My high school, Mater Dei, unfortunately didn't allow students to come to school in costume on Halloween until my senior year, but they did have "spirit weeks" for the individual classes. On one day during some of these spirit weeks, students were allowed and encouraged to come in costume.
For my freshman spirit week, I decided to resurrect my Pencil-Neck Geek costume (see my Halloween 1985 page for more details on it), since it was a big hit in 8th grade and of the several Mater Dei students who had attended Carden, only one of them had remained through 8th grade and had already seen the costume.
In the photo above, the students are not wondering what I am, as the caption says (yeah, I know, it's written for humor value), but rather locating where my real head is, behind the faux black shirt / ninja cowl. Also, despite the implication, I believe all these students are freshmen as well (I recognize Mike Cademartori and Randy Garrett).
Apparently the 1986-1987 yearbook staff was really taken with my costume. I appear again just two pages later, with an even more inaccurate caption:
No idea who the girl is. Just some innocent bystander trying to eat her lunch when she was accosted by a masked pervert for this photo-op. (Actually it was either her idea or the photographers to do this shot, not mine.) It's possible she was a sophomore, perhaps explaining the incorrect "Sophomore spirit week" reference in the caption. Unfortunately this pose hurts the illusion of the costume, since my upper arm is bending in the wrong place.
Believe it or not, the yearbook staff wasn't through with me yet. I appeared yet again in the 1986-1987 yearbook supplement:
Actually, timing-wise, this was the first of the three photos to appear, since the supplement was passed out at the end of the year so people would have something to sign for each other, because the full yearbook didn't become available until the following summer. Indeed you can see a bit of someone's writing at the top of the photo — John Levandowski made the pithy comment "Who is that geek oh its you, I'm glad I said it" [sic].
I believe this was also the year the Pencil-Neck Geek costume got its name. At a big Halloween party I went to (which featured no Carden or Mater Dei students, so I had yet another brand new audience), I was being interviewed on mic during the costume contest, and they asked me what I was supposed to be. I hadn't really come up with a name, and I answered rather lamely, "Something you wouldn't want to run into in a dark alley.". However, someone in the audience yelled out a much catchier moniker: "He's a Pencil-Neck Geek!".
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Dan Harkless
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