BRAAAAAAAAAINS (And Beer)

Saturday was the First Annual Chicago Zombie Pub Crawl! Yeah!

We had been excited about it for weeks, carefully deciding what kind of zombies we wanted to be, fervently hoping there would be more people that just the four of us.

The day of, Knut, Lauren, Eli, and I got together to do our makeup. I don’t think any of us had ever worn zombie make up before, so it was a little challenging.The website for the crawl had some handing tips, including spreading gelatin on your skin and letting it dry for a weird cakey scabby look. I smeared myself liberally and gave Lauren a huge gross head scab. Initially, we were going to wear flat white face paint, but once Eli put it on, we realized it was a little too harsh for today’s modern zombie on the go. I hunted around for my barely used foundation for an age, but never found it. However! I had some super concentration concealer-like stuff meant to go under eye makeup, so I mixed it with the face paint for a slightly more subtle pallor. I dusted my whole eye area with a combination of iridescent green and black eye shadow and used a bit of blue to highlight my skin scabs. A little fake blood and I was ready for BRAAAINSSS…

Knut’s makeup was pretty subtle. He wanted to be a researcher from 28 Days Later, so I applied the face paint very thinly, gave him pale green under eye circles, and lined his eyelashes with red liner. Showtime!

We parked a little farther up Clark Street and hurried towards the meeting spot, pretty nervous. We didn’t see any other zombies. Had they left without us? Was it the wrong date? Were we the only ones who showed up? Then we turned a corner and were nearly crushed by a wave of 50 or so zombies heading for the bar. Excellent.

The PH group who had organized the event gave us our t-shirts, our zombie pins, and helped anyone who needed it with their make up. Got your goodies? On to the bar!

While we were waiting in line to get in, a non-zomb asked to take a picture of us. We put our arms around each other and posed. Then he showed us the photo. I was the only one in it! Huh. Simon’s a small kind of dank bar. Fortunately, zombies like dank as much as they like $2 beer, so we packed ourselves in. This was much to the chagrin of the non-zombs sitting and drinking at 5pm on a Saturday. A little row of hecklers commented about everyone who came in, coming up with exceeding clever nicknames like calling an awesome girl dressed like a 1980s aerobic instructor “Volleyball Zombie.” It strikes me that when you’re in a bar that has rapidly become 95% or more zombie, you are no longer the cool ones. Once inside, we hung around, admired each other’s wounds, and chatted. With the exception of one guy who wanted to talk about soviet experiments involving extreme animal cruelty, it was a lovely bunch. However, zombies are not content conquering only one establishment. On to the next bar!

Charlie’s Ale House is an airy bar and grill and we frankly adored the expressions of their dinner salad consuming patrons and zombies flooded the bar. Our little group leaned onto a group of regular humans at a little table and they fled through the window! Ha! This gave us the perfect vantage point. Here we could grab at passersby moaning “braaaains” from the comfort of a bar stool. We also got to chat with our awesome new zombie friend, Zombie Steve! The zombie party really hit its peak here. First Knut randomly yelled “Braaaaains!!” and the whole bar followed suit. Seven or eight times. A seven foot high Grim Reaper waved and spoke to us. A zombie performed a spectacular robot dance on the sidewalk. Zombies began running out and pressing themselves on stopped cars. Humans took photos of us from the other side of the street. Awesome.

After our tenure at the bar, we shuffled en masse to Hamburger Mary’s attic. The music was an odd choice (Zombie Abba?) but they eventually figured out what we wanted--- Thriller on repeat! Yeah! We danced, we drank beer, and we groaned on sofas, zombie boys nicely let zombie girls use their bathroom. It was probably the best party night I’ve ever had.

My favorite part though, was in the first bar. We were chatting to this charming zombie couple (I didn’t get their names! Darn!) and he was telling us how worried he was that they would be the only two who showed up. I love the thought of 100 people putting on their dead makeup, worrying they’d be all alone and finding at least 100 of their zombified peers ready to toast their lack of health.

If you'd like to see more photos (we've got lots of great ones!) go here.