All Hallows Eve

I watched him sail by, carefree, a penguin on wheels. An avian monstrosity, closely pursued by Che Gueverra, comes rocketing towards me like his feathers are on fire (maybe it's a Cuban penguin?). He leans into the turn, avoids Pippi Longstockings and a very surprised sophomore on her cellphone, and disappears. Che blisters off after him, but has to brake suddenly as his skateboard is impeded by Abraham Lincoln and what very well might be a burrito.

No, I haven't lost my sanity. Or even if I have, this isn't a hallucination: it's Halloween! The day when grown (and not so grown) men and women, girls and boys, don rediculous costumes and beg for candy. Some costumes are quite inventive, Lee Harvey Oswald and the aforementioned Pippi (which turned out to be a husky man in drag) among them. Others almost qualify as a cop-out, which includes my own halfhearted attempt at being a substitute teacher, or my usual fallback: christmas caroler.

As a kid, I could never quite decide if I liked halloween. Trick or treating was always fun, and acquiring massive amounts of candy must be high on every kid's list (although I never liked the chocolate candies, preferring the fruit-flavored ones, leaving the former to forlornely turn white in the back of the closet, later to be joined by the chocolate manifestations at christmas).

Still, I really did not enjoy halloween parties for much of my childhood, for the single reason that at almost every party some kid would show up as something gross: zombies and witches weren't bad, but I objected to the kid with the axe in his head, accompanied by realistic-looking gore, or stab victims, or anyone who felt a need to secrete fake blood like Robin Williams doing standup. It's just...ewww. And of course, at any sleepover a horror film would be mandatory, which I always hated. I watched both What Lies Beneath and The Ring because I didn't want to be the kid who made everyone else not watch what they wanted or go home.


It snows pretty much every year on Halloween, at least where I grew up. It was almost a rule, Halloween we'd have a foot of snow, then nothing till well after christmas, and invariably a blizzard on Easter. Gotta love the mountains (which, apparently, are pronounced "moun'ins" by natives, close relative of "kit'ens" and "mit'ens", where the T is never pronounced). So our costumes had to be winter-wear, meaning Columbo (from Rocky Horror) had to wear about three pairs of nylons under her fishnets, the fairy had her wings on over her winter coat and looked much like the michelin man meets tinkerbell. And of course, where I grew up you couldn't walk between houses, or at least not in 90% of the subdivisions, so you had to have a driver let you off at each house. We always went over to the richer town next door, where the houses were close together and the residents distributed king-size candy bars--or so legend goes.

There were ghost stories, peeled grapes and apple cider, pumpkin cookes. Jack-o-lanterns were a perennial tradition in our house, followed by the competition to see whose pumpkin "melted" last from decomposition. Watching something that once approximated a face slowly sink into furry obscurity is a fascinating science experiment.

I remember being a star one year, with a fantastic gold costume and little streamers. Another year I was a cat, which involved the delectable task of coating all visible skin with thick, black greasepaint. I must have been prepubescent, otherwise I would have been The Pimple for the entire following year. I can't remember if I dressed up as a Tootsie Pop or just wanted to.

I could turn this into a comment about how I'm too old to go Trick-or-Treating, but I won't--because I'm not. True, I didn't put much effort into a costume, mostly because I didn't expect to do anything for Halloween and a few last-minute party invitations were the only reason I even tried. But I appreciate that, for one day a year, all of us can dress up and pretend to be someone (or something) we're not. Halloween, in college at least, is just an excuse for a party--or a riot (see Boulder, 2004). As my brother commented, "the women dress like whores and the men dress like women". A little more imagination could do us all good--though I think every man should have to walk around in heels for a night, just once in his life.