On playing Dress up

            I was a teenager in the late 90’s. I was a bit of a nerd or the Goth Punk variety.  I had a Mohawk, painted my nails, wore black etc. One of my favorite things to do was to game with my friends. By game I mean getting together with my friends, writing out characters to role-play and then play out in our imaginations what we were doing. It was pretend on a whole other level. We didn’t see it as that, no of course not. These aren’t dolls! They’re G.I. Joes!

            My favorite game was by a company called White Wolf. They had a game called The World of Darkness. It was essentially earth, only darker. Every monster you could think of was real and it wanted to eat you. It was all of my favorite monsters in one place and you could play one.

            My friends played this game quite often for years. It would be what we ultimately would obsess over when we started L.A.R.P. That stands for Live Action Role Playing. This is taking pretend to the next level above what we were doing. You basically take a game of dress up; add a bit of theatre and a gallon of nerd sweat. Ok maybe two gallons of nerd sweat.

            We would travel to other towns to play this. It was every weekend. Bloomington, Terra Haut, Indianapolis etc. I even occasionally traveled to Chicago and competed in contests. I won once for the most grotesque costume. I’d taken four rubber gloves and put them on both of my hands, then added Vaseline in between them so when you shook my hand it literally went *squick* and stuff moved. I rolled around in mud and dirt and other foulness for a while too to get my clothes just right. It was right down disgusting.

            I remember the first time I showed up to one of these events. It was a group of my friends and a bunch of college students. We were all underage and had NO idea what the “rules” where. Before the game had even started, I walked up to who would become a very good friend; and started conversing with him in character. You see my friends being jerks told me the game had started. So when I walked up to him and started role-playing he looked at me like I was retarded and said that the game hadn’t started yet.

            I felt pretty silly and embarrassed. Here I was a teenager with all these really cool adults playing pretend dress up monsters. I thought I was making a complete tool of myself, but what I hadn’t realized was, we were playing pretend dress up monsters. We were all ridiculous nerds and having a good time with it all.

            It was a better alternative to what my other friends were doing. Which was a lot of drugs, committing crimes and getting each other pregnant. So being a nerd was a much better approach to being a teenager in the late 90’s. I mean, I wasn’t shooting up my school; I was playing dress up with my friends and I was pretty good at it too.