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Blogs / Resident Tourist / September-October 2011 / October in MD: From Wenches to Zombies, Expressing Your Inner “Other”

Oct 11, 201111:55 AMResident Tourist

October in MD: From Wenches to Zombies, Expressing Your Inner “Other”

Maybe you’ve been to the Renaissance Festival and have noticed that people---adult people and lots of them---really love to play dress-up. There’s something liberating, it seems, about becoming someone else for a while.

Whether a temporary wench from medieval times in a fetching leather bustier or a kilt-sporting woodsman gnawing at a roasted turkey leg, you can walk amongst the colorful flags and crystal shops with cheer---your government day job just a hazy, future-tense prospect.

In costume, you are a character on a set, free to improvise different lines for a while, far from your cubicle and pinching office shoes.

Short of a Halloween party, the RennFest was the most acceptable place to dress-up and release your inner “other.”

Until Silver Spring’s Zombie Walk, that is.

Apparently, there are hundreds of the undead among us. Ellsworth Street and Georgia Avenue has teemed with them once a year since 2008. This year, the zombies come out on October 22nd.

Heads, bloody and still sticking to the hatchets that cleaved them, desperate fingers reaching from outstretched tattered sleeves, pale empty faces moaning for “Brains!” Zombie couples, zombie superheroes, and little zombie babies parade past the Discovery building, toward the specially-scheduled zombie movies at the AFI. It is a sight of sore eyes!

If you are not the zombie-dressing sort, come for the spectacle of it. (Though you may find that, like when you are inside the wooden fences of the RennFest, the one who looks strangest is the jeans-wearing, camera-toting, stuck-in-the-modern-moment YOU!)