The Great Pumpkin.
Made in 2010, then remade in 2016 with extra drama!
What do we really know about the Great Pumpkin? Linus gives us very little to go on, and he never shows up! I realized that, visually speaking, the Great Pumpkin could be anything that I wanted him to be. I decided to land somewhere between European royalty and Norse god.
The mask is like a cross between a Jack-O-Lantern and a deer spirit. His patchwork cloak is lined with an entire black satin king-size bed sheet, and has clusters of branches growing from the back. He reaches for you with gloves that have fibrous vegetable fingers. His is the regal, terrifying face of autumn.
As effective as the Great Pumpkin costume had been, it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. I’d always imagined him to be creepily tall, and if I was confident enough to perform the character on stilts, I would have done it. Instead, in 2016, I commissioned a local craftsman to build six-inch wooden platforms onto a pair of my shoes.
I brought the Great Pumpkin back out, with mossy vines growing out of the shoes and twisting up my legs. With a redecorated kimono, new branches, a new staff, and a new town to debut him in, I was ready to stalk again!
Bobble Head.
The movement of the performance is a really fun part of the Great Pumpkin costume. Since the mask is suspended from a crown, it sort of hovers in front of your face. The cloak is heavy, and fun to swoop around as you walk. When you roll your shoulders, you can get dramatic motion out of the branches on the back.
But if it’s really dark out, everybody will think you’re Krampus.
