Sooooo in preparation for the brand-spanking-new-very-current content that will be coming the next 6 days, we decided to take things back again, this time to the end of April, to one of our very favorite annual Pittsburgh events: Attack Theatre’s Dirty Ball.
(The Dirty Ball: if you’ve been, you know. If you haven’t, you should. Just trust us.)
This year marked our third Dirty Ball (yes, we were there for a threesome, and we’ve got the button to prove it!), and while it might not have been our favorite year, it was still a blast. This year’s theme was superheroes, and we took a kind of alternate version of that: comic book TV spinoff characters who weren’t actually in the original comic series anyway.
Yeah. That’s right: we went to the Dirty Ball as the Dixon brothers from The Walking Dead.
I was the obvious choice to play Daryl, thanks to my boyish good looks and expert skill with a crossbow. And Michael was perfect as Merle because he only has one arm anyway.
(That last part isn’t true. I had to make Lil’ Merle out of plastic canvas and silver Lycra, because if there’s one thing Daryl Dixon is excellent at, it’s adapting YouTube videos and Pinterest patterns into real life costumes.)
My mum is the one who *truly* deserves the costuming award for this one, though, as she made me Daryl’s famous angel wings leather vest. Let me tell you just how hard it is to not wear this out in public every day of my life.
(Get your Halloween orders in early – for a small fee, my mum can craft you this amazing costume too!)
Once we were fully in drag (ahem, once *I* was fully in drag, and my husband was dressed as my redneck brother), we were off!
The Dirty Ball is always a fabulous mix of dancing, drinking, inappropriate costumes, and general debauchery. There were sexy shadow dancers in the Velvet Lounge and superhero action figures everywhere.
The superhero dance performance was a bunch of fun, and it featured some cool ‘special effects’ with costumes made of power strips and box fans.
Oh. And flashers. There were definitely flashers.
And a creepy tunnel supervillain!
I got to leave our mark on the magic dry erase board.
And we got to make people totally uncomfortable with real-life slashfiction! Have you ever been watching The Walking Dead and wished Merle would say something like, “Stop touching me on the butt, little brother”? If you’d been at the 2013 Dirty Ball, you could have experienced this magic moment!
(Sadly, I have no pictures from the annual Fashion Show this year, as we were both in it this time. We, uhh, were the live-action slashfiction portion of the Fashion Show. The uhhhh two redneck brothers making out on center stage. Classy as always!)
The final dance performance of each Dirty Ball is always “I’ve Had the Time of My Life.” It is impossible to not feel like this is the best night of the year when that happens.
(I don’t know who this very confused young man was, but he kept insisting there weren’t enough vampires around to bite Daryl Dixon, and I was like, ‘ugh, I don’t cross genres’ but I promised I’d take a picture with him anyway. Did I mention there are like 5 open bars at the Dirty Ball?)
And no trip to the Dirty Ball is complete without sharing a few dirty secrets… (Oh, and many thanks to my amazing Drag King friend who helped me not be a total failure at my first attempt of dressing as a man! Even though my facial hair was rather Sidney-Crosby-esque… I’ll get the hang of it by Halloween, promise!)
As usual, the Dirty Ball was over long before we’d danced enough, but we snuck over to Art All Night in Lawrenceville in our Dixon brothers costumes, which was pretty damn fun, too. Already looking forward to 2014, and starting to think of costumes to top this year!