Spotlight on @MaddieDayAuthor #Halloween Costumes #giveaway

MADDIE DAY here. I had my first Mystery Lovers' Kitchen spotlight a year ago, in which I pretty much told you my life story. 

But now it's Halloween season, and I happen to LOVE Halloween! Ask me to dress up in costume and I will say yes, ma'am, without hesitation.

So I thought I'd run through some costumes I have known and loved over my long life so far. It's too bad photographic evidence is lost for some of them, but I've done my best to dig through the boxes and albums from decades past.

I was a proto-feminist from about age three, and couldn't stand it that my little brother got to have guns and a Davy Crockett hat and I didn't. My mother was a loving soul, though, and somehow found me this costume, which I adored.

My mom was also highly creative. One year for a local parade she created a role as tiger trainer for my oldest sister, with the rest of us as the tigers. Barbara was delighted to crack the whip! I'm front right on the tricycle, looking a little bewildered. My sister Janet is rear right, and David, about age two, is standing in the tiger's cage. Everything is homemade.

In first grade I was chosen from among several hundred first graders to be a princess in the town's Camellia parade. I was thrilled to wear a floor-length gown and be photographed with my prince, Barry Babcock. The itchy net, not so fun.

The next is a hoedown dance number my sister Janet and I were in a few years later. We and Barbara took ballet classes for years and were each in several recital numbers every year. My mother sewed all the costumes and also taught the other mothers how to adapt the standard patterns.

Fast forward twenty years. We find a friend I made the first week of graduate school and me in one of many years of wearing matching costumes to Halloween parties and trying to confuse our friends. Jennifer and I, still besties 46 years later, have always been the same height and more or less the same weight, so that part worked.

And another in the same theme. We're both wearing black wigs we found at a yard sale one year. I still haul mine out on occasion!

One theme of my costumes as an adult is to go as out of character as I can. I have a photograph from a work party with my date from about forty years ago. I've long been described as a crunchy-granola type. When I show up at a party in a short tight skirt, fishnet stockings, heels, lipstick, makeup, and dark hair with a cigarette in hand, nobody knows what to make of it! Alas I can't find that picture anywhere.

But here's one from a spoof play - Linguistic Jeopardy - that Jennifer and I performed in during our doctoral program. We're wearing other wigs we must have found somewhere. She's in the fright wig in on the right, and I'm the slut with the cigarette on the left.

After I moved north of Boston and became a Quaker, I started attending annual Halloween parties given by one of our members. About fifteen years ago it was a prom theme. I found a thrift store gown, white gloves, and a plastic corsage to go with the wig. Check out the glasses. Also only trotted out on Halloween (along with the red lipstick), they are mine from seventh grade. The distance prescription still pretty much works!

I've also loved the years when attendees at the New England Crime Bake dressed up according to a theme matching the Guest of Honor.

For Charlaine Harris's year, there was the Vampire Ball. I'm here (note the same wig and glasses) with Sherry Harris on the left, Liz Mugavero on the far right, and someone whose name escapes me also in a platinum wig. 

Cheryl Hollon as Poirot agreed to squire my Miss Fisher around the promenade another year. (I can't remember that guest of honor.)

And we all wore western attire for Craig Johnson's year!

This year, alas, I'm going to be on book tour in California on October 31, and I don't plan to pack wig or ancient glasses.

But I will be celebrating the release of Murder Uncorked, my debut in the Cece Barton Mysteries set in my home state of California. It comes out this Tuesday, October 24, and I'm thrilled! 

Please check the Appearances tab on my web site for details of where I'll be on both coasts.

Readers: Share your favorite Halloween costume. Or ask me questions about my past! I'll send one of you my special branded wine tote bag (wine not included...).

🎃🎃🎃

My next book to release is Murder Uncorked, featuring my new wine bar manager Cece Barton.

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We hope you'll visit Maddie and her Agatha Award-winning alter ego Edith Maxwell on our web site, sign up for our monthly newsletter, visit us on social media, and check our all our books and short stories.

Maddie Day (aka Edith Maxwell) is a talented amateur chef and holds a PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University. An Agatha Award-winning and bestselling author, she is a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America and also writes award-winning short crime fiction. She lives with her beau and sweet cat Martin north of Boston, where she’s currently working on her next mystery when she isn’t cooking up something delectable in the kitchen.