I had no idea there were so many steampunkers in the Madison area until last night, when we went to the latest Adult Swim at the Madison Children’s Museum. I knew it was going to have a steampunk theme, but I figured maybe that meant the guys on the staff would show up wearing top hats and the women would be in hoop skirts. Wrong.

At least half of the people there were punked out. Probably more. Some of the costumes were rather tame, but most of them were so elaborate they must’ve spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours putting them together. A lot of the clothing was just cultural plagiarism, throwing together pith helmets, Ike jackets, riding boots and whatever else looked cool together. Quite a lot of it was utterly fantastic, like the little clockwork trinkets that almost caricaturize the genre. And then, there are the goggles, sometimes worn, sometimes hanging from the neck as if they had been taken off only moments before, but very often wrapped around a hat like a fashion accessory. Lots of goggles. Probably more goggles than gears.

I have been to costume parties where I felt out of place, but I have never felt as out of place as I did last night. It really shouldn’t have bothered me, but I couldn’t help it. There were men in bowler hats riding penny farthing bicycles across the play room on the second floor. Try to act normal with something like that going on right beside you.

Probably the biggest shocker of the night was the complete absence of anything fun going on in the elevator. Last time we went to adult swim there was a guy with an upright piano in there, banging out pop tunes, and fifty or sixty half-drunk people singing along with him. After I got over the shock of being the only guy not wearing a paisley vest and a pair of goggles last night, I went to see what was going on in the elevator. Nothing was going on in there. They were using it as an elevator instead of a traveling party. Must’ve gotten into trouble with the fire marshal after word got out about the piano man.

Since we weren’t dressed for the occasion and there wasn’t a piano bar in the elevator, we hung around for only ninety minutes or so, then left to find a bar on State Street where we could relax with a beer and gab for a while.