Halfway to Halloween Horror Ball
Our big show, The Halfway to Halloween Horror Ball, came and went and boy was it a good-un. Probably our best ever. It was the brainchild of Covered in Bees, and of course By Blood Alone is game for anything involving horror and halloween. There was an entire stage design by Cruella that was jaw-droppingly great (she should really be doing this for a living), as well as a fortune-teller, walk-arounds in horrific makeup, a "wheel of misfortune", and all sorts of cool decorating. The crowd was huge - probably the biggest we have played for - and many of them in costume. Members of Sinferno showed up dressed as Kiss, and Boo's gal Catherine came as the Queen of Hearts. The sound was particularly good and our set went down great - which is amazing considering that Runtt played the whole thing in a red panda costume! Seriously, he didn't miss a single beat - with panda gloves on and everything! Everyone was in awe. During "Darkman", Aepril of the Medusa Maidens accompanied our music with middle eastern dance - quite captivating. That night was also the debut of our 9-minute epic, "Serpentarious", which we closed with and got through it ok.
After we broke down, The Medusa Maidens made their debut and put on quite a show, dancing to some extremely hard industrial number. They were above and beyond most middle eastern dance troupes, and made a great addition to the show. The crowd totally ate it up. Afterwards was the costume contest which, oddly, was won by Catherine as the Queen of Hearts, the odd part being that the prize was a whole bunch of Bees-related cds and merch, all of which she already owns. Finally the Bees took the stage in matching ties and corpse makeup. There's not much to say other than they crushed as usual and the crowd loved it. (They recently won "Best Live Act" in the Phoenix music poll, so it's not surprising that they rocked out.)
In closing, I must say that one of the great things about the show was how many people said they had more fun than on the real Halloween. Last year Halloween sort of got co-opted by some of the big promoters in town who really just saw an opportunity and threw together a show with the word "halloween" in the title, and while our show at the time did very well despite the competition, the interference from these Johnny-come-latelies diluted the holiday a bit. I'm really glad the Covered in Bees had the foresight and gumption to, shall we say, "take back the holiday" for all the Portland horror and halloween fans.