Although Halloween wasn’t a thing in Croatia for Dado’s childhood, he has not let time, age, stage in life, decency, modesty, maturity, self-respect, pride, judgement, money, or anything else get in his way of Halloween. Dado is really cool like that, but I should probably tell him that more often. Anyhow, one year we threw a Halloween party with our friend Martha at our place. Well the party was turning out to be quite an ordeal, but so entirely, fabulously worth it. Martha and I Googled across what seemed like vast highways of decor ideas and put together a party we were proud of. Well Dado, bless him, wasn’t much help with the party. I think at one point he walked the dog. It turned out that actually was an indirect huge help since Martha and I were wrapped in about 6 yards of cheese cloth to be used for our scary ghost heads. Point is, that Martha and I were really caught up in the decor and prep, and Dado wasn’t. He was caught up in costumes. What started off as my romantic mummy idea…me and him, wrapped in endless gauze and chiffon, turned out to be my one-man-show and Dado’s firm stance on, “I don’t want to be a mummy. I want to be The Hulk.” A little taken by his direct disrespect for my awesome idea, I glared at him with a triple scoop of love-surprise-irritation. Sure enough, Dado bought himself The Hulk costume. Much to my surprise, it came in an adult size. And Dado was a very happy man, with two set of eyebrows. This was 2011.
2012 brought out tiki/war dancer/south beach/samba Dado. Last year he didn’t want to dress up. Nope. But he did want to wear a fancy mask. We shopped and shopped and the night before its debut, he found it and all of its glory. The thing was legit. The next day he wore it and he wore it with pride and there’s a little piece of me that loves him just a little more for it. Little did Dado know that a week later he would have to go with me to find masks for a salsa masquerade ball Courtney and I planned to attend. Halloween over, we searched high and low for some masks. After endless shopping and a whole lot of chubby face rejection (my face is apparently too wide for the standard mask…sad) we found Venetian masks at Pier 1, of all places. And so, Dado and I enjoyed our moments of mask victory and within a week our masks went from hot commodities, to retired has-beens.
Or were they. Enter Mary and Ricky. We were all up for anything at one winter shoot and as we reached into our car trunk to grab a lens, there they were. Feathers and sparkles with gaping eye-holes blankly looking at us as if saying “Give us one more run.”
Here they are in action, on a run, but hopefully not their last!
I’ll let you figure out which one was Dado’s.
xo,
Steph.























