Halloween, Part 3

As I mentioned in the last post, there were 7 of us guys all outfitted in our Rollerball costumes. I’m 5’-11”, and was the shortest one of the bunch of us. When I had all the gear on, I was about 6’-6” and had the presence of a football player. The tallest guy was 6’-6” before, and over 7’-0” when he was all decked out. I think I have a line on getting some photos, so they should be coming soon. You won’t have to imagine what we looked like because you’ll be able to see it. Keep in mind that these are from the ‘70s, so I hope they’ll do us justice.

So – the big night came and we were ready. We had decided that we would spend the evening (this was Halloween night) going to different bars and trying to win costume contests. We had scanned the newspapers – there wasn’t the web to surf back then – to find out all the places that were having contests. We identified a bunch of places where we could go and try to win. There were varying prizes, some cash, some gifts, and we wanted to try to win them all. We had ended up spending about $100 each to make the costumes, which was a lot of money back then.

We gathered at my friend’s house and planned out our evening. After we got all dressed up, we decided it would be a great idea to take some pictures. We did a bunch of poses that emulated scenes from the movie, and we even made a big silver ball – like the movie – and held it high in some group pictures. We had conscripted one of our friends not dressing up to transport us around, since it was a little difficult to drive with roller skates on. He had a great ‘70s vehicle – a Dodge van, all carpeted, little windows in the side in the back – a veritable epitome of the times. It was the perfect way to go in style.

So – the evening began. I don’t remember how many bars we went to, but it was probably at least a half a dozen. Some of them were small little places with not many people and just a little contest, but others were pretty good sized. I remember the best one was a huge bar and we ended up being one of the top three for the big prize. There was a huge stage and we each took our turn vying for the biggest cheer from the probably fairly tipsy crowd. When our turn came, we skated in a perfect “V” formation and pivoted around to face the audience, with the leader holding up the silver ball in a perfect victory pose. The crowd went wild – it was like being rock stars! I can’t remember if we won – I don’t even know if it mattered all that much – for that moment we were on top of the world.

We had totally succeeded. We had won contests, we’d been the life of the parties we attended, and we’d had a complete blast. But – we didn’t even know that we had the biggest adventure of the night still ahead of us.