Skullface Visits the Ballpark

I'm sometimes given to absurdist tendencies, so I'd like to share with you some thoughts I had the other night while watching the World Series. There's not a great deal that the Chicago fans can do in terms of dressing up to support their team, and for the matter the Astros fans are equally unlucky. In other words, neither team has a readily identifiable symbol or mascot that fans can emulate--and thereby support their team--through dress or costumery.

Packers fans have wedges of cheese atop their heads, Vikings fans wear helmets of nordic design, and Raiders fans simply seem to drape themselves in silver and black and go berserk. White Sox fans really have no aesthetic peg upon which to hang their hopes and support. Watching the people in the crowd at Game 2 in Chicago, I saw a fairly uncreative collection of various White Sox tributes in the form of lame costumes, color coordination and face paint.

I tried to think of a costume that one could wear to preserve some aspect of the team's identity, yet stand out enough to catch the eye of the network camera as it swept the stands, while still making those in your immediate vicinity upset and uncomfortable.

Then it came to me: an oversized, leering skull. I more or less gave up on looking for some team-specific theme in my costume, though it is black and white, maintaining the White Sox identity through its color scheme. A huge skull, and therefore garish and slightly shocking, will certainly attract attention. Yet it's not entirely out of order because we're so close to Halloween. I see it being made of something like neoprene and some sort of rigid understructure so as to maintain its shape.

A few bells and whistles are required, to make it that much more appealing. A friend of mine in college had this annoying little toy called "The Pocket Dad." It was a little battery-operated squawk box with a series of buttons which, when pushed, would play a recorded Dad-like line, such as "I'll give you something to cry about!" So, similar to Pocket Dad, Skullface would come equipped with a bank of sound bites such as "Kneel before the dark gods," "I weep blood for the fallen warriors of Odin," or simply "Brraaahhgggghhhhh!!!!" The recordings would be of an almost painfully loud volume, and possess a hollow, speaking-from-the-grave like quality.

Another Skullface feature is an internal rig that would vomit blood at the user's discretion. Fake blood is another option. The vomit apparatus should have three settings: (1) a slow and viscous gurgling drool; (2) a wide-area fine spray; (3) a concentrated and forecful projectile jet. Bleeding eyesockets is another possibility, so as to add some visual element to the "I weep blood..." line. Multimedia!

Ideally, the Skullface costume would come equipped with a high-powered flamethrower. When a big run is scored or at other critical and dramatic junctures in the game, the user could point the flamethrower skyward and let fly with a 30-foot jet of flame to underscore their appreciation of the team's performance.

This way, rather than the network camera panning the crowd and looking for simps with signs that incorporate the letters "FOX" into some sort of rah-rah message, or looking for people who've used the black-and-white theme to dress themselves up as zebras, dalmations, or newspapers, producers can simply direct the lens at the shrieking, blood-vomitting Skullface with the flamethrower. As recognizable as the gore and pyrotechnics is the 20- to 40-foot diameter of empty seats around Skullface--not even the beer or hot dog guy will come close.