I won with my "Salesman From Hell" costume, 3rd place, $30.oo in a bar contest.
I took a bike helmet and made a big bondo skull over it, complete with long dangly fangs one of which had impaled his own long tongue.
The suit was an old suit with dark slop stains on it.
"Grabstein Feinsmukker" (sort of German) for "Graveyard Gourmet"won first place good for $300.00
His shoulders were home-made sheet metal circular fins covered by inner tube rubber, sew on. Skulls were hanging externally exposed in the stomach region, the skulls were made from Bondo.
The head-piece was latex poured as seperate pieces then sewn together making long tenticles from all over the head, (to help him crawl and dig his way through the ground to get to the buried corpses, along with his elbow spurs) (very pronounced)
I cast repeated, elongated copies of my own teeth in clay, then reproduced in latex to give him alot of teeth, big smiler!
I made him jack-boots from inner tube rubber all sewn together.
Some punk said "Humph! I could have made that costume!"
(Then why didn't you?")
At $300.oo prize money I might have been reinbursed at a rate of .02 cents an hour for all the work and time I spent putting this together!
I made these two costumes over 20 years ago. If I was making them today I would use alot of Goop glue instead of sewing so much.

Bar costume contests are often won by a sexy woman showing herself off or by that bar's best customer who will be spending the check right back at them, or at least this is what I have seen happen.

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"My Insanity is well-respected, until they wiggle free and become a stringer for a tabloid"