Make It So Number One!

I'm playing catch up right now! In the meantime, enjoy your Sunday. By the way...I stood five feet away from Patrick Stewart yesterday. I'll fill you in later...but I may or may not have embarrassed myself. Shocked? I didn't think so...

Movie Bites - A Halloween Beverage Fit for the Headless Horseman!

I LOVE contributing some writing over at this beautiful and classy food blog.

READ MY SPECIAL HALLOWEEN ENTRY HERE.

Empire Strikes Again: Amazing "Goonies" Reunion Video

For Empire's 20th Anniversary, they were able to snag the cast of 80's classic "The Goonies" including Mr. Steven Spielberg and Richard Donner. You can watch the video over at Empire's site. Cast shenanigans, warm embraces and some talk of a sequel (finally?) does drift in an out of the conversation.  One amazing bonus to the 20th anniversary issue of the magazine? Steven Spielberg himself guest-edited. I rarely buy print magazines anymore, but I think I'll be snagging this one for sure.

WATCH IT HERE!

P.S. www.empireonline.com is a fabulous place to linger.

In Which Heather Confesses to Life as a Halloween Snob

Wherein a mother allows some
costume inaccuracies for the sake
of her child.

I abso-freaking-lutely love Halloween! It's that one time of year you can completely geek out in public (outside of Comic-Con) and not receive negative attention. It's a day to look your obsessive fangirl best while laughing at the crappy costumes worn by those less impassioned. Granted, it's been a while since I watched Cinderella, but I'm reasonably certain she didn't wear a dress with her own picture appliquéd to her bodice. Creepy much? 


It's reminiscent of the bad guy in the movie “Kuffs”, who wore a shirt displaying his own face. Incidentally, when he was shot and killed, the bullet went through the forehead of his visage. (Note: I do not condone violence to those who wear such things, but internal snickering is mandatory.)

Padfoot is up for adoption!

Berry, the amazing German Shepherd was being cared for by a stunt man who also worked in the Harry Potter films. But he travels so much for work since the series ended that the dog had to be put up for adoption.

Check out Berry's story on the British rescue's website.

If you are touched by Berry's story, I'd like to recommend a few things for those of us stuck in the states who can't really do anything about it. (Because if you're like me, you want to snuggle that dog and bring him home ASAP.)

1. Donate to the German Shepherd Dog Rescue that's caring for Berry. There's a donate button at the very bottom you can click on.

Berry out of "makeup". 

2. Donate to the ASPCA, the Humane Society or Humane Society International. Remember, donating to causes for animals also does a lot for humans. Keeps them safe from sickly strays, for one thing. But this is a whole other subject that I probably shouldn't get started on...

3. If like most of us, there's just no money to give, volunteer at a local animal shelter or consider becoming a foster home for a local rescue group. 

Holiday Advent Calender + Halloween = Calloween

I was lucky enough to do some voice work for a great iPhone app called Calloween. It's for kids and it comes from RapDevPro, the same company that did the addictive Match Monsters app.

I love Halloween, but many of you know that I hate genuinely scary stuff and I've been that way since I was a kid. So I would've LOVED this back in the day. It's all atmosphere and innocent fun. It features classic monsters and gives you that same "counting down" giddiness that you usually feel at Christmas.

Of course, I also would've freaked out at the sight of an iPhone and thought it was a tricorder...but you get the idea.

This is Halloween, This is Halloween...in Orlando

I dressed as a flapper for the Trick or Meet Up and may or
may not have attacked this walking Turkey Leg.  

I have LOTS of fun Halloween blogs coming, it's just a matter of finding the time to post them. I have three Halloween blogs on SmithBites this month, a great guest post here from Heather about how it feels to be a Halloween snob, and plenty more. But this is what I've been up to so far...

In the past, I've posted:

Wreck the Halls!

Halloween: Five Ways to Avoid the Gore and Enjoy the Holiday

and waaaaaaay back in the day 20 Halloween Flicks, Made for TV Movies and Cartoons

I haven't been blogging much this fall because I've been busy working on Orlando Attractions Magazine: The Show which takes pretty much all day, every day. (Don't cry for me Argentina, it's like living one long Halloween blog post. It's amazing.) 

But I did give myself the afternoon last Sunday to put up my fall garlands and orange and purple LED's, my pumpkins, and cider-candles. Also, my work on The Show has already taken us to Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party, Universal's Halloween Horror Nights, Busch Garden's Howl-O-Scream, and tomorrow we're off to Sea World's Spooktacular. Later this month the Tampa Zoo Boo! It's been non-stop Halloween and I'm completely in love with it. 

Usually I blog about the Haunted Mansion a lot this time of year, but this year I've already been IN the Haunted Mansion. We covered something called the Walt Disney World Trick or Meet Up. (Or Trick or Treat Up, I've heard it called both.) It was an after-hours event where we were allowed into the Haunted Mansion for private rides. And once again, my husband and I found ourselves completely alone on The Haunted Mansion, nothing but empty doombuggies all around.

This also happened in 2008 at the Doombuggies.com "Swinging Wake". For someone like me who is so obsessed with the Haunted Mansion that it actually took up a large chunk of my graduate thesis... inhabiting the Mansion alone for any period of time is literally a dream come true. 

If it hadn't been for a phone call from my boss telling me about the event, I would've missed it completely. That's what my boss calls me about! Hello there, dream job. I'm usually too grumpy or tired to have a good perspective on things, but in Tina Fey's Bossypants, she also speaks of this exhaustion-based mood disorder that overtakes her when she works on 30 ROCK. Again, I am certainly no Tina Fey. Not even close. But it sure is neat to share an entertainment-based ailment with a hero. At least, that's what I'm choosing to call it. I guess I could learn to lighten up too...but it's more convenient if I pretend it's a communicable comedy-writing disease. 

In the mansion, after hours.
(And totally looking snooty about it!)

And anyway, it's pretty weird to be surrounded by people who are fans of the same things on a daily basis now. For so long, I was the super weird girl obsessed with the Haunted Mansion and theme parks and now I find myself frozen and shy around my new peers. I feel like a freshman in high school all over again. I know what they're all talking about, I just can't make myself jump in. I can talk Hatbox Ghost (Again, wrote a short story all about the Hatbox Ghost during grad school) and collector's items and fan-created characters and Cory Doctorow...but for the first time in my life, I'm just kind of at a loss for words on a regular basis.

It's great to find home, but then...how do you find your place at home? My identity was in being the lone weirdo...now I'm in a whole herd of weirdos. 

Too much ennui for a Halloween blog! Bah! 

Anyway, how are you wrecking the halls? And what will your costume be? I'm still trying to put my Han Solo costume together, I have the holster, the shirt, and the blood stripes, but I need the vest, the gun, the boots, and the pants. No  WAY am I going to have the money for those, so it looks like another Halloween costume dream unfulfilled for me. (It's why I had to be the ubiquitous flapper costume from Target at the Treat-Up.) 

Greetings from Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party, I am the tiny red-shirted spec on the gound holding a camera.
(Photo courtesy Matt Roseboom...said awesome boss.)