N.Y. dad's Halloween graveyard honours dying trends — and trends he wishes would die
Rest in peace Trumpcare, dabbing and (spoiler alert) Viserion from Game of Thrones.
These are just a few of the concepts being memorialized on the front lawn of Michael Fry, a 39-year-old school teacher from Mamaroneck, N.Y., whose annual Halloween graveyard is a neighbourhood hit.
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"I guess I would describe it as a cemetery for dying trends," Fry told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann. "Anything that has been popular or, you know, in or cool over the last year that seems to be on its way out."
Though he admits some of them are more "wishful thinking."
"A few of them are definitely dead, but there are a handful that I'm kind of hoping that by putting them on a gravestone maybe they'll soon die," he said.
For example, dabbing — the celebratory dance move popularized by NFL star Cam Newton.
"All the kids tend to do the dab dance when anything even remotely cool happens. They threw a piece of paper at the trash, it went in, so they dabbed. They get a decent grade on one of their projects, so they do a dab," he said.
Homemade slime is another one.
"Everyone's using all the Elmer's glue they can find to make this slime and it just it gets on everything, it gets stuck on everything, and it's extremely annoying," he said.
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Fry can't take all the credit for his creations. He brainstorms the ideas with his kids, who he admits come up with some of the best ones.
Old Taylor Swift was Fry's daughter's idea.
It's a reference to the singer's single Look What You Made Me Do, in which she declares her old persona dead.
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"She thought it would be funny," he said.
Fry said he toes a difficult line with the annual project.
"I just try not to make anything too controversial, too left or right," he said. "Just kind of make people chuckle and laugh when they walk by, but not necessarily get too upset by what they see."
One of this year's graves pays homage to "Trumpcare" — U.S. President Donald Trump's failed efforts to repeal and replace former president Barack Obama's signature Affordable Care Act.
"I could probably put Trump-something on every single one of these gravestones, but I don't want to do that because I don't want people to, you know, jump into my yard and start kicking gravestones around."
