For three years I've I dressed up as a falcon for Halloween. I got the idea from a character in "The Books of Magic" comics named Tamlin; he was called "Falconer", and he spent most of his time in the form of a hawk. I was also inspired by the elaborate costumes in the ballroom scene in the movie "Labrynth".

I started my costume with a pair of simple brown pants and a brown batiked shirt. I added a couple of brass necklaces, put in two gold earrings, and slicked back my hair with mousse. In the past I've used spray-glitter in my hair and on my skin, but I didn't want glitter getting in the printers and scanners at work.

I used medical tape (ouch!) to attach two-foot pheasant tail and one-foot seagull feathers at my elbows. This worked our really well; my wings stuck straight out even when I bent my arms, and I had a full wingspan of nearly nine feet.

I also feathered my fingers, using the medical tape as "skin" through which I poked one-inch almond feathers. Doing all my fingers took a long time, but it made it look like my hands were covered and still allowed me to type.

I wore a leather-and-brass gauntlet on each hand; I made them by hand over the last two years to wear when I was feeling "punk", and they look kinda like something that Xena would wear. I think they gave the costume a rather exotic touch.

My face was the hardest part. Last year I wore a large feather-mask (like the ones in "Labrynth"); it looked good, but it was sticky and hot, and it hid my lovely features. This year, I had a solution to that problem- glue feathers directly to my face.

I bought one-inch almond and pheasant feathers in the craft section at Wal-mart, and a bottle of spirit gum from a costume shop. Spirit gum is the stuff used to attach beards and mustaches in theatre, and it seemed like the ideal stuff for the job.

I wanted to cover my entire face with feathers, but that would have been too time consuming and too difficult to do evenly. So I settled for doing just my eyebrows. The night before Halloween I picked out all the feathers I would need, cut the roots off, and laid them out in the proper order (biggest to smallest). In the morning I painted the spirit gum onto my brow, dipped the feathers, and stuck the sticky ends into my eyebrows. I pressed them into place with tweezers, and viola! Instant bird mask.

The facial feathers worked even better than I expected; the feathers moved along with my eyebrows, so not only could I still emote with my eyes, but any eye movements were exaggerated by the feathers. I stuck a brown lee press-on nail to my nose for a beak in 97, but in 1998 I replaced it with a made a long gonzo-like beak made of sculpey.