The story behind these pictures:  Yes that's me as Gandalf the White and me as Clara Clayton (and an... er... acquaintance as Frank).  In 1979, at Minicon in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I decided I wanted to enter the competitive masquerade, and I wanted to do a reproduction of an outfit I had designed for Gandalf the White in a painting I happened to be selling at the art auction at that particular convention.  Building the costume was not a problem; I had gone through the full course of costume design training in college, and had been taught to sew by my mother, who herself had learned as a seamstress for the fashion company Junior House.  It was the make-up that was daunting, because the masquerade was done as a ball, which meant everyone, the judges included, would be seeing you VERY close up, and I could NOT have obvious glue and make-up lines showing.  The effort to pull it off took weeks of hand-hooking not only the beard and mustache (which were three separate pieces), but also the eyebrows and parts of the wig.  Alterations to my nose and parts of my cheeks (which aren't really visible in these photos, which are the only extant ones of that costume and quite old, faded, and grainy) required the fabrication and application of prosthetics.  When all the necessary pieces were assembled, it took four-and-a-half hours just to apply the make-up; alterations to the rest of me (which involved major strapping of certain parts and slight padding of others) took another hour of work.  When it was done, it actually was not as uncomfortable as it might have been, and worked surprisingly well.  Nature helped; the night of the masquerade, I began to develop a horrible chest cold, which caused my already somewhat low voice to drop over an octave, turning me from alto to baritone.  I spent the evening startling a lot of people who recognized the outfit from the painting in the art show (it took second prize in the Fantasy division), and creating considerable disbelief among those who refused to believe I wasn't a guy under all that.  Indeed I wasn't, and it turned out to be a most successful evening.

The other outfit, which is much closer to my "real" self is the costume you see on Clara at the very end of Back to the Future III.  It too posed many challenges in construction, but with my husband along playing Doc, we took both Best in Show and Best Worksmanship at the MediaWestCon masquerade in 1991.

More absurdness:  Strangely enough, after we did the 1979 masquerade, a theater chain for whom we and a group of friends did "celebrity double" presentations did a series of special Saturday morning charity showings of older movies, one one which happened to be Ralph Bahski's animated Lord of the Rings.  Well, I already had the hair, and being animated, the costumes were extremely simple, so we and a bunch of others said sure, no problem, we'll do it.  This is me and JR as Gandalf the Grey and Elrond.  My goodness, but JR didn't look bad in his youth, did he?