Married to the Empire

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

The joy and pain of being an Imperial

Ruf recently had an Imperial Officer costume made for the Neiman-Marcus Adolphus Children's Parade on December 1st. He learned from experience last year that it's nearly impossible to lead a group with a stormtrooper helmet on, so he wanted an open-faced costume for the parade this year. We hired a local seamstress, who did a fabulous job, and I ordered custom-made boots for him for his birthday.



Looks good, doesn't he? (If anyone is in the DFW area and needs a seamstress, email me at ewokgirl @ verizon.net *remove spaces* and I'll give you the name of the woman we hired.)

Ruf tried out his costume on Saturday at something in Arlington called Wizard World. He received tons of compliments on his costume, but he also received something else: pain. Pain in the form of horrible blistering from his stiff, new boots. Actually, I don't think he even has blisters; I think his skin was just rubbed raw. I'm doing laundry today, and in sorting clothes, I saw just how bad things were. These are the socks he was wearing inside his boots:



Poor guy! He now has a roll of moleskin to use when he wears the boots in the parade. I think he'll pretty much have his ankles completely wrapped. He may be in pain, but at least he'll look good! (Isn't that a rule of fashion?)

4 comments:

AnneK said...

Yup! Thats the rule of fashion. Suffer for the sake of looking nice. I have done that maybe two times in my life.

Ann said...

His costume is FABULOUS! Everytime you post about 501st I wish Eric would join here. It's so cool. Did you say that his group will be marching and it will be on t.v.? I wonder if it's a program we would be able to see here. Isn't it just the coolest thing to see a group of stormtroopers marching in formation?

I sympathize with him on those painful boots. Even wearing a pair of shoes just during church hurts a lot, I can't imagine having to walk around all day and role-play an imperial officer with terrible pain like that.

Did you ever see stormtroopers with, oh I can't think of it, not comlinks, but ear pieces with microphones so they can talk, I don't know what it's called, I wonder if something like that exists. I bet it's expensive if it does.

It would be so cool to run into you two at a star wars event. I'm sure they'll have another celebration in a couple years.

Anne Marie@Married to the Empire said...

I keep telling him he needs to break in his boots. If nothing else, bend them like crazy to make them more pliable.

Several of the guys have systems in their armor that allows them to talk to each other, but not everyone has it. And apparently, it's a huge pain in the butt to program their remote thingies to do this. Ruf did several of them for people, then said no more. He really doesn't enjoy working on electronics.

Maybe in a couple of years, I'll be willing to do another Star Wars vacation. I like Star Wars, but not enough to spend several days with it as our vacation too frequently!

Anonymous said...

Hey, that costume looks great. Thanks for sharing it. I hope he gets the boots broken in by December 1. Happy thanksgiving!!