Co-Op Does The Monster Mash

Top: Seniors Jay Anderson and Max Hoffman. Bottom: Strings students take the makeshift stage. Lucy Gellman Photos.

As a kid, Jay Anderson was so afraid of Halloween that looking at their own costume made them cry. By four or five, they were tepid on the holiday at best.

But Friday morning, no one would have guessed it as they joined the ranks of the fashionable undead, strutted to the corner of College and Crown Streets, and became part of the Monster Mash all before 10 a.m.

Anderson, who transformed into a fierce looking, laced-up zombie with a steampunk twist, is a senior at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, where they are studying choir. Friday, they joined peers outside the College Street school building for Co-Op’s inaugural Halloween pop-up, an hour-long concert that featured students in the band, strings, and choir programs.

In that time, it became many things, including a celebration of Thelonious Monk and a reminder of the magic of weird art (and the people who lovingly make it), cult classics and camp, from Frank-N-Furter and a Zombified Julius Caesar to a spin on Barbie that RuPaul would have been proud of. By the end of it, even Nosferatu, Mr. Potato Head, and a half-inflated Barney were dancing along. 

“For us, the idea was with Thelonious Monk’s music, it is very reflective of this time of year,” said band teacher Matt Chasen, who had dressed as the Mad (or Matt, he suggested) Hatter before heading into his classroom that morning. There’s a spectral, paranormal quality in particular, he explained. “His music is very unusual — when you study it, it’s very angular … But everything that needs to be there is there, it’s just orchestrated in a different way.”

The pop-up, inspired partly by Co-Op’s long-running tradition of Parking Day, was born earlier this year, when choir teacher Jaminda Blackmon suggested a series of pop-up concerts between April and June, in the quiet weeks after the choir’s final concert of the year. Chasen, who has been at Co-Op for the last six years, realized that those lulls happen multiple times during the year. In the fall, there’s one between October, when the school celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month, and December, when the band holds its winter concert.

Monk, whose larger-than-life persona and discography is inextricably bound to a Halloween day visit to Columbia Records in 1962, seemed like the perfect intersection. That was especially true when Chasen realized that Halloween—which Co-Op’s vibrant student body generally does not pass up—fell on a Friday.

Outside, that spirit of spooky season filled the sidewalk, which just past 9 a.m. became clogged with dinosaurs, animals, superheroes and a few ghosts all standing shoulder to shoulder with each other. At the center of the action, Blackmon raised her hands, and prepared to strike up the choir. Beside her, Principal Paul Camarco, unrecognizable in a Mr. Potato Head costume, did the same. For a moment, his comically large, inflated white hand hovered close to Blackmon’s face, then lowered itself as the music started.

Top: Who you gonna call? Bottom: Assistant Principal Talima Andrews-Harris.

From behind the choir, the keys came bouncing in, bobbing to the lyrics of “Ghostbusters.” In the front row, a bespectacled catwoman stood next to a miniskirted skeleton, both rocking at the hips and shoulders in time with the music. A pair of glittery red antlers, perched atop two dainty doe ears, seemed to fit right in beside a half-dressed pink and white bunny. Back at the end of the front row, a student turned the fearsome idea of Lucifer on its head, with small devil ears and a sparkly red cape.

Anderson, covered with layers of scaly skin and painted-on blood that they’d applied before school that morning, was waiting for their time to shine. As they rocked in place, a sign perched in their hands, Blackmon shouted directions back at the students, competing with the rise and fall of chatter and the rumble of passing cars.

Unlike Chasen, who asked students to learn 20 Monk compositions this fall, Blackmon focused on the day itself, choosing spooky-scary selections with her students’ input. For her, it’s a way to put her own imprint on the program, which Harriett Alfred ran for decades, while adding fun new songs to the repertoire. While students initially resisted choreography, “I think they had a good time,” she said.

In part, it was because they let themselves remember how to be silly. When the class settled on Bobby Pickett’s “Monster Mash,” Blackmon tapped senior Max Hoffman to do the voiceover, and then folded in a few dance steps to keep students on their toes. Friday, it seemed to work: they eased into Pickett’s 1962 "Monster Mash,” and then winged it a cappella when the music unexpectedly cut out.

At the front of the group, Hoffman emerged in a bloodied toga, a bright red sash fastened in the front. Delicate gold ribbon ran down one fold of the toga; fishnet stockings and thick platform boots emerged from another. Hoffman haughtily tipped back his head, revealing a cut that was part David Bowie, part Patricia Quinn as Magenta, and raised his voice over the two dozen conversations that had already started.

“I was working in the lab, late one night/When my eyes beheld an eerie sight,” he started, and glided across a few feet of sidewalk, his hands cutting through the air in choppy motions. Behind him, the chorus sprang to life, ready to shimmy on the hook. “For my monster from his slab, began to rise/And suddenly to my surprise—”

“He did the mash!” members of the choir announced with what felt like genuine surprise. Hoffman’s arms pumped through the air, with the mechanical air of something not quite human. “The monster mash!”

“I feel like when you’re doing something at a performing arts school, you can’t half-ass it,” he said after performing, one arm slung casually around a streetlight as he and Anderson traded Halloween anecdotes. Besides, “it’s really fun.”

Hoffman is, by his own description, very much a theater kid: he’s acted in Elm Shakespeare’s Teen Troupe and Co-Op’s musicals for years, and wants to study music and composition in college. He’s obsessed with cult classics like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, including a past Halloween costume as Frank-N-Furter. His Doc Martin platform boots, which give a femme and punk edge to everything they touch, are everyday footwear. When that world intersects with Halloween, it’s almost too much excitement to bear.

For Anderson, the day is now also about reclaiming the sheer dread that once haunted them at the end of October, as the holiday drew near. Raised between New York and New Haven, they used to balk at costumes, afraid of even their own reflection the year they tried to dress as a zombie. Now that “I think it’s a time to hang out with friends,” they committed fully to the role, doing a little line dance as the lyrics slipped over the choir.

“Honestly, I came to an arts school to perform my art,” they said. “I think this was great. We had a lot of fun.”

Back beneath Co-Op’s overhang, dozens of students listened to strings—conducted by a caped, wizard-like Henry Lugo complete with a dramatic blue hood—dive into the score for “The Phantom of the Opera,” violin and viola plunging through the space. As Lugo’s cape flapped in the wind—and Mr. Potato Head lifted another imaginary baton—strings trembled, as if they too were quaking at the sight of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s masked man for the first time.

As students flowed into Allen Silva’s “The Evil Eye and The Hideous Heart” slightly later in their set, it was as if the sidewalk sensed the music’s rising tension, and decided to play along. Inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart,” in which a narrator begins to go insane—and become murderous because of it—the piece sounds almost cinematic, as if a listener can see the action playing out in real time. When strings lift and swirl around each other, the stakes suddenly feel higher in real life, too.

On College Street, a sudden gust of wind lifted a knot of purple and black balloons from a costume, sending them flying toward the crosswalk. When a pair of hands rose into the air and caught them in one motion, a cheer went up from the crowd, and several student musicians turned to track the commotion, even as they continued playing.

In an alcove near the school’s art gallery, visual arts instructor Zach Chernak had transformed into the fearsome Nosferatu, his skin white with a fish-like, silvery sheen. As he listened, he opened his mouth just slightly to reveal two terrifying buck teeth, and there was momentarily the sense that a vampire might strike at any time. 

In rows of seats set up for musicians, band students were settling in, ready to play close to 20 selections from Monk (they got through 11 before the next period, some finishing with goosebumps and shivering shoulders in a midmorning cold). By the time they got to “Bolivar Blues” off the album “Monk’s Dream,” they were grooving, with solos loud and smooth enough to stop conversations in their tracks. Camarco-as-Potato-Head, who had retreated to the art gallery inside, gave a thumbs up as he danced from the window.

When they flowed into “Bright Mississippi,” one of the last songs before students packed up and hurried off to the next class, it felt like listeners could close their eyes, and travel across time and space. As keys and trombone entered a near-growling, undulating back and forth that made it hard not to dance, the other instruments built a world around it, from percussion to guitar to woodwinds that came triumphantly back in. Every time a student rose to solo, it became a chance to celebrate the morning all over again. 

After playing, senior Maya Gonzalez looked around and savored the moment. Before taking the makeshift stage—Gonzalez plays the trumpet and has also gotten into tech theater during her time at Co-Op—she dressed up with Batman face paint and a matching black sweatshirt, worried that the full costume would weigh her down. As she packed up, she praised Chasen for helping the band find more chances to perform, especially outdoors in the community.

“I love Halloween,” she said. “I’ve been dressing up ever since I was born.”

While her first costume (a bumblebee, she remembered with a smile) may have been the most endearing, it was Friday’s that may have been the most true to her in this moment. As Chasen yelled “Maya!” over the group, trumpet roared into a solo, smooth as butter and deep-lunged and brassy all at the same time. When asked about the pop-up, she beamed.

“I’m really excited that he’s [Chasen] trying to do something” that helps the band get its name out there, she said.

Cruz Castillo, a junior who rocked a guitar solo, agreed. Friday, he’d come out with Bowie-esque clown eyes, drawn in bright, dripping diamond shapes around his eyes. Since Castillo was 10, he’s found routine and rigor in the guitar, which Chasen draws out of him. When the class started learning Monk’s music a few weeks ago, he was inspired by the rhythm of the music, and the propulsive way it moved forward while keeping a groove.

“It feels pretty good” to be out playing for classmates, he said. “It’s pretty fun.”