When I found out that 25-year-old Brookline resident Alli Auldridge was planning a “Zombie March” this Saturday evening, it seemed fitting that we should meet up, refashion our mugs into brain-eating cretins, wander around the Somerville neighborhood where she’d decided to start her walking-corpse pilgrimage, and, I dunno, call it a dry run.
In Auldridge’s mind, the Zombie March has no political or social significance. It is what it is: people dressed like zombies staggering from Davis Square to the Cellar, a bar near Harvard Square. That’s it. Auldridge estimates that at least 30 people will show up as the undead.
This isn’t her idea. The living dead have instigated their own flash-mob-style “lurches” across the land, with pre-planned assemblies descending on cities such as Toronto, Austin, and San Francisco (where possessed cadavers scavenging for brains overwhelmed the Apple Store). Boston has even seen its share of zombie-themed events — like “J. Cannibal’s Feast of Flesh” at the Coolidge Corner Theatre this past January, and the zombie walk that was timed to coincide with last year’s Land of the Dead release.
But Auldridge isn’t one of Boston’s usual zombie-wrangling suspects. She isn’t a horror fetishist, a kohl-eyed goth, or a punk-rock kid. She works in the marketing department of a nonprofit. She studied anthropology at Smith College. And this is the first time in her life that she’s dressed up as a zombie.
Or so I learn when we meet this past Monday night at the Someday Café, in Davis Square. She brings along 28-year-old Jesse Hirsch, a Somerville resident who studied journalism but now works as a researcher in a law firm. They’re both saving their real zombie costumes for this weekend, so they’ve come outfitted as the second-string walking dead. Hirsch is in a stained sweater and a straw gondolier-type hat (he claims he’s a French zombie, although I’m not co-signing that one). Auldridge is in jeans and a ripped green T-shirt that reads, if you can’t take a joke. Printed on the back, upside down, it says, fuck you.
We head to my nearby apartment to put on makeup. Although Auldridge has brought along a “Horror Makeup Value Kit” — a $7.99 party-store package of theatrical blood, fake scar tissue, grease sticks, and an assortment of other scary-paint tubes — she’s not exactly sure how to transform her features into those of a zombie. Hirsch draws black circles under his eyes. (French-quarterback zombie?) Then he draws them all around his eyes. (Raccoon zombie?) Auldridge rubs shades of green, yellow, and gray all over her cheeks. Now she just looks seasick. I take a fake-blood pouch and drag it across my neck. I’m a victim of a failed beheading.
So we head to Mike’s Pizza, self-consciously stumbling and dragging our legs across the street. Auldridge keeps breaking character and giggling. Hirsch moans like a zombie, which actually sounds very similar to a barnyard animal. I recommend that we ignore crosswalks and just jaywalk: we’re already dead, so the cars can’t kill us, right?
