Tell Me About It, Humboldt features short conversations with Humboldt County, California residents about their niche interests and obsessions. You know that thing you can't stop talking about at parties, even after everyone has walked away? That’s what we want to hear.
This week’s episode focuses on impractical Halloween costumes with Raven from Little Pond. We get into construction details, materials used and how to plan for sitting down and getting through doors when your costume is sculptural and expansive. This is a lighthearted look at the true dedication that goes into visualizing and executing original and exciting costumes!
This show is supported and produced by Cal Poly Humboldt’s College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences. Interested in being on the show or do you have someone you want to recommend? Email podcasts@humboldt.edu.
>>Abigail Smithson: Welcome back to "Tell Me About It, Humbodlt" on KHSU. This is a show dedicated to building community by showcasing the amazing, eclectic, deep, and sometimes weird expertise and passions of people living in Humboldt County. And here's your host, Joyce.
>>Joice Chang: Hello, everyone. Welcome, Raven from Little Pond. How are you today?
>>Raven Palomera: Thanks, Joyce. I'm beyond nervous, and it's very stressful to be here.
>>Joice Chang: We're going to talk about something you love. So that's great.
>>Raven Palomera: Yeah.
>>Joice Chang: But before we get there, we would really love for you to tell us about something you don't care about.
>>Raven Palomera: I have thought about this for way too long. I don't care about food.
>>Joice Chang: Ah. Wow. Okay. That's definitely a first. You don't care about food, in what sense?
>>Raven Palomera: Do you know when in movies and films, there's this moment where you realize it's a dystopian society because they have a nutrient cube, like, that they just pop one a day, and it's all the vitamins and nutrients?
>>Joice Chang: This is your dream.
>>Raven Palomera: Yeah, that would be ideal.
>>Joice Chang: Okay. Alright. Well, that's-- what color would this cube be?
>>Raven Palomera: They're usually brown or gray.
>>Joice Chang: And that will be fine with you?
>>Raven Palomera: Ideal.
>>Joice Chang: Ideal.
>>Raven Palomera: Yeah. I want it, as much as possible, not to be related in any way to food. I just want it to be like a pill that you pop, great all day done.
>>Joice Chang: Okay, this is definitely a first. I love that. Okay. So here we're going to talk about impractical Halloween costumes.
>>Raven Palomera: One year I was a juice box, and so it was like a dark blue as a base, but more of an indigo, not quite like a dark purple.
>>Joice Chang: Okay, can you describe this juice box costume and why it was maybe easy or hard for you to make this costume?
>>Raven Palomera: It was one of the ones that I thought of kind of in the middle of the night. I was like, you know, it would be awesome? If I had a straw coming out of my head.
>>Joice Chang: Yes.
>>Raven Palomera: So I got a big piece of cardboard and made it kind of back into a box. It's also easier to do it if you don't take the box apart to begin with.
>>Joice Chang: Okay.
>>Raven Palomera: Cut a hole for the head, and just kind of plopped it on myself. From there, it's a lot of paint. I painted the whole thing to be like the base color that I wanted it, which was that indigo color. And then I used paper, actually, to draw and write nutritional facts on there. So the whole thing--.
>>Joice Chang: Dedicated, okay.
>>Raven Palomera: Yeah, the whole thing took like box of cardboard, paint, and then Sharpie and a couple of pieces of paper. And I made a paper tube, too, for my straw.
>>Joice Chang: Okay.
>>Raven Palomera: This whole thing was actually one of the simplest costumes I've done. It was bulky.
>>Joice Chang: It was bulky.
>>Raven Palomera: Yeah. I had a meeting actually with my supervisors and my whole team that day. And when I sat down in the chair, it was a chair that has, like, arms on the side, and the box like lifted up because it was wider than the chair.
>>Joice Chang: Impractical, definitely.
>>Raven Palomera: The whole meeting, not-- not only was I not able to take notes or, like, participate.
>>Joice Chang: Yeah, I can imagine.
>>Raven Palomera: Yeah, because my arms had to come back into the box to be able to. So it was not just that. It was that it raised the box up. So I'm, like, on the edge of my seat trying to, like, see out of my box the entire meeting.
>>Joice Chang: You say this is a relatively easy--.
>>Raven Palomera: Yeah.
>>Joice Chang: --costume to make. Are there ones that you felt like were much harder to make and also impractical?
>>Raven Palomera: Yeah, the one that I'm working on right now is quite large, and it has a number of pieces of things that I've never tried to do before. So we've got cardboard, I've got bamboo sticks. I've got a lot of fabric going on, too. There's going to be streamers involved, probably a lot too of things that I don't normally do like projectiles. I'm going to be a pirate ship.
>>Joice Chang: A pirate ship?
>>Raven Palomera: Yeah. So I'm going to have sails.
>>Joice Chang: You as a single person, is going to be a whole pirate ship.
>>Raven Palomera: Yeah.
>>Joice Chang: Okay.
>>Raven Palomera: That's the idea. It's pretty long so far, which is creating some problems in terms of, like, how you get in and out of it. I have almost tripped and fallen quite a number of times trying to get out of it. But the mast, I've never done that kind of thing before with sails, so I did go grab some fabric that I think is going to work, but--.
>>Joice Chang: Hmm.
>>Raven Palomera: --Like, I've never been like a-- I feel very piratey. We're like, lashing bamboo poles together to make a mast.
>>Joice Chang: Okay.
>>Raven Palomera: So it feels very fancy, but I don't know how it's going to work out in the end.
>>Joice Chang: How do you think about your body vis-à-vis the costume?
>>Raven Palomera: The first time I did it, I really didn't think about it at all, and it created a lot of problems.
>>Joice Chang: Okay.
>>Raven Palomera: I-- You can get stuck in doorways.
>>Joice Chang: Mmhmm.
>>Raven Palomera: You can have trouble opening doors. Thankfully, I have a lot of colleagues and friends who are willing to, like, kind of play Butler and open all of my doors for me that day.
>>Joice Chang: But now you know better.
>>Raven Palomera: Now I do know better.
>>Joice Chang: Okay. So this is like a tip that you have for others who want to get into this game?
>>Raven Palomera: Yeah, it is-- you don't really ever think about the space that you need to maneuver through spaces all the time.
>>Joice Chang: True.
>>Raven Palomera: You kind of you're like, Okay, I can see a space and understand that I'm either going to or not going to sit there.
>>Joice Chang: Generally speaking.
>>Raven Palomera: Generally, yeah. But you don't even think about, like how far your arm needs to reach out to be able to pull a handle--.
>>Joice Chang: This is true.
>>Raven Palomera: --Or, like, if you have something with sleeves on, sometimes you can't actually raise your arm to pull on a door. The other thing that's really tricky is bathrooms. You need to be able to either make sure you can go to the bathroom, A, fit in the stall.
>>Joice Chang: Fit in the stall, right.
>>Raven Palomera: The doorways are often narrower than you want them to be.
>>Joice Chang: True.
>>Raven Palomera: And then actually go to the bathroom. And if you need to take your costume off, where are you going to take it off?
>>Joice Chang: Right.
>>Raven Palomera: How are you going to take it off? Do you need assistance? And most of my costumes, I've needed help from my friends to get in and out of it.
>>Joice Chang: So for anyone that's thinking like, Oh, Ravens just in a cave, making their own costume, in the dark. Is this really what's happening?
>>Raven Palomera: No, all of them have been collaborative. My boyfriend is a great builder of things. He's one of those people who can annoyingly not look at the IKEA directions and build the furniture with no problems. I look at the directions later.
>>Joice Chang: It still doesn't make sense.
>>Raven Palomera: I'm like, something should have gone wrong then I could have been like, Aha. Should have read the--.
>>Joice Chang: Should read page 56.
>>Raven Palomera: Yeah! Exactly. That doesn't happen. And I'm really not. I'm not like a-- I'm not a spatial person. So building the costumes for me has always been kind of relying on the existing shape.
>>Joice Chang: You are collaborating with people who have different skill sets.
>>Raven Palomera: Yeah.
>>Joice Chang: And you come up with the ideas?
>>Raven Palomera: Most of the time? Some of them, people have either encouraged or not encouraged me to do, a big one that I really wanted to do for a long time was a horseshoe crab.
>>Joice Chang: Okay.
>>Raven Palomera: Yeah.
>>Joice Chang: And somebody talked you out of it?
>>Raven Palomera: No, no, no, no. My boss and I talked about it for a really long time, but I think the thing that I really appreciated about that was, like, one of the first times I think that someone outside of my, like, immediate friend group was like, I hear your idea, and, like, let's talk it out. Like, let's see how you make this possible. Okay. So it's also just, like, even if you don't end up doing the idea, if you're just hanging out and talking to someone about it, you can come up with some really cool things that you might want to try.
>>Joice Chang: Yeah.
>>Raven Palomera: And it can be as complicated or as simple as you want it to be, right? Like one of mine was just the juice box, the cardboard box, paper, that's all you needed. This one that I'm doing now is much more complicated, but it's also been with the help of my friends have had ideas about it, my boyfriend's helping me build it.
>>Joice Chang: Right.
>>Raven Palomera: He's the one pushing and gluing things while I'm sitting there and holding it together. And it's always been collaborative, and you know, and it's fun. It's fun that way.
>>Joice Chang: I think that's a really nice way for us to end this conversation. The idea that this is collaborative in all the different facets, talking about it, making it, actually executing the costumes themselves, right?
>>Raven Palomera: Yeah.
>>Joice Chang: And that's really, really cool. I never thought about hollowing costumes in this way. So thank you so much, Raven. We really appreciate you coming here and sharing that with us.
>>Raven Palomera: Yeah, thank you.
>>Joice Chang: Okay, that is a wrap for Tell Me About It, Humboldt, brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Polly Humboldt. If you want to be featured on the show, or have a local guest to recommend, email us at podcasts@humboldt.edu with your idea, and check out the show notes on khsu.org for more information about today's topic. Thanks for listening.
>>Raven Palomera: Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.
