Did you ever have a classmate that pretended to be a vampire or some other supernatural creature? How much did they commit to it?
I had a couple classmates that pretended to be vampires back in elementary and middle school. They’d pretend their Koolaid was blood, complain about the sunlight, and bite their friends a lot. Not enough to draw blood, though. I haven’t kept up with most of them, but one guy is a teacher now. He seems pretty normal.
Not a supernatural creature, but I've never seen someone so committed to something, let alone pretending to be a character, like a friend I have.
So, for context, I have a friend who disagreed with his Dramatic Arts professor on how a character had to be played (or something like that) on the first class of the year, and apparently after some arguing, the professor challenged my friend to attend to any business he needed to do in the campus as normal, but portraying a character, any of his choosing, for the rest of the year. And god damn, he did. For the rest of the year, he bought a Victorian era costume, complete with cane and top hat, learned many quirks of the language at the time, and many of the behaviors of society. And Sir Marcus Godwin was born.
He went full in-character mode. He talked using the time's English, walked like a gentleman, and behaved like he was a Victorian era man who was time travelled into the present. It was really hard not to laugh, specially when he spoke, with professors trying REALLY hard not to laugh. I think the DA professor must have warned all other professors of the classes my friend had, because I'm surprised he wasn't expelled of any of them. But he made it to the end of the year nonetheless and not only did he get the max grade on that class (which apparently was nearly impossible with that professor), but also got a fuck ton of money on bets he made along the year.
I dressed like a cowboy for awhile as a preteen. I try not to think about it too much. Though I still have a hat tucked away in my closet. Just in case.
If you lived south of the Mason Dixon no one would have noticed. It's so ubiquitous people forget how ridiculous it is: men who take themselves very seriously attending the office in the same outfit they wore to go trick-or-treating when they were six. I don't mean it as any kind of condemnation. I love the ridiculous, delight in the passion of people grooving in their niche, and absurdity aside western wear can be a good look. But I feel the same way about all kinds of theatrical clothes, while the stetson crowd tends to ridicule the other.
You say that. But I was south of the Mason Dixon line and I definitely stood out. Even at some country music concerts. Because I was dressing as if I was the one on-stage at any given concert. I saved and eventually had my white Stetson, quite the rotation of Garth Brooks-style (sometimes literally!) Western shirts, Wrangler jeans, boots, belt buckles, the whole nine yards.
Your average concert-goer was in a t-shirt (IF THAT) and a ball cap with a fishing hook on it.
To say nothing of dressing like that in other, still-less appropriate, non-concert settings.
Ever heared of the French nuns that caught a case of mass hysteria and started meowing like cats? I'll quote a section about it on Wikipedia:
In The Epidemics of the Middle Ages, an 1844 collection of works written by J. F. C. Hecker (and translated by Benjamin Guy Babington), a translator's note by Babington, citing an unnamed medical textbook, recalls the story of a nun who lived in a French convent during an unspecified time (presumably in the Middle Ages) who inexplicably began to meow like a cat, shortly leading the other nuns in the convent to meow as well. Eventually, all of the nuns in the convent would meow together for a certain period, leaving the surrounding community astonished. This did not stop until the police threatened to whip the nuns.