doing.
There were some other notable costumes. Carrie dressed as a black widow spider. Several people were dressed as members of the medical profession (and nearly every one made a joke referring to helping with the dagger sticking through my head). There were two women who both dressed as flamenco dancers. I wondered if one of them felt inferior. There was a theme couple: the man dressed as a plastic surgeon (basically a labcoat, a bald cap, and a huge syringe marked “silicon” that with which he nearly poked my eye out at the bar) and the woman dressed as his augmented and bandaged creation. There was a costume contest and they won for “best couple.” The prize for “cutest costume” went to a guy dressed as a nun with a puzzlingly and improbably huge bust. The fake-breast motif was mercifully brought to a halt when I won for “scariest costume.” To be honest, there wasn’t a lot of competition…the guy who got runner-up dressed as a half-assed grim reaper was the only other remotely scary costume (in the classic, Halloween sense). When I accepted my bottle of wine and was handed the microphone, I said my name and mentioned that I thought the person dressed as George W. Bush would win for scariest costume. Unfortunately, what might be considered a fairly edgy thing at a U.S. Embassy party was lost on everyone, as I believe Amy and the woman presenting the awards were the only people to hear me (though to my delight, the latter actually seemed kind of mortified).
We ended up staying late as most of the guests drifted out, presumably to go dancing on Monot St., presumably with their bodyguards in tow. We talked with the bartenders, who were all young guys that volunteered for their posts behind the bar.
Caroline drove us home and I was perhaps too animated in my personal assessments of some of the people I had met at the party. Why must I always judge? After some lurching around the apartment like a zombie, I washed off (most of) my makeup and went to bed. The next day we had brunch at Casablanca with Caroline and Carrie and I still had some tell-tale black around the eyes and blood around the lips.
