Costume Drama

'We have an actual fangsmith here. We make custom fangs. I mean, we sell packaged fangs too, but the custom fangs are really special,' says Tony Bianchi, the proprietor of Halloween Adventure at 104 Fourth Avenue, which two weeks before the holiday is already operating at a fever pitch of anticipation. Though this is obviously high season, Bianchi says he has no trouble keeping busy the rest of the year: NYU film students need fake blood, Renaissance weddings require wands, demonstrators want masks for effigies, and then there's the mysterious if steady traffic in rubber chickens.

The first thing you notice as you come through Halloween Adventure's door is a display of patriotic costumes, a bit incongruous in the East Village if a sad sign of the times. "Can you believe they didn't make a good Statue of Liberty until last year?" Bianchi muses. " Now we're up to the gazoo in them." Asked if the store accommodates less orthodox political opinions, he points to the row of rubber faces hanging behind the cash registers. "Look— I've got Arafat, Powell, Giuliani, Cheney. I don't carry a bin Laden mask; I don't think they make them. I do have Hussein, but it's a little touchy. You know, a lot of the kids who work here—when we go through the masks they can't identify anyone. They don't even know who Putin is, which is kind of scary."

Bianchi, who wears his hair in a silvery gray braid and on this particular afternoon is sporting a skeleton cape and a Batman shirt, is finely attuned to shifting Halloween tastes. "When everyone wanted a Monica mask there wasn't one. Now there's a mask and nobody cares. It's like O.J. I got him, nobody cares." Nixon, on the other hand, is what Bianchi calls an icon. "We have a condom on his head 'cause he's a Dick." Among several Clinton variations, Bianchi is especially fond of Horny Clinton, who has a pair of horns, a phallic nose, and lipstick kisses on his cheeks.

But not every getup requires a course in political economy. "You know, your Average Joes, they go for the nuns and prisoners—not a lot of ambition. Or they buy a cape—you can never have enough capes in stock—or sequined tails or horns." Or perhaps they visit the horror department for "your classic Freddy Krueger or Scream costume. Scream is an icon now, like Santa Claus. And then we have the severed limbs and brains and chain saws." Even innocuous-seeming costumes can harbor a dark side: "You sell them a classic Easter bunny, they make it into a killer bunny."

Bianchi fairly cackles when he shows off a favorite costume, new this year, that consists of plastic buttocks fitted with a hidden pump that unleashes a noxious brown liquid ($44.99). When an Upper East Side-ish woman cuddling a little dog almost throws up as Bianchi demonstrates this item, he turns to her and says, "You walk him, right? You gotta pick it up, right?"

Of course, most people in the store don't want a leaky tushie—they're in pursuit of somewhat less revolting attire. "Actually for Halloween, guys kinda wanna get laid," Bianchi whispers, by way of explaining why stuff like, say, the sorcerer's apprentice costume is such a hard sell. "Guys want to, like, sweep women off their feet—they want to be pirates or do Star Wars or Star Trek." Could this also be the explanation for the vast array of costumes that betray no knowledge of the last 50 years of women's history? For here are sexy nurses (but surprise—no women doctors), sexy witches, sexy French maids, and even relics like sexy flappers with Louise Brooks wigs and sexy '30s sirens who look like Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight. For little girls, the prospects are equally retrograde: Joining the miniature brides are belly-revealing I Dream of Jeannie sarongs (for young fans of TV Land?) and lots of cheerleader getups with names like Peggy Pom Pom. A '50s poodle-skirt outfit has a Jon-Benet Ramsey look-alike on its package; a $44.99 Alice costume, consisting of an apron and underskirt, promises to make the wearer look like the object of Lewis Carroll's peculiar lust.