Dean Robbins
I saw strange and disturbing sights at Saturday's Freakfest Halloween party on State Street. In a brazen challenge to Catholic authority, nuns openly smoked pot. A depraved Super Mario traded sloppy kisses with a French maid. A crowd-surfing robot got dropped on his head, surely necessitating time in the repair shop. Even cops stumbled drunkenly in the dark, wearing miniskirts and fishnet stockings instead of the traditional pants. I wasn't able to get their plastic badge numbers.
Despite such misbehavior, everyone seemed to be having fun in a fairly safe environment, at least in my line of vision. Granted, my line of vision was sometimes limited, especially in the massive mosh pit formerly known as State Street at the Capitol Square. During a set by the Ready Set, I made the mistake of trying to cross from one side of State to the other, and the normally five-second trip took 15 minutes, during which I had unintentionally intimate relations with a sexy nurse and a very unsexy zombie.
Speaking of the Capitol stage, Locksley turned in the best set of the night, stuck in an early timeslot. The West High grads, now based in New York, played pop-rock so irresistible it could raise the dead -- literally. I saw a skeleton pogoing to their ecstatic "The Whip.'
Outside State Street's temporary gates, I noticed two Hasidic Jewish men in a car, with bushy beards hanging down to their chests. I think they were real Hasidic Jews, but on a night like this, the only way to know for sure would be to give those beards a yank.