STUDENT ‘SKELLIES’ THRILLER

The Skelly dancers practice before the Halloween parade.

BY KATE BARCELLOS

When Gary Meitrott began to mention the Rutland Halloween Parade, I found myself excited and yet hesitant; was I a wild thing beneath my clothes and smile, and could I throw that outside of me?

“There is a parade in Rutland, the longest-running Halloween parade in the country,” Gary starts tentatively, not expecting any volunteers to appear out of the crowd.

“I would invite anyone and everyone to participate; we particularly need what are called Movers and Shakers. They follow the procession and invite others from among the crowd to dance in the streets; a real dream of mine would be to have a thousand people coming and following us like children to a Pied Piper. But there are other parts too; Kate is an Anarchist Dancer, so her job is basically to do her own thing and play with our Grim Reaper. We have a Queen too, and if the Anarchists worship her, she gives out flowers that they can hand to the elderly in honor of Day of the Dead. ”

The moment he handed me my costume, a pair of black jeans and a black turtleneck painted with white bones, my knees began to shake and my breath came in stutters; I was going to be a Rogue for

Halloween, a crazed and wild thing selected to dance and run and bow, to entertain those on the sidelines and represent the single greatest and most ancient symbol of death: the skeleton.

Throughout rehearsals, costumes were designated and clans were threaded together. The parade was opened by the block of choreographed dancers, dressed like whirls of sunsets under crowns of Spanish flowers. Following them came our most terrifying Jack Skellington Himself; Gary strutted gallantly as the conductor for the Boom-Booms, four sets of wheeled percussionists drumming out a beat that could convince the most stubborn of spectators to begin to sway. The percussion instruments were made entirely from scavenged materials such as milk jugs, plastic barrels, tin cans with lids and nuts and beans for shakers. The Bottle Blasting Babes filled one of the wheeling stations, a line of sassy women and their glassy weaponry, with eyes carved out as black as the sky.

The Boom-Booms were a fearsome bunch wielding loud drums and giant plastic holders, the thunder-cracks of the group that seemed to open up the heavens with each mighty blow staring round from beneath feathery headdresses and Mayan crowns. The Dr. Seuss Jitney Drummers were a sly few, sneaking around their row with flames painted up their faces and great, red devil ears, often creeping up right close to the crowd with their personal snare drums and clackers. The Queen was as regal as she was terrifying, with her great cloak of purple sparkles and gaunt, skeleton face; she sat on a throne of bones and brightly-colored peonies, tossing out offerings to the Anarchists as she waved to the crowd. Following up at the very end was Death himself; he staggered from beneath his long robes, a face of dark grey and hollowed cheekbone, beckoning to the crowd with his nightmarish sickle and long, monstrous hands. Skelly, the fourteen-foot dancing puppet, skipped and jitter-bugged his way along behind, a skyscraper symbol for our Spanish-Skeleton extravaganza, a beacon of terror and joy for all those crawling out from the deep on this one night of ghoulish glory.

Throughout the pulsing mass of glitter and bones, demons with long white hair danced and threatened each other, crazed with the wild spirit of the music and the grandeur of the night. The Anarchist dancers, dressed in torn shirts and bandanas, leapt joyfully among the rows of drummers and dancers, pausing to fill a child’s candy bag or hand a flower to an elder on the sidelines. Every so often, two or so dancers would run back to the Grim and bend slowly around at him, taunting and teasing until with one mighty swing of his scythe, they jumped back and ran forward again. Rolling and tumbling over each other, stretching and spinning, crouching and cart wheeling and pirouetting again into the crowd, they circled a second time to gather spectators into the procession to dance into the street. At the end of the row, the Skellies had a surprise lurking in the shadows.

Halloween grew late, and a thunderous mass of devils, cats, hippies, witches and fifties pin-ups have followed us to the stage in the middle of the street, through the rain and wind to a growing circle of people in front of a disc jockey booth and the Boom-Boom stations. Gary stands at the front as a ghostly voice echoes over the loudspeakers, his rain-soaked smile even more gruesome as the speech quivers evilly through the speakers, “Darkness falls across the land, The midnight hour is close at hand…”

One by one, the choreographed dancers rise up and begin to stumble through the crowd. Each member of the crowd gasps and jumps aside as a zombie in torn clothing wanders into them, drawn as if by a magnet into the center of the circle; even in their rancid state of molding flesh, the dead cannot resist the beat.

The skeletons begin to twitch, arms and legs crunched into decayed twists, hunched and staring with dead eyes and crooked grimaces. The onlookers begin to roar, screaming and singing along as Gary violently conducts another layer of thunderous percussion upon the classic Michael Jackson anthem. The dancers skip to the very outer rims of the circle, shaking their all but decapitated heads in the thrilled faces of the crowd. With the last beats of the song, the bodies collapse in a rotting heap at the center of the stage; tongues loll in and out, eyes rolling like white marbles in their heads, the screams of the crowd so piercing it is difficult to tell if they are cries of ecstasy or sheer terror.