Costume gloom?

The Halloween countdown is winding down. Today’s the day to scare up a last-minute costume. Short on cash? Fresh out of brilliant ideas? You’ve come to the right place.

Last week we tagged along with Lisa Caryl, an independent costume designer who translated her Spokane stage experience into tips and tricks for the rest of us.

We gave her a simple assignment: Shop at only a thrift store and a drug store, spend less than $50 and devise a costume that can be worn right away.

We met on a brisk October morning, just inside the front door of Value Village on Boone. Caryl immediately struck off for the kitchenware section. She loves inanimate objects, and she figured she just might find inspiration there.

One year, she dressed her daughter in a red-checked tablecloth, fired up a hot glue gun to attach knives, forks and plastic toy food, and, voila, the girl was a “Picnic.”

This year, Caryl says, she’s heard one of the Display House’s best sellers has been a “One-Night-Stand” costume, outfitting the Halloween reveler in a nightstand complete with lamp shade and alarm clock.

But today, nothing leaps out of the kitchen aisles. She zigzags over to a Halloween section, pausing to finger a filmy gray zombie outfit.

Caryl knows costumes. She’s designed for Spokane Civic Theatre, Interplayers, Actors Repertory Theatre and Spokane Children’s Theater. When actor Josh Hartnett showed up in Spokane to film “Mozart and the Whale,” it fell to Caryl to devise his whale costume.

A Halloween idea, then, should be a cinch. Caryl makes her way through the clothing aisles, searching for prom dresses. A skimpy burgundy evening gown catches her eye. “Something like that could be a very feminine devil,” she explains. “You could cut it off for a flapper dress, or you could add pieces for a zombie or a vampire princess.”

A ruffled turquoise number pops off the rack. This dress has Mattel written all over it. With a blonde updo and heavy eye makeup, suddenly you’ve got “Classic ‘50s Barbie.”

And then Caryl spies a floral wreath. She pops it on her head, with memories of a margarine commercial from years ago. “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” she intones.

But it’s a bagful of artificial Christmas greenery that stops her silent. “There’s got to be something you could do with Christmas tree branches,” she muses.

The boughs go back on the shelf, but soon Caryl spots a pair of brown and black striped pants. Her eyes narrow. “I think they kind of look tree-trunkish,” she says.

And then she’s off: To the selection of women’s shirts for a green blouse. To the shoe rack for a sturdy brown leather pair of Dexter Oxfords. To the dressing room where she discovers each piece fits perfectly.

She’ll be a money tree.

The cashier adds it up: $7.99 for the shoes, 3.99 for the green shirt and a whopping $1.99 for the bark-like pants.

Next stop: Rite Aid. Here the costume gels. She picks up fake green dollar bills and a bag of toy coins for $2.99 apiece, a package of pipe cleaners for $1.69, a tube of green makeup, half-price at 86 cents, and three eye pencils in shades of brown and green, two at $1.74 and one $3.49. The grand total, with tax, for both stores: $31.94.

At home, Caryl uses a glue gun to weld the coins to a strand of green yarn for a quick necklace. She staples and glues toy dollar bills to the green shirt. She enlists a daughter to weave her copper-colored hair into braids threaded with pipe cleaners. They’re branches, of course. The final touches: She applies green makeup to her face, bobby pins more dollar bills to her “branches,” and draws stems and leaves on her hands.

She’s a money tree, all right, and it dawns on her she has the perfect place to wear her new costume. She’s the president of the board for a brand-new Spokane theater group. It’s called Ignite! Community Theatre, and tonight it’s presenting “Tales of Terror” in a former funeral parlor at Music City Recital Hall on North Monroe.

It falls to Caryl to welcome the audience to Ignite’s very first performance this evening, and, of course, hit them up for contributions.

Posing in her costume, she improvises her lines, “Money doesn’t grow on trees. Contrary to appearances, I’m not made of money. So please help.”

Yes, a money tree. It’s cheap, it’s last-minute, and it’s perfect.