Natural Selections asked Chad Euler who was a winner of this year’s best Halloween costume on ABC’s Live With Regis and Kelly to recount the experience for our readers:

Chad Euler and Tara Morris as the Gorton’s Fisherman and his Mermaid Catch

The costume took three sleepless nights to make. I hand stitched the mermaid costume out of foam, two types of vinyl, and shimmer wrapping paper, and made the aquarium out of wood and plexiglass. On Halloween morning we woke at 5:45 a.m. to don part of our costumes and ran down the driveway of Rockefeller dressed as a fisherman carrying an aquarium and half of a mermaid carrying her tail (we got some strange looks from security and the people arriving early to RU). We jumped into a cab, which rushed across town to ABC studios and the Live with Regis and Kelly annual Halloween costume contest. There we fixed the rest of our costume, taping our legs together, and got in a line which stretched around the block. There were around a hundred plus people in costume from all over the United States. We stood outside in line for an hour and a half until the producers picked us and ten other people to go into the studio. Inside, Gelman and the other producers chose us and five other finalists to go on stage and national TV. We got to wait in the green room and backstage until they brought us out. Everyone was very nice, and it was very exciting just to be on TV. We were nervous, not about winning, but about tripping and falling on live television, since our legs were taped to each other and they told us we only had ten seconds to make it across the stage. All of the other costumes were really spectacular and we didn’t think we were going to win, so when Regis called our names we were shocked! We moved forward as confetti canons exploded and were quickly interviewed by Kelly. Then we wished everyone a Happy Halloween as the show ended! Half an hour later Tara was at work and I was back in lab. It was really gratifying to win because of all the hard work we put into the costume and Halloween costumes in the previous years. Some of the prize money was used to help buy an engagement ring, and two weeks later Tara and I got engaged.