"Give me your hand," Chrissy says from behind her pickup's steering wheel. When we pause at a stop light she Pulls a bottle from her purse, opens it, and starts dabbing Band-Aid-colored liquid latex are we. She twists a WISP of tissue paper and Lays it on the putrid-smelling latex, then dabs more over the paper. My newly Rotting Flesh Will Have to dry.
I've just flown in to my former home, New Orleans, and we're driving Thurs Goodwill for zombie costumes, preferably comfortable stuff That We Can Dance in. This Is The Third Year That Christina Duggar, a 32-year-old grad student, has headed the Thrilla Guerillas, a flash mob That performs Michael Jackson's "Thriller" dance is a Halloween night. Last year, 57 of us, Including Americorps volunteers, Tulane Professors, a civil-rights lawyer, and a cook, donned the gear and a zombie, with a Tricycle-mounted Mausoleum cobbled Together from repurposed building materials Fitted with marine and battery-powered speakers, Thrilled the French Quarter.
New Orleans is natural "Thriller" Territory. There are the Above-ground cemeteries, of course, the vampire tours. While historic preservationists Fight Efforts To Make The St. Charles streetcar line handicapped-accessible, homes abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, are collapsing into Their Foundations. The Education System Remains death in a permanent grin, and headlines in the Times-Picayune Reveal That shoddily Constructed BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling operation, Which spewed Nearly Five Million barrels of oil into the Gulf, was from the beginning Rigged for death.
WE HAD Guerillas practiced together for two months before hand, watching the 1984 "Thriller" music video, Which Many Of Us Consider one of our sacred texts. In it Jackson - at the time reportedly still under the thumb of his abusive father, joins a group of zombies escaped, slipping in and out of makeup corpse before his terror-Stricken girlfriend. All the while, they sings and Dances with a fury and passion to the special Deeply Exploited: Another aspect of "Thriller" that New Orleanians get....
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