It’s probably because I’m a theatre person–I always use the R-E spelling when denoting the stage as opposed to the cinema, which I always spell with the more common E-R, although it’s not a hard and fast rule–and by a theatre person I mean that I’m active, very active, in theatrical pursuits. I can call it “community” theatre in that the people with whom I work all live within a reasonable distance from me, and we are most certainly a community, but the term “community” theatre denotes amateur efforts, and we do manage to get paid for our work, which is, I am, told, the definition of “professional.” I am, thus, highly involved in professional theatrical pursuits, working with a community of like-minded individuals. All this is neither here nor there, really, except that it explains why I don’t “cosplay.” The idea of putting on a costume and make-up and pretending to be someone else–as one of my frequent artistic collaborators once said on the subject, “When do I NOT do that?”
I have some other, non-theatre friends who participate in a yearly “zombie walk.” They put on tons of make-up, entailing hours of work, to go walk around in public and pretend to be zombies. They look good, I can’t deny, but all I can think about when looking at them is the amount of time it took them to achieve their results, and how much more time it will take to wash all that zombie gook off. As a kid, I loved to play dress-up, more than the average, I’d imagine. As a grown-up, though–and I should put “grown-up” in quotations–if I’m gonna go to that much effort, I want to get paid for it, or at least know that I’m donating my time and labors to a good cause.
The idea of turning myself into a zombie, however, albeit an action figure zombie, has its appeal. There are several websites one can patronize offering the ability to render one’s likeness in the form of an action figure: Funko, myfaceonafigure.com, thatsmyface.com, etc. Has anybody tried turning themselves into a ZOMBIE action figure?