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Skin Is For Suckers

From $34.46
Skin Is For Suckers poster art

Consider the injustice. A skeleton presents himself at a door on the one night of the year built entirely around him and collects a scream, a slammed door and, on one memorable occasion, a garden rake. A nine-year-old in eleven ounces of printed plastic knocks on the same door and collects a full size bar and a compliment on how frightening he looks.

The remedy ran two dollars and change at the five and dime. A smock with a skeleton on it. A mask of a skull, moulded in an ivory that is frankly not his colour, on an elastic that has already gone once.

He is wearing himself, badly, at retail, at a markup. The woman at number nine said it was a wonderful getup and asked where his mother had found it.

Under the mask is the truth. How I miss the good old days, when I could show my true face and horror ruled the peasantry as it should!

Skin Is For Suckers t-shirt
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SKU 30652608

From The Morgue

The safety line printed on those boxes was not decoration. The Flammable Fabrics Act of 1953 followed a run of injuries from cheap brushed rayon, and children's costumes — thin, loose, worn within a foot of a candle in a carved pumpkin — sat squarely in its sights. By the seventies "flame retardant" appeared on the box as a selling point alongside the glow-in-the-dark ink, which was generally zinc sulphide and needed a solid minute under a lamp before anybody went anywhere. It faded inside the hour. Every kid learned that the hard way, standing under a porch light recharging himself before the next block.

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