So….my mother-in-law asked me to do a room for her school’s Halloween carnival.
Now, this is a very special opportunity for me, as it harkens back to the days of my childhood. Days when I was just a lad, trying to find his Halloween way.
It was the same year when my brother was sick on Halloween, dad out of town, and mom not able to leave my brother, or have me wandering the streets alone. The first year I started staying home and handing out candy.
Mom sat and talked, some kids thought she was a dummy, she moved, they spooked, and I thought it was COOL.
However, the first inklings of how to go about making our house into a proper ‘spooky’ house came later in the year. At school.
I don’t know WHAT the assembly was SUPPOSED to be about. I just remember encountering a few things for the first time in my life. Tesla Coils, Jacob’s Ladders, and Black Lights.
They weren’t really being used in a halloween way in the assembly, more of a teaching, hey this is such and such, and it does this because of this way. It didn’t matter. As I sat there, I SAW Frankenstein’s lab. See, I had been to haunted houses before, but this was back in the times when these things were rather pricey. Not the under $20 they are today.
I was hooked. So much that Santa brought me a Tesla Coil lightning ball that year. I SOOOOOOOOO loved that thing. 2nd best present I ever got (best being a fish tank). Made me sad when it became a little…unsafe… 3 years ago.
That following year, I was going to make our porch into a science lab. I had the lightning ball, and I went out with my own money and bought me some makeup, and a ‘blacklight’.
That was a lesson in ‘buyer beware’. “Blacklight” my ass. It was a purple lightbulb. An expensive purple lightbulb packaged to say blacklight. So, I sat in the dark with my little lightning ball, burns on my face and hands (the makeup worked good), and a crappy purple lightbulb on the porch light.
Essentially…it sucked, and I had been ripped off in the process.
It would be years before I was able to purchase a real blacklight. And, by that time, we were doing more hide in the dark and go boo things at the house.
So, when asked to help the school, the Lab was FIRST on my list of ideas. Heck, I still have a habit of collecting things for use in a lab setting even though my theme doesn’t even approach allowing me to use them.
So, more than 20 years (man I’m getting old) after the original idea came to me, it’s time to start building my lab. So, here’s a little teaser with the test video. We’ll get a video of the full thing at the carnival.