KaraokeFanboy

I've realized why I like building haunted houses so much.

For the past several Halloweens, my staff and I have built a haunted house inside our after school program facility, and while the experience is fulfilling on a community-service level, something else about the process has tugged at my heartstrings, and I haven't been able to put my finger on it . . . until this year.  About a month, one of my staff was riffling through an unmarked box in our storage room and extracted some twine, asking if we should put it in the arts and crafts room. 

"No!" I exclaimed, taking the twine excitedly.  "We'll need this for the haunted house!"  In that moment, holding the spool of coarse rope, I realized why I love building haunted houses.  I'll call it The A-Team Factor.

See, the A-Team was infamous for building weapons out of whatever was handy.  Not unlike MacGuyver, but as a team, they often built an arsenal from the most common of things.  Remember the time they used air conditioning tubing to make a lettuce head bazooka?  Or the time they were locked in a storage room and built an armor out of trash cans?  And that was before Jon Favreau's Iron Man!  Halloween, specifically its horror component, allows for this hasty, sometimes messy impromptu application.  For example, when we black out the rooms for our haunted house, we don't loop the duct tape behind the fileted trash bags; we let the duct tape show, because its presence implies a sloppy precision -- a sense of planned chaos.  Twine, the disheveled cousin of yarn, is scary in itself, but when it's used to tie a rubber shrunken head to a fence post, its texture takes on a different identity altogether.  When the A-Team built their makeshift weapons, they didn't have time for aesthetics -- just results. 

On Friday morning, as I put the last of the AA batteries into the glowing skulls, as I zip-tied the last of the tarps into place, as I tied those rubber shrunken heads to the fence, I didn't see my hands, but instead the gold-jeweled hands of B.A. Baracus.  My smile wasn't my own, but that of a satisfied, cigar-chomping Hannibal Smith.  And in the end, when the kids ran crying and screaming from our haunted house that night, which in the strobe-riddled dark hid its 99 Cent Store props in a bone-chilling mystique, my thoughts were his, too.

"I love it when a plan comes together."