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If you’re like at least a thousand other Harvard students, you may have seen a Sidechat post yesterday morning of an unknown girl enjoying breakfast in Leverett wearing an extremely tall witch’s hat. And if you’re anything like me, you were delighted by the Halloween whimsy! So imagine my surprise when, as I was eating dinner in Dunster on All Hallow’s Eve, the very same girl in the very same hat entered the dhall! Like Sidechat commenter #1, I had to know: “Who is this diva?”

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The diva in question turned out to be Bimba I. Carpenter ‘26, a Leverett resident, who made the hat herself. I asked her if she would “walk [us] through the thought process” behind the hat.

She answered: “As long as the thought process that I’m walking through is taller than 12 feet, then I can walk you through it.”

It turns out that the hat is made entirely of copies of The Crimson, proving that the print issue of our newspaper is worth something despite the fact that Flyby Blog is almost entirely online. (Just kidding! We love print media.) Carpenter “built an armature out of Crimsons,” wrapped it in more painted copies of The Crimson, and “attached it to the top of a bike helmet for security reasons and general safety.”

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I asked her the question on all our minds: why? Her response: “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if the entire costume is just a really big hat?’” And she was right! It is funny!

Carpenter knows about the Sidechat post, and is very pleased. She says, “I’ve brought so many smiles to people’s faces today, it’s been amazing.”

Before letting her go eat her dinner, I had to ask Carpenter about the biggest witch’s hat in the zeitgeist right now: the one in the Wicked movie coming out soon. Her statement was, “Any hat that is shorter than this hat, I disregard entirely. Honestly I have no thoughts regarding the hat. It could be fine, but it’s out of my wheelhouse.”

Carpenter’s final comment? “The word haberdashery is great, and it means a hat store.”