They still want the gorilla suit.
But on this morning, 33 years after Marcia Carter stitched together her first Santa suit, an elderly couple are wandering the aisles of her Arvada store in search of an Elvis-style cape.
It seems impossible, standing amid the racks and racks of, well, everything inside Marcia’s Costumes on Sheridan Boulevard, that there could not be at least one Elvis cape.
Marcia’s daughter, Linda Walters, 52, who began working at the store 32 1/2 years ago, is convinced there isn’t one. It likely went out the door in that first rush Sept. 16, when the schools and the theater people flooded inside.
Still, she goes looking, sadly stalking the aisles.
“This is it,” she says, looking away, “after all these years.”
Marcia’s Costumes is outfitting a final Halloween before shutting its doors, more than three decades after the then-Northglenn businesswoman and seamstress first decided there was money to be made in Santa and gorilla suits.
Temporary costume shops that sprang up over the past five years cut into the store’s Halloween business so badly that Linda Walters last spring discovered she could no longer financially stay afloat.
Her mother, who had run the financial end of the business that had once been the largest costume shop in a five-state region, suffered a debilitating stroke four years ago. She is 72 now and lives in an Arvada senior-living apartment, totally noncommunicative.
She had been a businesswoman who dabbled with her own mother in the tailoring business. In 1978, after strangers begged them for those Santa and gorilla suits, she opened her first store in Northglenn.
She made all of the costumes then, ordering from France what she couldn’t find here. Eventually, 10 seamstresses would work at the 10 stations in the store’s back room.
Michael Jackson, on tour stops, would come by the store to purchase sequined gloves — his real one was diamond-studded — and the fedoras he would toss to concertgoers, Linda Walters recalls.
Yet regulars began stopping by less frequently in 2005, the year the temporary stores began opening. A break-in in 2008 nearly finished her, she said — thieves, who were eventually caught, had hauled away some $60,000 in merchandise.
The heavy snows of last year fairly wiped out Halloween sales. It was time to make a decision.
Today, everything in the store is half-off. The gorilla suits were the first to go. “Believe me, this is looking right empty now,” said Danielle Rice, one of Linda Walters’ few remaining employees, a young woman who used to shop the store years ago with her family.
I cannot fathom this. The place remains filled with medieval knights, animals, pirates, dancing girls — virtually every costume imaginable. Linda Walters, though, does finally confirm there is no Elvis cape.
“I’ll take this,” the elderly woman finally tells her, swinging a purple cape studded with gold buttons.
Linda Walters has hired a liquidation firm to help her clear the store. Its last day, she says, will be Dec. 15.
She will keep her job as a costumer for the annual Parade of Lights and with various theater groups. It will not be the same, she said.
“It gets to me every time someone leaves the shop,” Linda Walters said. “It’s the friends, people I have come to know over all these years.
“I always ask myself, will I ever see them again?”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
