S&M

My friends Sarah and Maddy have birthdays around the same time and recently had an “S&M” party to celebrate themselves. Here’s the fun part: the options were to either a) take the theme at face value and get out your chains/whips/leather…the whole nine yards OR b) dress up as an S/M something. Guess which one I chose?

That’s me on the right as a very literal Stud Muffin (blueberry of course) and Molly on the left as a Sock Monkey.

If you want to be your very own stud muffin here’s what you’d need:

• Brown shirt and brown pants
• Chef’s hat
• Brown paint
• Studded accessories (i.e. suspenders, collar)
• Blue sticky felt and scissors (optional)

For a sock monkey:

• Knit grayish brown hat
• Grayish brown shirt or sweater and pants
• Two pairs of white socks (for hands and feet)
• Red pom pom or red yarn to make pom pom
• Red scarf
• Red lipstick
• Rubberbands (to form the ears of the hat!)

What’s crazy about Molly’s costume is that she already had everything on hand except for the socks which she bought from the dollar store. Mine required a little more purchasing than that (no I did not have studded accessories lying around but yes I will be wearing those studded suspenders all the time now).

Another plus was that the party happened to take place right before Halloween. So we just wore the same outfits the following weekend!

I highly recommend an S&M theme for a party. It is a BLAST. People really get creative with the S/M factor. Sandman, Surfer Moses, S’Mores and Single Mom were some of my personal favorites from that night. I told my coworkers and other friends about it too, and once I got them started brainstorming costume ideas they couldn’t stop. It’s kind of addictive. Below are examples we came up with:

• Super Mario
• Sailor Moon
• Superman
• Spiderman
• Soccer Mom
• Social Media
• Sun and Moon (alternatively: Stars and Moon)
• Scar and Mufasa (for a couples costume!)
• Sharks and Minnows
• Sarah McLachlan
• Seth MacFarlane (or maybe one of the characters he voices for ease)
• Seth Meyers
• Saint Mary (or Sister Mary)
• Salem, MA (aka a witch)
• Sunday Morning (aka a hangover or pjs or both)
• Spider Monkey
• Subway Map
• Subliminal Messaging
• Scary Movie (or Scream Mask)
• Swiss Miss

Obviously if you use adjectives things get a little easier (sexy moose, sad mustard, sweaty marshmallow…) but it also seems like a copout. It’s so much more fun to try to think of things that already go together! We definitely realized there are more S&M combinations than you would think.

Part of the fun is also having people guess what you are. Stuffed Mushrooms was a great guess for mine, and though incorrect it provided an awesome idea for a future costume.

And of course there’s the classic, represented here by my best girl Liz, who I believe won for best costume of the night:

If you want to try to replicate her amazingness, you’ll need:

• A red dress
• Yellow yarn
• Styrofoam balls
• Brown paint
• Red pepper flakes (optional, hilarious, and make your meatballs very realistic)

The great thing about this one is that the meatballs are hot glued directly onto the yarn scarf, so that cute red dress is totally wearable again.

Anyone got any other good ideas? What would you be for an S&M party?