Gee-gaws as far as the eye could see -- and then some. There were over 1600 booths at the 15th National Halloween Costume and Party Show and I had snagged press credentials. It was a moment in time for someone like me -- a rubber chicken fancier of no small renown. The truth was when I applied for my press pass, I had no idea how large this event was. I'd only planned enough time to look around a little and interview Jason Frankel of Tooth Fairy Inc. But upon arriving, I sadly realized my two hours would only allow me to skim the surface of this truly amazing industry show.

The cavernous room was divided in two. On one side were the exhibitors catering to Christmas, Easter, the Fourth of July, balloons, greeting cards and other sunny ephemera. The other half was strictly Halloween and designated by a large sign as "The Dark Side." If I looked down from the ceiling, I wondered, would the two sides of the show form a giant yin/yang -- that eastern symbol representing the bi-play of light and dark in the universe? Probably not. There was no by-play here. The division seemed to cut clean down the middle of the room and was even reflected in the kinds of people that ran booths. Most of the light side exhibitors looked like Amway salesmen or recruiters for "Up With People". Peering through the entrance to the Halloween side I saw clowns, capes, Star Wars figures, people made up to look like Quasimodo....I even saw a couple of dragons walking around. Guess which side snagged my two hours?

The entrance was guarded by a life-size figure of Frankenstein's Monster sculpted in the Karloff tradition. I breathed deep and steeled myself for sensory overload. What happened next can only be described as an all too brief trip into the best and worst that contemporary notions of Halloween have to offer. Turning to my companion, Scott, I asked where he thought we should start. After all, I reasoned, if he makes the decision at least I'll have someone else to blame for what I miss.

It was clear from the outset that the products and services here ran the full gamut. From rows and rows of the cheapest novelty items to full blown animatronic displays costing upwards of $10,000 one common denominator (besides the Halloween theme) was all the exhibits carried that aura of odd familiarity. I had seen so many of these items in stores and in movies and other media that it was jarring to suddenly meet the men and women who invented and hawked such wares for their living.

Rubber Chickens, Martian poppers, and whoopee cushions were present and loudly accounted for. Novelty Teeth abounded. One outfit specialized in what they called Billy-Bob Teeth. Another, Tooth Fairy Inc., offered more than thirty styles of goofy choppers. We interviewed the owner, Jason Frankel. Rasta Imposta sold novelty hats "....so cool...you'll wish you had three heads!" Other vendors specialized in Party Music, lighting, and fog machines. Union products Inc. offered a more Martha Stewart approach to Halloween offering large plastic ghosts, candy corns, black cats and witches. Another exhibitor offered up a cartoony-looking Frankenstein's Monster that shook its hips to the tune of "Monster Mash". There were Beanie Babies done up in the Halloween theme. One doll was designed to be thrown against the wall and yell "Ow!" when it hit the floor. One of my favorite exhibitors was Stagecraft Inc. which featured costumes designed to make the wearer look as if they were riding some fabulous animal.

As a child my own experience with Halloween had been limited to what I could find at the local Ben Franklin's dime store. It was at this sacred place that I also became a devotee of comics and magazines like Forrest J. Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland. Though October faded into November and the costumes were put away shipped back to whatever magical world they had come from Famous Monsters helped ease the pain by running pictures of kids, far cooler than I, who turned their backyards into graveyards, and their parents bathrooms into makeup studios. An 8mm camera turned them into young DeMilles and a little improvisation with household items turned them into The Mummy! Frankenstein! The Melting Man! Dracula! The Werewolf!! Though I fantasized about such activities, I never took the leap into oatmeal-based makeup -- preferring instead to live vicariously through my local late night TV Creature Feature. But I admired these young lads and lasses who wound up the focus of Forrest J. Ackermans, "Wanted More Readers Like" photo op. And my eyes often wound their way to the back pages of FMwhere Halloween was available all year round. Masks deluxe, fangs galore, fake (or was it?) vampire blood, bolts for the neck, flesh putty, Spock Ears, cloaks, costumes, etc. All or most of it was of a higher quality than what I could find in my own hometown. And the 1999 Halloween Costume and Party Show was exactly like walking into the back pages of FM. Want a Halloween mask or accessory? Well here was Don Post, Jr, king of the mask makers with a booth taking up more than ten booth-spaces.

Things had changed at Post Studios since my FM days. Along with the fondly remembered exquisite versions of Universals Monsters and classic comedy/celebrity masks there was a decidedly gory turn to Post's 90's product line. Other masks included devils, demons, psycho- paths, zombies, and accident victims of various types. And there were still more additions. If you can imagine it happening to the human body it was probably represented here. The denouements included a gutted corpse, several varieties of hacked off limbs and a wide-eyed severed head with a green apple in it's mouth.

Another big feature of the show was the presence of the haunted house industry and it also reflected a modern turn. There were tons of full size animatronic figures of the kind that cost several thousand dollars and are utilized by the amusement park and motion picture industry. On the surface it was disturbing. A hooded body hung from a gallows suspended several feet off the ground. Every so often it's feet would kick swinging the figure to and fro. Another was strapped into an electric chair. Unlike the hanging victim who was covered from head to toe this figure was stripped to the waist and amazingly detailed, every vein bulging as if they were all trying to break free from the straps. Suddenly the squinted eyes and clenched teeth of the death grimace were brought into sharp relief as a blue bolt of electricity jumped from one electrode to another seizing the figure up in the chair where it writhed horribly. In another booth a very lifelike alligator lunged out of a cave to snap at the heels of passerby. But the grossest of all and the one that appealed most to my twelve-year-old instincts was a figure leaning over an open barrel marked toxic waste. If you waited patiently he would start to shudder and -- you guessed it -- a gushing torrent of something resembling green Campbell's Soup shot of it's mouth with firehose force winding down into a thin dripping trickle.

Overall, my impression was that adults are just as busy exploring Halloween as kids ever were. But being adults we're even better at getting ourselves into trouble if we aren't careful. Our jaded sensibilities can carry us into behavior and beliefs that can seriously jeopardize our already compromised understanding of good and evil.

There was also C.S. Lewis admonition at the beginning of The Screwtape Letters, "There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors...." Lewis goes on to separate such people into two camps` materialists and magicians. Without a doubt, I saw a lot of both at the trade show. In fact, many seemed to be making their living by straddling the gap between the two. It was a weird mix of expert artistry, crass commercialism, and mythical appeal.

But at the same I couldn't help but sympathize with a lot of what I saw. These images even many of the gorier ones clearly begged for a context. The hanging corpse, snapping alligator, and plethora of severed heads, arms legs hands and feet would be right at home in a fairy tale story like Hansel and Gretel, or Jack and The Beanstalk ("I'll grind his bones to bake my bread" -- wonder what kind of bread he meant? And I wonder what kind of salted meat Jack saw hanging in the giants kitchen?). Go back and re-read the original Brothers Grimm. They contained much if not all of the above. And what they didn't spell out was almost worse. The human imagination can almost always outdo the author's pen.

Even the vomiting figure embodied some fond memories. Who hasn't traded barf stories with friends or eagerly waited for the "oohs and ahs" generated by the revealing of some spectacular scar or peeling back of a scab? Any good church folk out there still know all the words to "Grimy Greasy Gopher Guts?" "I'm Looking Over My Dead Dog Rover," or "Comet Makes You Vomit?"

And what about the horrific descriptions of hellfire and damnation many of Halloween's staunchest critics are want to use? What about the stage plays that supposedly show the torments of the unsaved? What about the market for Christian horror via sensational testimonies, graphic anti-rock seminars? Jack Chick tracts anyone? Bob Larsen and Frank Peretti novels? What about other works by C.S. Lewis like The Great Divorce, a ghost story with a decidedly creepy ending or, Perelandra with the hideous undead Un-Man? If Perelandra was a film what would that demonized zombie look like? The Screwtape Letters, a conversation between two demons also comes to mind as an example of what I mean. And does anybody anywhere have any doubts about what those spiders were up to in The Hobbit? Did anyone else out there fearfully imagine Bilbo and company paralyzed in their shimmery cocoons as the arachnids feasted on them in the peculiarly horrible way that spiders do?

And though Lewis rightly criticizes the materialist modernist "parts is parts" view of humanity in That Hideous Strength he also ends that book on a decidedly gory turn with a graphically described beheading, a series of horrific zoo animal attacks at a banquet and last but not least the destruction of a city ala Soddom and Gommorah. Clearly a lot of this was about CONTEXT. As adults we were just better at imagining the details of our childhood stories and games. It can, of course, be argued that as our depictions of villainy and evil become more and more detailed we do not necessarily benefit from the better view -- only more sure of what we first suspected. Evil truly is evil, wrong, destructive, ultimately ugly, undesirable. Good truly is good, virtuous, noble, desirable in every sense. There is a point where the great divorce divides them forever, even if that point is hard for some people to imagine from their present position.

But the hunger for something different, something "other" or even something spooky goes a lot deeper in all of us than some would like to admit. Our openness to (though not our blanket acceptance of) what provokes it may well be a measure of our true level of spiritual desire. Do we really believe in more than what our five senses tell us, or do we simply believe in a nice sanitized spirituality that takes on the appearance of good without really grasping the supernatural nature of it's power. In other words, do we believe in an actual personal, knowable God who is actively interested in us for our good? Or in an actual personal Satan who desires our destruction? An awareness of the true nature of the world around us may well leave room for plenty of spookiness especially for Christians. An awareness of death (though not a celebration of it) would seem to be a potentially healthy thing when seen as a reminder of the transient nature of our earthly existence. And the irony suggested by the gross and grotesque nature of many of the products reminded me that not only weren't we truly at home on this earth, and in these weird fragile often grotesque and gross bodies of ours but that it was healthy to remember and be able to laugh at it. It was all passing, all fading, and someday would be replaced, fixed, however you choose to say it by something perfect.

At least at the Halloween show, even the Dark Side had its lighter moments. One of my oddest experiences was meeting Bela Lugosi Jr., a lawyer, who makes his living administrating the rights of celebrities. What does one say when meeting the son of Count Dracula? For someone like myself, familiar with the tragic turn of Bela Sr.'s career, it was both an honor and rather humbling: a reminder that Bela Sr. was a person, someone's dad, not just an icon.

Turning away from the haunted house displays I found myself facing the entrance to something called "the Black Hole". On the outside it looked like a twelve-foot tube covered in a canvas-like material, but inside it was a narrow six inch path, two railings and a number of strategically placed lights and mirrors. Stepping inside one became instantly and intensely disoriented, surrounded by a spinning starfield and unable to find ones bearings, convinced that the space was much larger than the outside suggested. I wasn't able to walk through it all the way but I found the experience a good reminder of gravity. Likewise, the Halloween show had challenged my preconceptions and reinforced my ideas about good and evil. Far from threatening my foundation it had stood up to examination and proved itself larger philosophically than I originally gave it credit for.

Despite what some people may think, I am actually not a little kid anymore and -- despite what some people may think -- even I am willing to admit that. And so, the inevitable perspective check: could I take my son or daughter to something like this? Where did they fit in to the adult vision of Halloween- a vision that was hawked indiscriminately at best in the public square and often targeted kids directly with products . To be fair, this show was only for exhibitors, buyers and the press. I did see a few kids but they were all accompanied by adults presumably parents. I reflected on both the stubborn resiliency and mutability of childhood innocence.

It was time to go. As I left I took one last sad look at the life-size Frankenstein monster guarding the entryway to this wonderful world. It was a world of excess to be sure, but there were moments in it when I felt much closer to "reality" than I think I would have on the other Light Side of the exhibition floor where everything seemed a little too happy to be true. In fact, having, as a child, patiently put up with more than my share of day-glo shredded plastic, Happy Easter tinsel, and manufactured joy I'd have to say the awe and mystery of Halloweentown still seems a little more in touch with reality and overall a better starting place for this wounded seeking soul. Not that I'm sure I'd want to live there.

The key remains context. Things need to be put in a context in order to invoke certain meanings. Maybe you're out there and you're unsure of your context. You just think Imaginarium is cool, fun to look at, a good source for movie info or product reviews. If so that's okay. No hard sell. There are plenty of thought-provoking articles and you can always get in touch and talk more if you'd like. We'll keep working to broaden and diversify our coverage of wonder-where-we-can-find-it. The question is what are you looking for? If it's in depth articles on imagi-topics look no further. This issue we offer

But before you go meet a true gee-gaw pioneer that we bumped into at the trade show....

Jason Frankel doesn't just believe in the tooth fairy -- he IS the tooth fairy! Tooth Fairy Incorporated, that is. And what is Tooth Fairy Inc.? Only the provider of the finest quality novelty teeth in the world. Tooth Fairy is a division of Frankel's Costume Co. Inc., a large family owned magic and costume shop. Jason's grandfather, Morty, got the ball rolling by opening a magic store in downtown Houston in 1950. But after customers expressed interest in Magicians' apparel, Morty's wife, Leola, a seamstress, put together a costume. Since then, this tri-generational business has done nothing but grow. It now has fifty-thousand costumes available for rental and purchase.

It also boasts an exciting new subsidiary. During the 1996 Halloween season Jason's dad, Lon, frustrated with the lack of quality novelty teeth he had to offer his customers, challenged his son to come up with something better. Before long, Jason found himself immersed in books on prosthodontic appliances (dentures to us laymen) and even hung around his own orthodontist's office learning how to work with the materials.

It was a difficult process there are no textbooks on how to make teeth that look like the hunchback's split and stained choppers. Not to mention gorilla, morlock or phantom of the opera styles. "Once I got the procedure down, I had to create my own teeth. Even though they look messed up, I like them to be perfect. Every single denture is handmade" says Jason."

Each pair of Tooth Fairy Teeth come prefitted to a very realistic looking set of gums. In order to custom fit them a customer simply takes two putties that are provided, rolls them together and puts them in the denture. As the putty hardens via a harmless chemical process, the customer puts the teeth in his/her mouth -- which then forms a permanent custom mold. The lucky owner can then slip them in and out whenever they want. "I wear my teeth alot," says Jason. "Since the dental acrylic we use is approved by the American Dental Association and made specifically for making dentures, I'm always at these dental trade shows looking for ways to improve our product. I've had a lot of dentists walk up to me with dollar signs in their eyes and say, 'Call me.' I mean, they take one look at me and they think Mercedes!"

But heavens! Where will it end? "We only started with about four styles but we figures out early on that the more styles we had the easier it was to keep people interested in the product," Jason continues. "We have about thirty styles now and we're getting ready to introduce another twenty or so in the very near future." Tooth Fairy, Inc. does offer several styles of fangs, but the style of the dentures doesn't really allow for eating, or drinking much less putting the bite on someone. So would-be neck-nibblers will have to look elsewhere to get their fang of choice permanently bonded to their real teeth. "We've made custom fangs for people. In fact we've made some for movie productions. But we actively discourage people from having them bonded to their natural teeth. It can really throw off the bio-mechanics of your mouth. The majority of people that buy any of our fang styles are playing vampires in films or on stage or going to Halloween parties."

For most of us who grew up reading Famous Monsters of Filmland, the idea of owning dental appliances of the same quality as Lon Chaney and other special effects legends was a misty dream. Having tried out my bubba teeth on everyone in sight, I am completely hooked on Tooth Fairy Teeth. They are relatively inexpensive -- most styles are $24.50. The kicker is that Jason and his brother Aaron hope to pay their way through college through sales of their decidedly successful product. Jason is currently in pre-med at the University of St. Thomas and Aaron at the Art Institute of Houston where he's studying architecture. Having their product showcased in the media has definitely helped. So far the big three TV networks, The Houston Chronicle and a host of other national media have run stories on Tooth Fairy. And even though we sadly report that Morty passed away in 1975, Jason thinks his grandfather is smiling down on them, "I know if he was around today he would not take these things out of his mouth."

LONDON (AP):Police in Hamburg Germany recently discovered the body of Wolfgang Dircks at his home. He'd been dead in front of his TV set for five years. It seems he had an arrangement with his bank to automatically deduct the rent from his very large bank account. Not known as a friendly person noone bothered to check on Dircks during the five years he was dead. Oh, and there was a TV listing in his lap.

MOSCOW (AP): In an experiment in socialization Orangutans, were provided with TV sets in their zoo cages. While details are not available it seems that the sets were removed after a pattern became apparent. The male orangutans would become so fascinated by the TV that they would completely ignore their companions and offspring and even become aggresive if they were interupted by them.

Survivors of Cornerstone Festival Imaginarium 1998 will be terrified to hear that the Festival powers-that-be have decided to once again resurrect their annual pop culture bash. "We're going to party like it's 1999 because, er, well, it is 1999," says Imaginarium spokesghoul Uncle Freebie, stepping boldly out on a limb with his remarks. "This is Imaginarium's FIFTH YEAR at Cornerstone Festival and we're going to do our best to top last year. The theme for this year's Cornerstone Festival Imaginarium (June 30 thru July 4th) is "Grotesqueries, Mysteries and Truth". For a report about Last Year's Imaginarium, click here. For information about This Year's Imaginarium, click here. For a prediction about Next Year's Imaginarium... Well. Don't want to step any further out on any limbs...

Gene Siskel (January 26, 1946- February 20, 1999), noted film critic for the Chicago Tribune and half of the famous team Siskel and Ebert passed away in February of complications from brain surgery. While this is old news by the time you read it we still feel the sting here at Imaginarium central. We only had the chance to make passing remarks to him and colleague Roger Ebert in the last year while attending the same film screenings but we always found them full of the same good humor that they displayed on their television show. We remember what it was like as youngsters to see Roger and Gene actually "thinking" about the movies and like many movie minded kids we tuned in every week to check which way the thumbs turned. Thanks, Gene, for your wit and dedication to film and for the inspiring way you spread your enthusiasm.

As for the rest of you, hope you feel like hanging a thumb or two skyward after reading this installment of Imaginarium Online (or, if not, perhaps, at least, hanging by your thumbs). We haven't decided yet if we're going to be able to post another installment before the fest or not, but at least we'll add to the Cornerstone Festival info posted here, eventually putting up a complete day-by-day schedule. Hopefully. We enjoy keeping you in suspense, and we hope your suspense keeps you coming back to the site.

And while you're surfing around, be sure to stop in at www.barneyfife.com, where the Bel-Aire Church of Christ in Tullahoma, Tennesseee, has posted highlights from their weekly Bible study class based on life in Mayberry, N.C. These people are so Imaginarium and they don't even know it. (I'm working on a Bible study based on life in Mount Pilot). Also, if you'd care to read this entire page in Ubbi Dubbi, click here.

-- Dave Canfield, Editosaurus