My four year old daughter determines to be a Raincloud for Halloween 1998
Morgan (now Dylan) as a Raincloud for Halloween 1998.
Four year old Morgan/Dylan on the boardwalk trail out back at Orca Landing, an urban cooperative household in Seattle.
Trotting up the path raining as she goes. My then-wife Gwen put a lot of work into designing the costume. Once the materials were gathered, the rest came fairly quickly, and a legend was born.
The costume Gwen made for her daughter as Morgan wished it became iconic. Rediscovering these long lost fotos 13 years after the Fire and a quarter-century after they were taken was an emotional moment.
Morgan standing in her power as a four year old child with both confidence and a little bit of mischief.
Morgan long before they chose the name Dylan. The cloud was a large mass of cottony material fluffed out like cotton candy and adhered to the top of a wide-brimmed, straw cowgirl hat. Raindrops were drawn and painted on both face and shoes. Gwen made a blue-as-water cape with a silvery rope for a belt. The cape was baggy enough to layer up beneath it should the evening turn damp and chilly. My little girl was a smash hit everywhere she went as a Raincloud for Halloween.
By Halloween of 1998, Gwen and I had been married for just over ten years and together a few years longer. We’d met in Richmond, Virginia at Virginia Commonwealth University. We eventually moved across the country to Seattle, Washington where we had lived for a short time previously. By this time we were in the midst of a seven and a half year long period of living in Orca Landing, an urban cooperative household as an intentional community in the Greenwood neighborhoods of Seattle.
Morgan didn’t change her name to Dylan and adopted they/them pronouns until much later as they finished up college. In someways I had set a precedent as her father when I switched from the daily use of my middle name, Dudley, to my first name, William, in late 2001. Made a big deal about it, too, and got instant pushback from my immediate family of origin back East. When I was a child in elementary school, I often would make up names for myself as “Dudley” was often made fun of by other kids. They were a mishmash cobbled together from history and science fiction. One time I handed in a paper signed “Krueger Kragnarock,” and my teacher responded in anger and asked the whole class “who in the world handed in this paper?” I raised my hand. She glared down at me thru horn-rimmed eyeglasses, slapped the paper down on my desk, and ordered me to write my actual name. My little Raincloud for Halloween grew up and had different reasons for changing their name. As I learned later in life, we all have names, and we are not our names.
Gwen, who for a short time had switched to spelling her name “Gwyn,” and I celebrated the Wiccan Sabbat of Samhain more than Halloween back in those days. Having kids, however, put the emphasis back on Halloween and costumes. Kate was born about a month later back in Virginia at the end of November. We adopted her soon afterwards and moved her into Orca Landing with us. Later joined with others, including Kristina and her daughter Talia, who became sister to Morgan and Kate, in cocreating Dragonfly Community. This iconic raincloud costume, however, set off a trend in unique and colorful Halloween costumes among the Dragonfly kids.
Many years later, when these old pictures I’d taken as prints about 25 years ago were rediscovered among the boxes of those salvaged from after the house fire, Gwen wrote us in a family group text: “I love this [picture]. Dylan, I remember being so happy when you said you wanted to be a raincloud for Halloween and not something predictable like a Disney princess. And it forced me to think outside the box about how to create the costume for you.”
William Dudley Bass
Sunday 5 March 2023
Shoreline/Seattle, WA
NOTES on the original pictures:
These fotos were prints shot with a Canon AE-1 35mm LSR camera using Kodachrome film. Don’t remember if Kodachrome 64 or 200 as I used both color-reversal films as well as Fujichrome Velvia films.
Surviving pictures were entombed in wet ash from the 2010 house fire, salvaged from the rubble, and treated in an ozone room by the staff of the restoration company. Many surviving pictures were then wiped off and the worst burns trimmed off. Nearly all were faded or sustained some kind of damage from the intense heat, estimated to be at least 1200°F, and toxic smoke of the fire along with water and fire retardant chemicals. Am grateful these few pictures survived. I scanned them into TIFF for high resolution and sought to clean up and sharpen the images a bit with Apple Photos software on my old, big iMac.
Truth is I suck when it comes to photographing people. Something always gets blurry. Me and the movement, I imagine. My forte is dynamic landscape photography, but I’m not any master, just an amateur hobbyist who enjoys being creative with light and shadows. Enjoy!
Copyright © 2023 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.