Costumes and masks

iParty has Obama and Hillary masks! Yes folks, now you can perform your own presidential debate skits, SNL style.

They also had sad, leftover Mitt and Rudy masks. After what Mitt pumped into his own campaign, a mask of his might be a good investment for Halloween: wear bum's clothes and the Mitt mask.

This is a riff on what Al Capp used to do in his Li'l Abner comic strip after the Kennedy-Nixon election: Whenever he drew a wide-shot exterior of the White House, he always had a hobo walking by outside the gate, drawn with Nixon's face.

I was at iParty, anyway, to trawl for 'appropriate' costumery for the novelty hula I'm choreographing: Lola O'Brien, the Irish Hawaiian. You know, I've wanted to choreograph this song for 30 years.

I think hapa haole hulas (the Tin Pan Alley songs like Lola) have been culturally rehabilitated, except in the academic community. While I feel compelled to note that 'grass skirts aren't grass, and they aren't Hawaiian,' and also that "hula skirts" are not the "national dress" of Hawaii, I think it's sheer denial to maintain that the cellophane skirt era is not a part of Hawaii's cultural history.

But I understand the concept of 'national dress' or 'ethnic dress.' It was big when I was a grad student and grantee at the East-West Center in Honolulu. The EWC was under the State Department in those days, and ethnic dress/national dress was good for photo ops.

Apparently for Barack Obama, not so much. That swami-looking pic from the Drudge Report--precisely who was signifying exactly what with that?

The photo was from an official tour of Africa, he was visiting drought- and flood-ravaged regions as a U.S. senator, and talking up what a great job the U.S. military was doing in providing aid.

OK, you see all these guys trying out the costumes of their hosts. Notably, W. Bush in a mandarin outfit (now that was appropriate!).

The thing that irks me is that when it's a white person, they're dressing up in someone's (literally) outlandish attire, but when it's a person of color, like Obama, it's somehow supposed to reveal their true nature. Their nature as--what? Outlandish? Other?

I don't think that worked out too well for the instigators of the Drudge post. People have pretty much decided for themselves whether Barack Obama looks like Us or Them.

I kind of like seeing him and Hillary debate, because to me they look like America. McCain, with Lieberman standing just to his left (ha!), looks like Old White Guys.

I am very tired of people mistaking America for Old White Guys.