Wearing Masks in Wal-Mart

Do you have certain friends or family members with whom, whenever you get together, you go from an average, reasonably sane person, to, well, a weirdo?

(Video above - "Creep" by Radiohead)

I know some people like that.

Or maybe it's my fault.

I don't know - they ARE related to me.

Particularly when I'm out with any combination of my kids, especially my oldest three (daughters aged 19, 18, and 15 at this point in time), we feed off of each other's silliness and reactivity.

That was an honest typo!  I meant "creativity", but reactivity works, too.  

Freudian slip or what. 

Anyway, about the masks.

Last October (2011), a couple of my daughters and I were in Save On Foods in Williams Lake, BC, and we were eyeballing some eye masks.  They were presumably for Halloween, but because I don't celebrate that (I'm bad enough in my own way and have no interest in celebrating something with blatant darkness behind it, but that's fodder for another blog entry), I decided not to buy them.

I regretted it later.

Then in February, we were in that store again, and I asked the lady at the cosmetic counter if by any chance they might possibly have any of those eye masks still kicking around since October.

I expected raised eyebrows and a comment to the effect of, "Um, it's long past October..."

But no! There were some left! We tried on several until we found just the right ones.

After we bought them, we went to the water place, where we go to fill up our 5-gallon jugs with purified H2O to take home to our dispenser for our drinking pleasure.

We walked into the water place wearing our masks, and the lady who owns the business laughed and laughed and laughed.  She told us to go into the back room and say hi to the lady working there, telling us to address her by name, with which she furnished us - I'll call her Sally. We greeted Sally and got a strange look in return as she apparently wondered if she knew us. The shop owner then joined us, with peals of laughter. We explained to Sally that we really weren't people she knew, so not to worry. I think she was relieved.

Off we drove to get gas for the vehicle.  I got a few strange looks from passersby as I pumped gas. Then in the grocery store, we got questioning looks. A security guy lifted his walkie-talkie to his mouth and looked right at us from several yards away. When we were at the check-stand paying for our items, the cashier had such a questioning look, I volunteered the story without her asking.

Finally, we headed to our ultimate destination - Walmart! - and someday, maybe we will achieve the appropriate level of weirdness to wind up in a "People Of Walmart" video.

As we walked through the door wearing our masks, the Walmart greeter lady greeted us with a huge grin and a hearty, "WELL!  WELCOME to WALMART!" (translation - "Yo, look at these chicks!  We get ALL KINDS in here!")

We headed to the stationery section, where we knew they sold wooden letters, and set up for our mini photo shoot, the product of which you can see below:

 

Several people in the store asked us variants of "what's up with the masks?"

I retold basically what you've already read in this blog entry, and by the fourth telling of it, I said aloud, "We should print out leaflets to explain what we're doing, to rest the mind of curious onlookers."

We thought we were being so incognito. Imagine my surprise as I heard someone call my name while we walked through the parking lot.

I turned to see several members of a family we know, and I again retold the story.

And now you know... (said in a Paul Harvey voice) ... the REST of the story. 

I'll end with a quote from one of my favorite movies, "The Mask", starring Jim Carrey:

"We all wear masks - metaphorically speaking."

Think about THAT!

HOW ABOUT YOU?

Have you ever done anything "weird" in public, just for laughs?  

Or are you hiding behind a mask and aren't going to talk about it?

Leave me a comment in the box below!

Here are some other things I wrote:

• Highly Sensitive People
• Neil Of Fortune
• Serbian Accents
• Nekkid Pictures Of Me