Beating the Bloggess to the Death Punch
Yesterday, Jenny Lawson, aka the Bloggess, posted about getting one of those awesome 12-foot skeletons from Home Depot and I got to yell, “Ha! I’ve had mine for YEARS!” at my screen in a very condescending and superior tone because this is the first time I have ever purchased or said or done a cool thing before her. I’m sure she’s going to proceed to create something way cooler with her Bone Crawford than I have ever done with my Bona Lisa because that’s who she is, but for this one moment, I WAS FIRST.
Meet Bona Lisa, the 12-foot skeleton who lives on my patio.
Let’s do formal introductions, shall we? Bona Lisa, meet Everyone. Everyone, this is Bona Lisa:
This year I have given her eyelashes so onlookers will better understand that she identifies as female. Her pronouns are she/her/dead chick.
Ziggy, my honorary Kid (my Kid’s bestie), helped me attach the eyelashes, which are a total of eight Kardashian-length falsies. We felt like she was still missing something, so I grabbed some sparkly brown nail polish and painted on some eyebrows. Word of advice to my fellow skeleton artists: don’t put eyebrows on a skeleton, it makes her look sinister as fuck. Also, if you do put eyebrows on her, don’t do it with sparkly brown nail polish because that shit does NOT come off. I ended up having to spray paint over those abominations and in doing do, I accidentally painted her eyelashes bone-white so then I just settled for adorning her with a big purple spider and her favorite necklace of skulls and decided to deal with all that eyebrow nonsense later.
Bona lives year-round in our backyard, overlooking the hot tub on the patio, where she startles the occasional passersby. We have a lot of passersby but most of them are busy trying to grapple with being eye-to-eye with a 190-pound Great Dane, so a 12-foot skeleton is rather bland by comparison and doesn’t startle many of them.
In previous years, we’ve moved Bona around to a place of honor in the front yard for Halloween but she has gotten a bit fragile of late (last year she lost both arms and her skull during the move), so she now permanently resides in the back yard as Guardian of the Asshats, Protector of the Patio. Oooh, I should make her a sash that says that! And a CROWN!
Bona Lisa is the largest piece of my Skeleton/Sugar Skull/Calavera/Catrina collection. I’ve had a fascination with Día de los Muertos for a long time and somehow the collection sprang from that, although I don’t actually remember which piece came first. Maybe it was Catrina costume I wore for Halloween in 2014?
Whatever the origin, it has now spread to pretty much every area of our lives, from our permanent dinner table guest, Sketchy Jeff (and his dogs), to the dinner plates to my jewelry, and the artwork I create. I do loves me a theme.
Sadly for me, Jenny Lawson also loves a theme and she has more discretionary funds and frankly, a more obsessive sense of purpose and dedication to a bit, which means I won’t be able to claim being cooler than her for very long. But Bona Lisa is definitely going to give Bone Crawford a run for her money!
