Zombie Bike Ride. Headdress Ball. Local People’s Parade. Fantasy Fest Parade. Stanley Papio Kinetic Parade. Wesley House Lighted Boat Parade. Slow Riders. Cow Key Channel Bridge Run. If you’ve been to any of these themed costume or decorated bicycle events, you’ve probably seen Virginia Wark out there in the crowd. She tends to stand out — and not just because of her cover girl beauty or her 6’3” height — 6’8” if you factor in the silver platform boots she typically wears.
At the moment Wark is waving a 7-foot-long plywood sword she made to go with her samurai costume for a previous year’s anime-themed Fantasy Fest parade.
“I’d put beads on the end of it, then pretend to chop people’s heads off so the beads would fly into the crowd,” she says. “It was so much fun.”
Wark’s workshop is on the side of her house. It’s a tiny, shed-sized space with an assortment of power tools, some collected flotsam – lampshades, pool noodles, dollar store Halloween décor — and believe it or not, only two bins — one with costume pieces and one with hats.
“I can’t keep all the costumes,” she says. “I don’t have enough space and have to limit myself.”
Her costumes begin with basic staples — black or silver leggings, adaptable hats and headpieces — then she adds on and wings it as the idea unfolds. If she tries to plan it, “It doesn’t work,” she says. “I see what I’ve got and ask myself what I can do with it, then I go around construction Dumpsters. Like that piece of bamboo back there,” she says, pointing. “I saw it in someone’s trash and thought, ‘I could use that.’ So that’s kinda how that goes.”
Wark is the costume ambassador for those of us last-minute, less-organized people. She’s proof that you can participate in the dress-up revelry regardless of your sewing chops or the dollars in or out of your bank account.
“I don’t sew, but I’ll screw things together and make a costume that way. Bolts, Goop. You can sew a dress with Goop.”
The Mel Fisher Maritime Museum manager started picking up power tools over time, but especially since 1996 “when Atlantic Shores was still around” and she was invited to join Skip Ross and the Southernmost Hotel crew in that year’s Fantasy Fest parade.
“We’d set the platform up in that parking lot on South Street in September. Someone would tell you, ‘I need this painted’ or ‘screw that to that’ sort of thing. And you just did whatever you could to help whenever you could.”
Her first Fantasy Fest parade costume was a Flintstones car, circa 1986. Since then, she’s been many things, including a mosquito, a vampire insect queen, a Mars Attacks spaceship and a circus clown.
“That year, I got a pair of men’s pants at the Salvation Army. They must have had a 60-inch waist. I put a hula hoop in the waistband and would walk with a bounce so the pants would go up and down.”
Wark’s costumes tend toward kinetic. After entering Key West Art & Historical Society’s Papio Kinetic Parade, her trike has become integrated into her costume or the star of it. This year it will be transformed into a pirate ship.
“Imagine If I could attach this to the trike?” she says, holding up a ginormous white flag with the words “HELP ME” scrawled in blood red under a picture of a dagger. “You gotta get your Zombie on before you get your Fantasy Fest on.”
A summer job brought Wark to Key West when she was 26. The Sydney, Australia native first came to the United States via Tokyo, Paris, Milan, then New York.
“I was the worst cocktail waitress you could ever meet,” she says of the job she had at the Peppermint Lounge on Fifth Avenue in New York City. “I waited on Deborah Harry and David Bowie one time. But after a while, you know, you can only live on nothing and nightclubs for so long.”
She left the city for a summer job in Ogunquit, Maine, and was later recruited for the shopkeeper’s Key West store, Lido’s.
“I’d been to a few other places that I liked, but when I got here to Key West, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I think I could live here!’”
These days, she finds a monthly costume camaraderie with the Southernmost Slow Riders, a full moon club that starts at the compass rose on White Street Pier, then collectively pedals down Duval Street toward the waterfront to watch the sunset.
”You decorate your bikes a little — or not if you don’t want to — but mostly we’ve got all our lights on and everybody’s got a little bit of costume, a little bit of some-some. It’s an easy-peasy, socializing thing among all generations. They’re from different areas and ages and groups of the island. This place brings everybody together. You can’t help it. And the response from the crowd is so fun. The smiles. Everybody loves it. And they’re like, ‘What’s this?’ And then they go, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s Key West.’”
Yeah, it is.
VIRGINIA WARK’S COSTUME TIPS & HINTS:
Costume weight is a big consideration.
Size: Go big or go home.
Make it fun to make, wear, ride and behold.
Relatability: The crowd should get into it. People enjoy a level of inclusion.
Durability: It can’t fall apart. (I use a lot of Goop.)
Materials: Spray paint will dissolve Styrofoam. A light base coat is OK.
Let the materials you have guide you.
If something isn’t coming together, step away. A solution may come.
Give it a name that links to the theme.
