I guess if you´re going to tell a story, you should start at the beginning. Each of you knew one of us at one time or another. You may not have known it at the time, but I am sure that everyone knew someone like us at some point in their childhood.
We were the kids that lived down the street that at the age of 8 were putting on haunted houses for our friends. We were the ones that started setting up stuff in our yards in August for Halloween, and the ones that spent more time thinking up how to make realistic eyeballs in the candy bowl than doing our home work (by the way, peeled grapes work really well). We were also the ones who were so sad we could almost cry when November 1st rolled around and all of the pumpkins came down, and we had to put everything away until next year.
Well, it´s 20 years later, and we are still doing the same thing. On just a slightly different scale.
The original name of the group was “The Brotherhood of the Forbidden Grape.” That was before we were of legal age, and the single largest goals we had were acquiring booze and meeting girls. Usually the beer was much easier to find than the girls, thus we pursued the attainable goal instead of what we figured was a quest that would bear no fruit.
Sometime around 1990, the first ever Brotherhood party took place. We decided that costume parties were where it´s at, and our likelihood of getting girls to show up was much greater if we did something really cool. So we built Dante’s Inferno Room, the whorehouse from Beetlejuice . Much to our surprise we really did get some girls to show up, and we even have some photographic proof somewhere.
It took about 4 weeks of arguing, 5 cases of beer, and one long-ass night to put it all up. We messed with it for another week or so, but the bulk of it went up in someone´s backyard in one night. It was by far the biggest pain the ass thing I have ever built. It´s a miracle that it didn´t fall down on top of everyone, and kill them all in a single blow.
However it was bad-ass looking and managed to stay up for the 7 hours of the event. Plus, it was the coolest thing we had ever done. From there, every year, it has gotten bigger, harder, more fun, and much more cool. As we got older, our disposable income grew, and our imagination grew with it. Every year since 1990 we have started the planning earlier and thrown a larger shindig. Sometimes in the past we would take a year off and do something mellow since we were burned out from all the work of the year before, but for the post part we would do some type of large shindig every year. Recently we started moving to focus on a single large event during the year, which used to be Halloween and now is during the summer to coincide with the San Diego Comic-Con.
The Brotherhood Today
In times past, usually, about one week after the Halloween party, we woud start to argue about what we will do next year. About 9 months later we finally settle on something that is totally different than want we wanted to do in the beginning.
However as time has moved on, so have we, and the group has started to change from purely throwing events, to a group that does events, and also is an active participant in both the popular culture and subculture that inspired it to begin with. We have expanded the scope of our group to work with a fantastic collection of visual artists, costumers, musicians, performers and geeks who help us build the vision of both the events and on-line media experiences that we have started to produce.
It’s safe to say we don’t fall really into one particular category, we hold the largest after party at the San Diego Comic-Con and we also have a 6 booth complex at the Comic-Con itself to promote artists, sculptors, and counter culture groups. We are promoters, patrons of the arts and yet none of the above. We are fans of others work, and have fans of our own.
Over the years, we have had people come and people go, but for the most part it´s many of the same people year after year. If you´re interested in helping out, let one of us know; we are always looking for nice people that are still kids at heart. Our group is about having fun and being creative, not making money, or swelling egos. We are all nerds or at least aspire to be, so if you´re not doing it for the fun of it, you probably won´t fit in too well. There will never be a day where your initiated or “pined” in a ceremony, thats’s just not just not us, it’s more like if the end of the world came with a zombie outbreak, you would look up and expect to see all of us around you, making our stand against the undead.
And if you´re ever passing some little kid´s haunted house, tell him or her that they are a BAD ASS and will one day rule supreme.
and remember…..
Vita non est vivere sed valere vita est
-=X-Sanguin
Febrauary 2010, San Diego CA