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Chapter 87
Chapter 87
If there was one purely social event in Spearfish Lake that got talked about, planned for, rumored over, recriminated as a result of, or preached against, it was the annual Halloween Party at the West Turtle Lake Club. In other words, it was usually far and away the
most memorable social event of the year.
Like many things that get a reputation all their own, it started innocently enough, when Gil and Carrie Evachevski decided to have a few friends over for a little party the weekend before Halloween. Since it was right around Halloween, somebody suggested that
costumes would be nice -- something Carrie hadn't even thought about, and had to amend the invitations.
Mike and Kirsten were among the twenty or so people that had been there. It had been a nice enough party; everybody had a lot of laughs, and several people suggested to Gil and Carrie that they do it again next year.
What with one thing and another, it was hard to keep the guest list down for the second party. No one knew how many people had actually shown up for the party, but the house was jam-packed. The party reached a critical mass of its own accord, and sort of got out
of hand. Harold and LeRoy, the town cops on duty that night, got called to the scene three times before it died down, but they got paid back by making three DUIL busts of homeward bound party-goers.
Needless to say, when the party was over the house qualified for federal disaster relief, but Gil and Carrie were a little too bombed to care much.
Gil and Carrie weren't particularly drinkers, although they did enjoy a beer now and then, but this time they overdid it, along with everyone else. As they surveyed the wreckage the next morning, they were nursing heads as big as county fair pumpkins. They were still
groping for coffee and trying to come to grips with the mountain of debris when Mike and Kirsten showed up to help with the cleanup, unbidden and still nursing hangovers of their own. Mike and Kirsten weren't even in the door yet when Frank and Diane Matson pulled up in their car.
It was a while before anyone had been very effective -- every one of them had drunk way more than normal -- but they started in as best they could, with frequent breaks. "God, that was a great party," Kirsten commented on one of the breaks. "I don't know how
you're going to top that next year."
"Never again," Carrie replied, shaking her head. "Never again. Look at this house!"
"Frank shrugged. "Yeah, things were a little cozy in here."
Gil shook his head. "Well, we could have it out at the post. It'd be easier to get cleaned up if it got trashed like this."
"The post is so dingy," Diane commented. "Why not have it at Commons, out at the club?"
Since a falling feather would have made their heads ring just then, the idea hit them like a brick. The implications were obvious.
Even though the West Turtle Lake Club had been out north of Spearfish Lake since shortly after World War II, probably not one Spearfish Lake resident in a hundred had ever been out there. Every one of them had good friends that wouldn't be caught dead out there,
at least in the summer.
Yet, the nudist club members -- and there were more of them from Spearfish Lake than the Matsons and Evachevskis that sat in the destroyed living room -- were proud of what they had out there. Not just the beautiful wide beach, or the cozy summer cottages.
Commons was the showpiece, the huge Ursula Mandenberg designed log dining hall, built in the fifties. It had won architectural awards when it was built, and was featured in magazine articles and architectural books. It may have been the most famous building in the county, yet to
most people from Spearfish Lake it might as well have been on the back side of the moon.
But a Halloween party outside the normal season would be a different story. Even if a guest didn't want to admit that they'd been there, it was a costume party and no one could ever prove they'd been there or not.
Kirsten was the first to speak: "Great public relations."
"You could do it right," Diane said. "BYOB, or a cash bar. An admission charge to cover the costs. Caterers. A band. Almost two months to get the decorations right."
"Janitors," Gil said, surveying the shambles. "Backhoes, if it got real bad."
Mike shook his head. "You're going to have to do something about people driving home drunk. Last night isn't going to look good in the police report."
"We tried," Carrie said. The plan had been for the two oldest Evachevski children, Jennifer and Garth, to drive home party goers who were a little out of it, but it had broken down with the number of people involved.
"You'll have to try harder," Mike said. "Harold and LeRoy could sit out on the State Road, call all their buddies, and have a feast."
"If you had a shuttle bus that brought people out from town, then they wouldn't have a car to drive home," Diane observed.
Frank nodded. "Get the Students Against Drunk Driving chapter from over to the school to run it, maybe for a donation. Let them see what kind of damn fools adults are when they get a load on."
The party had been held at Commons at the West Turtle Lake Club for seven years now, and it had become famous and notorious. Among other things, it had gained a reputation for being very wet indeed. The cost was twenty bucks a head, whether paid by the guest
or the host, but the invitations had to come from a Club member. Hundreds of people that would never have come to the club otherwise had been there over the years, and invitations to the party were highly prized, especially since from the first year, the party strained the
limits of even Commons to deal with the guests.
The party officially started at eight, but there were any number of pre-parties in the cottages scattered around the club, so sometimes the guests were pretty well stonkered even by the time the official party started.
There were both alcoholic and non-alcoholic punches provided, but beyond that, there was a cash bar. The food was nothing less than sumptuous, although there had been a little problem with that at first; it was the only time of the year that Commons wasn't strictly
vegetarian, and Helga Matson had insisted that every dish in the building be washed three times afterward. Carrie usually hired not one, but two bands, one sixties/rock and the other country-western, so the music would never have to stop.
But the costumes were what everybody remembered. There was no sneaking out to the thrift store a couple days ahead of time for some old rags to wear; some of the costumes were worked on for months and agonized over all year.
There were some of the usual Halloween weirdities, of course, but most people took it as a chance to explore their fantasy worlds, and almost everything under the sun could be seen out there. There was only one unbreakable ground rule: nudity was not an
acceptable costume.
Overtly, it was not possible to tell the club members from those who weren't, although Binky Augsberg, who most considered a less culturally biased observer, had noticed one thing that sometimes helped to differentiate the two: "If you see a woman dressed in Gay
Nineties style, or in hoop skirts with seven layers of petticoats, then she's probably a nudist," she told Steve. "If you see a woman dressed in just lingerie, or dressed as a stripper or a hooker, or in one of those Elvira outfits with the neckline slit down to the waist, then she probably isn't."
Steve had looked around him, and realized there was some sense to what Binky had observed. "But what about that . . . uh, person over there with the flesh colored long johns painted to look like a naked woman?"
"What I said," Binky laughed.
Binky actually had a reputation as one of the more inspired costumers at the party. The first one she had gone to was in 1983, right after she married Steve, and she was still getting culturally acclimated to Spearfish Lake, and she'd been a little bit confused about the
whole idea. However, she'd taken her misgivings to Diane Matson, who'd been a big help.
"There's no need to do anything too far out," Diane had told her. "Especially the first year. Why don't you just wear that Vietnamese dress . . . what do they call it?"
"An ao-dai?" Binky prompted. "I haven't worn one of those in years, not since I was a little girl."
"Perfect," Diane had counseled. "Go with your fantasies. Go as the woman you might have been."
"But," she protested, "I don't even know where I'd get one."
"No problem," Diane said. "We'll make one."
Binky's ao-dai might not have been the most spectacular costume there, but it was one of the more memorable ones, mostly because it had seemed so appropriate on the slight Oriental girl. She'd easily walked off with the "Most Convincing" award; it had been like
shooting ducks on the water.
By the time another year had passed, Binky had adapted a lot more, and had gotten a bit of a reputation as a hard-nosed real estate salesperson. The reputation got subconsciously a little harder yet, when she'd gone to the party as an North Vietnamese Army
cadreman, with the baggy gray fatigues, Lenin hat with red star, and the very real, although unloaded, AK-47 that Steve had brought home as a souvenir. That outfit had several of the Vietnam veterans there, including Steve, subconsciously grabbing for their M-16s all evening, and
had Diane Matson wondering about her advice.
