Entertainment

Halloween costumes to 'swipe'

Have you seen the "MetroCard Bicycle Man" in action?

Since July, Andy Padre, a 39-year-old midtown artist, has been riding the city streets on a bicycle completely covered in MetroCards.

Now ready to take the project to the next level, Padre and 15 of his friends will march in next Tuesday's Greenwich Village Halloween Parade wearing wedding party costumes that have been cut and pasted completely from MetroCards.

"It's funny, makes people smile and gets them to think about an everyday thing like a Metrocard as art in a whole new way," said Padre, who used about 1,000 discarded cards which he and friends collected from the subway.

A city institution now in its 33rd year, the Village parade exalts and encourages the creative and bizarre. This year's grand marshals are the rockers Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of KISS, who are known for their outrageous make-up and sequins.

Animal magnetism will radiate from the first official float, which honors the parade's canine revelers.

"I wanted to do something to celebrate all of the dogs that walk every year in the parade and promote animal welfare," said Beth Joy. She and her dog, Bella, will be wearing French maid costumes this year.

"We've marched in the parade for seven years and there's just nothing else like it," she said.

As goes with the parade's extremely democratic style of participation -- an estimated 50,000 people march each year -- it is impossible to find any kind of set database describing those who will be marching.

But expect to see avant-garde puppeteer Basil Twist, who will display his 12-foot-high white spider puppet from the clock tower of the Jefferson Market Library for the twelfth straight year.

"I entered the parade when it was still having growing pains, but now it's turned into this massive public art experience, a hugely theatrical event with the world's most creative people strutting their stuff," Twist said. "I'm truly amazed at how many people remember and love the spider and come back to see it again and again."

The planning of this year's event has evoked some nostalgia for the year the parade started, said artistic director Jeanne Fleming.

"This year is all looking back to 1973," Fleming said during a phone interview at the parade's pre-production headquarters in upstate New York. "KISS was living in the Village and met each other through an ad in the Village Voice.

And to our surprise, they asked if they could be in the parade [this year]."