Devils and vampires may be Halloween standards, but most years it's the topical costumes that really stand out. Late Clinton-era Halloweens were full of Monica Lewinskys; the mid 1990s saw people dressed as John and Lorena Bobbitt; and after Taiwan's 1999 earthquake, a few even donned refrigerator boxes and posed as toppling buildings.
Tasteless? Perhaps. But Halloween seems not only to be a time to let the age-old goblins roam the earth, it's also an occasion to unleash their contemporary counterparts -- and only for a night.
This year, there can be no question as to who will corner the market of Halloween fashion: Osama bin Laden.
Fortunately, his is a pretty easy costume to make, much easier than, say, that of an anthrax spore. All you need is a turban, desert clothing and, of course, the beard. To help you along with this last and most vital accessory, here are our 10 suggestions on beard-making for those of you who haven't had the foresight to grow one naturally.
1. Buy a beard from the costume store. Not only is this option lacking in creativity, it also costs money. True Halloween mastery lies in putting together your costume MacGyver-style, using mainly innocuous household materials to come up with some miraculous result. But if you must, you can find a near approximation in most any fake pirate beard at the costume stores lining Hsimenting's Hanchung Street for NT$150 and up.
2. Construction paper. The polar extreme of a store-bought beard, construction paper is cheap and will look like crap. Though it is possible that intensive scissor work could produce something passable, any paper beard will still fall apart if you try to drink anything. So in the end, this option is best left for your preschool English class, which you can transform into an entire platoon of Chinese 5-year-old bin Ladens. And once they're all dressed, you can have them wave plastic AK-47s and chant: "Death to the American Satan!"
3. Spray paint your Santa Claus beard black. Don't worry, you can spray paint it white again in December. Or better yet, figure out a way to mix costumes and go as O-Santa bin Laden, that jolly old eggnog-slurping terrorist. You know, it's like the song says: You better not shout/ you better not cry/ you better not pout/ I'm telling you why/ bin Laden is coming to town/ He might be on your airplane/ or in the daily mail/ he don't care if you've been bad or good/ because you're the in-fi-del ...
4. Glue together your own fake beard from barber shop clippings. The hair of almost everyone in Taiwan is black, which just happens to be the perfect color for a bin Laden beard. Moreover, local barbers tend to be extremely easy going, and though they will probably find your request for the contents of their wastebaskets to be a bit strange, most will happily accede once you explain things properly.
5. Your air conditioner filter. If you live in any of Taiwan's major urban areas, your air conditioner's filter is bound to be either black or some very dark shade of gray. It is also made of spongy foam and big enough to pass the Taliban's minimum-size requirements. Another perk is that losing the filter is no big deal, because you probably need to change it anyway.
6. A black Russian fur hat. Look, the Cold War is over. This year, it will be hardly apropos to go as Vladmir Putin, Ivan the Terrible, a Cossack horseman, or anything even vaguely Russian. Remember, this is Halloween. It's important to be timely and have a sense of history.
RSS