Hey Sanka, Ya Dead?: Halloween 2013

I've never been much of a Halloween fan, even when I was a kid. Sure, I loved getting candy, but I always felt vaguely weird about dressing up and knocking on strangers' doors to ask for it. As I got older, Halloween became more about shaving cream fights and egging people's houses, which I wasn't really about. And then it became an excuse for people to get absolutely trashed and for girls to wear lingerie and cat ears and call it a costume. Not quite my style, to put it mildly. I'd MacGyver costumes together to wear to work at the UM wellness center to get a free smoothie (and I randomly won the costume contest one year!), but Halloween hasn't been a holiday I look forward to.

Until this year.

Halloween is a HUGE deal at USA Volleyball. People go all out, making costumes and decorating offices and throwing a party. The whole shebang. This year, the costume contest was movie-themed, so Kristina and I (the two interns) teamed up with Leslee and Rose (the two temps) to dress up for the group costume category.

We brainstormed several ideas, but once Rose came up with her suggestion, we knew immediately we had to do it: the Jamaican bobsled team, as seen in Cool Runnings.

(Side note: sorry not sorry to those of you that follow me on Twitter, since I did nothing but spam it with pictures on the 31st and you've seen/heard most of this already.)

It took a TON of time, effort and prep, and about a ton and a half of duct tape...

 

But it was BEYOND worth it. We looked awesome!

I got to be the driver (aka in the front) because it was the smallest box, and I got deemed helmet-wearer because I was the driver. The helmet made it a little hard to hear, but overall it was a pretty sweet deal!

We also decorated our cubes! Rose's office was Jamaica:

 

Leslee and Kristina's cubes, which are right next to each other, were the finish line in Calgary:

 

And my cube, which is in the middle, was an Olympic village-y sort of thing:

And, of course, check out our sweet ride!

I tweeted a photo of our costume to @NBCOlympics, and suddenly we became kind of a big deal.

I see pride! I see power! I see a bad-ass motha who don't take no crap off of nobody!

It ended up getting favorited/retweeted over 80 times, and we made it onto lists on Deadspin and NBC Sports. We also happened to win the USA Volleyball costume contest!

The Jamaican bobsled team finally wins gold! Sort of.

Basically, the whole day was awesome. I decorated a pumpkin with glitter to look like a curling stone, we had the USA Volleyball COO chucking candy across the main conference room room into a bowl, and look at these AMAZING costumes!

 

I absolutely loved all the other groups: Despicable Me, Ghostbusters, and The Three Amigos. I kind of wish everyone could've won, because those costumes were so legit. (But hey, if you're a soon-to-be college grad and want to be a part of the epic USAV Halloween next year, they're hiring the new me & Kristina for May-December 2014! Go apply!)

This super fun Halloween experience kind of makes me want to start a tradition of dressing up as Olympians every year. I could easily do a great Misty May-Treanor next year, but I'll need a tall, blonde friend to be my Kerri Walsh Jennings. Ah, well, I have 363 days to figure that out!

Feel the rhythm! Feel the rhyme! Get on up, it's bobsled time!