I woke up after my nap Friday afternoon and saw a sign that had been posted on my door that read, “Anything But Clothes Party! January 29th.” I was excited. That was the next day. If there’s one thing I love, it’s parties where I can wear something that makes people wonder whether they’re amused or uncomfortable. This is exactly what I had been trained for.
I didn’t have a lot to work with because I didn’t know the area around my hostel to buy materials within the next day. I figured there was going to be a lot of bedsheet / garbage bag costumes, so I didn’t want to do that. I had a friend who used saran wrap for an ABC party in college. “But isn’t it see-through?” I asked her at the time. “No, if you wrap it enough it becomes opaque.”
The party was just starting to get going and I was in the bathroom, halfway through my single roll of saran wrap, when I realized – no, it does not become opaque. I was wearing mostly-transparent plastic shorts. As much as I like weird costumes, that’d be a bit much. I was trying to figure out a way to somehow salvage this, when I saw the answer right in front of me. Bam! Toilet paper. I mummy wrapped a bunch of toiler paper around myself, then wrapped the saran wrap over that to secure it. It worked! Except now the white color and plastic texture made it look like I was wearing a diaper. I started wrapping toilet paper down my legs to get closer to shorts, but when I finished it looked more like a big pelvic cast. Alright, better than diaper. Let’s go!
Okay, so by the time I thought to go grab my camera, gravity had taken its toll on the costume and I’d lost the legs a bit. As you can see, my prediction of lots of sheet costumes was correct, so when I showed up with my weird saran wrap thing, people were pretty into it.
Not everyone participated in the ABC theme. In fact, almost nobody else did except the 3 people pictured previously and two of the bartenders. So for most of the party, I was walking around in a bar full of ~20-30 normally dressed people while I was wearing just plastic and toilet paper.
As an added bonus, a Peruvian girl I’d met earlier in the week came to the hostel to see me and brought several of her friends. None of them knew there was an ABC party and were understandably confused when they found me hanging out at the bar in saran wrap shorts. I told her that I’d be keeping the outfit on when I went out dancing with her later and she looked horrified. “Por favor. Cambia. [Please. Change.]” she pleaded. (I eventually did change into normal clothes for the club.)
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