At the time this was totally normal...

The Halloween dressing up festivities remind me of the good old Club Med days. Now for those of you who don't know- right after college I went to work for Club Med in the exotic Port St. Lucie, Florida. I'll spare you the details of what exactly Club Med is, but basically its an all inclusive resort where the employees "wear many different hats" if you will. My main job was working at reception, I later moved to be the logistics manager. So basically you do your 6-8ish hours a day at your "main job". The evenings are set aside for you to work some more! Many people will be in the shows that play each night. I managed to avoid the shows for a few months until that little kitty of a choreography lured me into the shows (story for another day). There were also mandatory "greetings" where we had to stand outside of the shows in our evening dress code saying "cou cou" to every single guest. My anxiety is rising just thinking about it.

LONG story short we sometimes had "special celebration" nights. This was usually around a holiday or if a lot of French were in town. What this consisted of was a champagne toast and 8 girls standing on a podium in old Italian wedding dresses. Whats that? Why? I have NO idea. I was picked (and by picked- I mean forced) to do the wedding dress thing because apparently I was small enough to fit into the dresses. I guess that was sort of a compliment at the time. So after dinner I would run over to this dressing room to grab the "least ugly" dress. And yes, I had to fight for the dress every week. And yes after doing it long enough, I felt entitled.

Next we had to do our makeup! This was supervised by Martina, the French golf store manager. Martina figured out that I spoke French and would then ONLY speak to me in French. Martina would enforce that we have our hair in a low bun using maybe 3000 bobby pins and hairspray. Bright red lipstick that we all shared was also mandatory. And god forbid we forget the GLITTER! I kid you not, we had glitter powdered all over our body.

Once the transformation was complete, we trekked over to the main outdoor stage area and got on our platform. We then stood there smiling for an entire 40 minutes. Fireworks would go off directly behind us and since we weren't allowed to freak out, we could merely cross our fingers that our shellacked hair wouldn't catch on fire.

Its funny how I remember the very first time I did it. The other girls had done it before and it was TOTALLY normal to them. I actually laughed at myself the entire time. All I could think was "Really??" Of course, by the time the next week rolled around I was a champ and it was totally normal for me.

I obviously didn't win the "least ugly" dress race in this picture!