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10 Questions for the Guy We Saw at a Festival Wearing a Homer Simpson Mask

We witnessed a man pushing life to its limits and we need to know more.

This weekend gone we saw something disturbing. Something truly terrifying. Something that we're going to be thinking about for a long time to come. On Saturday night, stood on the grounds of an airport watching Onur Ozer DJ, we saw the spectre that's set to crawl around in our subconscious night after night. It was a man, a normal seeming man, a man in jeans and a t-shirt, a man with a rucksack on, a man dancing to acid-tinged minimal techno at half eight in the evening. But this man, this picture of normality, did not have the head of a human.

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Now, festivals are spaces where pretty much anything goes. They're lawless playgrounds for overgrown children who've swapped Refreshers for something a bit more, well, refreshing. They're the kind of non-spaces that allow the normally un-allowable. People shit, shag and spume sick anywhere they can and most of us turn a blind eye to whatever nefarious act's occurring in our line of vision. Some things, though, shouldn't be allowed at all.

The man sketched above was one of them. For this man wore the head of Homer Simpson. Have you ever seen a man in a foam Homer Simpson mask dancing to minimal techno before? In fact, have you ever seen a man in a foam Homer Simpson mask before full stop? It was like that episode of the long running television programme The Simpsons where Homer mutates into a 3D being and ambles past a cake shop, except it was somehow stranger than that. As I watched him bob about through the crowd, my mind started racing. The loud music and language barrier meant that I couldn't ask him the burning questions I had, so I've had to write them down instead. Consider this a sort of Huffington Post open letter to the foam-headed Homer, wherever he is. If you're out there, please, please set my mind at ease.

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1. Is the mask custom built or are such items more readily available than we'd like to admit?

2. Why did you plump for the fat, yellow legend himself, Homer Simpson? What affinity do you have with the noted child-strangler and famous slaphead?

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3. Who is the worst person—living or dead, real or imaginary—you would willingly go to a festival wearing a foam mask of?

i) Side-question: do you think a foam head manufacturer would disregard his morals for cold hard cash?

4. Do you have a rough idea of the temperature inside the mask? I imagined it to be somewhere between "wearing jeans to the beach on a bank holiday scorcher because you mistook early grey skies for low temperature" and "Hell itself."

5. Was there any point during the night when you realised what you'd done and all your banter crumbled away and you crouched there, alone, on the floor of a Portaloo, utterly alone with your thoughts? Did you take the mask off and huff in the stench of it? Did you run your fingers through your damp hair and sigh a long, sad, solitary "D'oh" before plunging it back over your own head, the head you no longer recognise as your own, and sliding back into the throng? Did you? Did you do that?

6. Did, at any point in the night, the mask smell so bad that a circle formed around you, only for the sound of collective retching to over-power the music you were there to listen to?

7. How many wears do you get out of a oversized foam Homer Simpson mask? Is it something that you take to every festival in the hope that you'll become a squishy yellow totem of hedonism?

8. If someone had tried to force an open can of beer—Duff Beer, at that, the beer that Homer Simpson drinks—into the mouth of the mask, is there any system allowing you to continue breathing throughout the assault or would you have drowned?

9. Do you think Homer himself would have been terrified of you and the mask had he been (a) a real human being and not a cartoon and (b) at the festival itself?

10. What is your favourite episode of The Simpsons?

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