Happy Halloween! My favorite day of the year is finally here. We’re having an office party today and a lot of my co-workers are dressing up. Me, I’m going as me. Had I read Kevin’s posts about last minute Halloween costumes earlier than this morning, I might have gone as Mr. Baked Potato Head.
Kids today are lucky. They have so much more to choose from, costume-wise than we did. They also have a better class of costumes. If you are anywhere near my age, surely you remember those plastic masks, the ones that left you a mere pinhole in which to breath fresh air. They were so tight against your face you could feel your own breath bouncing back at you every time you exhaled. And that cloying, synthetic smell entered every pore in your face so you smelled like plastic for the rest of the night. I used to wake up late on Halloween night gasping for air, thinking I still had that I Dream of Jeanie mask on.
In a way, Halloween was better back then. Despite the poorly constructed costumes, we had no fear. Oh sure, we had fear of ghosts and vampires and whatever else was supposed to be hauting us on Halloween, but we didn’t have fear of our own neighbors or fear of poisoned candy. We certainly didn’t have the fear of offending anyone that limits the costumes kids are allowed to wear to school today. We could be as bloody and gory as we wanted. We could be offensive in ways that would have the ACLU tackling you in the street in 2007; So we dressed up for Halloween as gypsies, Indians, mental patients, bums and hobos (the latter two later known as The Homeless or The Housing Deprived) and other stereotypical costumes. No one really paid attention to the fact that we might have been insulting someone because no one cared. And it wasn’t our intent to insult, it was our intent to just be someone else for a day. Halloween was about candy and dressing up and being scared. End of story.
Most of the boys at the time did the usual horror costumes: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy and the proverbial white-sheeted ghost. They would jump out from behind the bushes and scare the girls and we would scream in exaggerated fright and run to the doorstep of the next house on the block.
We had parades at school and some of the kids would march around with fake, dripping blood and rubber masks with mutilated eyeballs. The goriness was all part of the fun. That’s what Halloween was for: shrieking and screaming through the neighborhood and finishing it off with a family viewing of Chiller Theater, munching on the candy loot while hanging onto Mom in fright.
But times have changed and we’ll have none of that gory, scary stuff anymore. Kids are vulnerable and impressionable, don’t you know? The blood might scare them. The costumes might offend someone. I mean, what if some kid in your school had his whole family murdered by a crazed ax-wielding monster? Don’t you think that costume would make him feel sad, Johnny?
But that was back in the innocent days of yore. Back before the razor blades in apples ruined Halloween for all of us. Hey, here’s a bit of trivia for you. Did you know that THERE WAS NEVER A RECORDED CASE OF A RAZOR BLADE IN AN APPLE ON HALLOWEEN? Yea. An urban legend set the tone for future years for this holiday.
Anyhow, if I were a kid today, I would be dressing up as Captain Underpants, just to piss off stuffy old principals who forget that part of being a kid is laughing at each other. Which begs the question (really, it does!):
If you were, today, a seven year old kid headed out for trick or treating, what would your costume be (taking into consideration what’s popular in the realm of mass commercialism in 2007)?
I really have a hankering to be a zombie. Mostly so I could walk around funny all day.
My children are a 1)Devil 2)Mr. Burns 3) Princess 4)witch and 5) a phantom.
I’d probably be some sort of Pokemon, but I’d rip the costume up and splatter myself with fake blood, as if I’d been in a Pokemon death match.
Your Barker would assemble the exact same outfit he wore in Tijuana last week – cover himself in cotton candy, and wear a cardboard sign over his nether parts which reads “Finger Lickin’ Good!”
Back in high school some science-minded friends and I decided to stick a razor blade in an apple for reasons that remain foggy. Guess what–it can’t be done. I mean, maybe NASA or IBM could do it under lab conditions, but safety razor blades are thin, flexible, and weak, and apples are surprisingly dense and hard. Even if you get them off to a good start they seem to twist inside the apple and break. We ended up busting a whole pack and never got one in (of course there were injuries, we were teenage boys, it’s a wonder there weren’t actual fatalities). All these years as a legend and apparently no one ever, y’know, tried to do it.
Yeesh.
The last time I went to a costume party was about ten years ago, at the famous Gainax bash in Japan, where the costumes are high-level and you’re expected to make a serious effort. With the help of a friend in LA who is a pro, I put together an “Iceman” costume (you know, the guy they found buried in the ice in the Tyrol). I got a little obsessed with it and did everything I could find in the books, the tattoos (non-permanent, I’m not completely nuts), the flaked obsidian knife, you name it. It turned out so well one of the attendees suggested I donate it to Kyoto University, where it’s probably rotting away in a box somewhere in the Ethnology Department.
–Toren
I’d probably be Hermione Granger.
Or maybe Hello Kitty.
I don’t know; I barely remember what I was like when I was 7. (I think I dressed up as a mouse).
I thought of that today, as I watched the kids at the school my youngest goes to. They sent a note home yesterday that specified that kids could dress up as “storybook characters” not scary witches or goblins.
I found “goblins” funny. Ever seen someone dressed as a goblin? I haven’t.
Okay, but, I decided that I absolutely would have gone as Satan, and in case there was trouble, I’d carry a bible and point out where he’s mentioned.
The bible is a book, it’s got stories, and the devil is in it. Argue with me.
And, yeah, that’s likely something I would have done at the age of 7. I was a weird kid.
The Man They Call Jayne. But only if my folks would let me carry Vera on my candy-extorting rounds.