From October 18th to the 24th, my family and I went to Omaha, Nebraska, to visit Richard and Holly.

When we came back, I had just a few days left before the big Halloween costume contest at the Zone Ball at Cal Expo.

The first order of business was Randy's hair. I attached a single layer of foam sheet, and glued it into place. It didn't look bad at all! I had a ray of hope.

At this stage, I had also decided to add an American Idol sign. I'm not usually a fan of signs on costumes, because part of the fun of costumes is guessing what they are. However, the American Idol sign is integral to the costume, so I decided to add it.

I graphed out a large sign on corrugated plastic sheet, once again from an abandoned roadside election sign.

I transfered the American Idol logo from the small sheet to the big sheet.

With masking tape, I marked out where the letters were. I planned to remove this after I covered the sign with black paint.

Did you ever notice the pentagram in the American Idol logo?

I wasn't at all sure about what to do for eyes. I didn't want to just paint them on.

I settled for cutting my googlie-eyes into almond shapes, and gluing them into place.

This photo shows a whole googlie- eye on the right, and a trimmed eye on the left.

Having wet paint on a costume is totally unacceptable, so when the final days of preparation came upon me, I had to get things to a paintable state.

Simon after his flesh-colored paint job.

Simon, with modified googlie-eyes in place. 

He looked exactly like a cartoon!

I planned to run a control cable through the surface of the table to operate the moving mouth. This connection would be hidden inside Simon's shirt.

I couldn't believe I got paint on Simon's shirt! Ahh! At this point, it was too late to fix.

The nearly finished Randy.

A gold chain and googlie-eyes brought this judge to a nearly completed stage. He just needed some earrings!

The American Idol sign was not as easy as I thought it would be. To get the effect of a small brush,  I had to keep the white spray can very close to the surface of the sign, and I had to keep the spraycan moving quickly, to avoid runs.

I actually ended up spraying and re-spraying three times, and the result was far from perfect.

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