What Are You Going to Be?

/ By / In / 20 Comments

As kids, we started thinking about the next Halloween on November first. Over the next several months, ideas were floated, refined, discarded, and resurrected. These were the most important decisions a kid could make in those days.

As a parent, I had to wait patiently while my kids repeated this cycle of indecision, hoping that there wouldn’t be a midnight sewing session involved on October 30th.

But I do love a good challenge. Want to be an aquarium for Halloween? I can do that. What about a 1950s style gum-cracking waitress. Easy peasy. A hippie? Still had stuff in my closet for this one: featuring my buttons and beads and a pair of dangly earrings that spelled out LO VE! (On the reverse of this sign: Trick or Treat!)  My older son was a big fan of the Amazing Mumford on Sesame Street, so one year I made him a cape and put his name in sequins on his top hat. Add one magic wand, and voila!

Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz? I even sacrificed a pair of my red shoes to make her ruby slippers!

Ever since my three kids were old enough to dress up for Halloween, I dragged out the old sewing machine and made their costumes. Eventually, they got old enough to pull their own costumes together. I think the last kid to go trick-or-treating went out as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman with a necktie and a briefcase. Instead of saying “trick or treat,” he began with “Good evening, sir or madam,” and went into his spiel. To make him stop, people would shower him with candy. Well done!

During the Jazzercise years, I was bold enough to answer the door in my SuperMom outfit (not shown: a pair of those Candies slides that were popular in the ’80s.) Featured alongside me are SuperBoy and Strawberry Shortcake. Nothing says the ’80s like that perm, either.

 

During a trip to New York one year, I bought a Statue of Liberty crown for my daughter. Draped her in green fabric, made a flashlight torch, and she was good to go. Give me your tired, your poor…and your candy!

The pièce de résistance may have been the spaghetti and meatballs costume. This one really killed.

And one year I scared  my kids by dressing up like a vampire/zombie in my black Gunne Sax dress. The little devil here was very freaked out.

When I was a little girl, my dad was in charge of Halloween, both costumes and makeup. His training in theater made him highly qualified for the task. He would bring home his battered green makeup kit from his high school drama classroom and get to work on me and my sister. I don’t know where he found some of those costumes, but one year my sister was a flapper girl and I was a chubby bunny, complete with wax buck teeth and a prop carrot. Another year I got to be Zorro in black leotard and tights, cape, mask and pencil-thin mustache. Instead of a sword, I carried a wooden cane from one of my tap dance routines. I think my dad had as much fun as we did getting ready for Halloween.

My costume designing days are long gone. Instead, I watch the parade at the elementary school across the street every year to see what’s trending, who made an effort to create something fun and new, and who goes with the evergreen witch/angel/football player/zombie options. Watching the kids brings back special memories of magicians, hippies, and meatballs.

 

Featured image is of me and my daughter at a UCSF ICU reunion. She was too old (and too cool) to wear a costume, but we ended up going in these matching jack-o’-lantern t-shirts. It’s one of my favorite pictures of us.

“Trickertreat”

/ By / In / 16 Comments

Once it got dark, the kids would hit the residential streets in roving bands gone wild, armed with big bags, running to each porchlight to cry, “Trickertreat!" at the door.
Read More

Mostly Tricks

/ By / In / 10 Comments

I have many Halloween memories, but can’t recall a single specific Halloween from before I went to college. All I have are fragments. Sepia-tones Instamatic snaps in my mind of me and other little kids wandering in and out of the pools of light and shadow of the streets in my neighborhood, seeking candy. No adult accompaniment back then, which I think made it much more fun. I remember that the bullies always seemed to dress as stereotypical hobos. I figured that it was because some old clothes, a pillowcase and a dab of greasepaint for dirt on the face was cheap and easy. My costumes were usually homemade and science-fiction themed. A robot of silver-painted cardboard boxes, corrugated tubes and Reynolds Wrap. Mr. Spock, complete with ears. The Creature From the Black Lagoon (well, sort of). As I outgrew tricks or treats, I noticed that the usual bullies kept at it, in the same costumes, although it was by then more of an extortion scheme for them.

Halloween did teach me a life lesson, though. I only learned the story behind it years later.

My Mom was a very take-no-prisoners person if pushed too far; https://www.myretrospect.com/stories/bringing-backup/. One day, when I was quite young and not at home, my school gym teacher showed up at our door. Mr. Louis was selling encyclopedias. After inviting him in and listening politely to his pitch, Mom declined to buy what we had available in the public library. That was when Mr. Louis made a serious error. He intimated that it might go badly for her kid’s grades if she didn’t buy a set of his books. With that, my Mom went ballistic, grabbed Mr. Louis and escorted him bodily to the door, all to the accompaniment of some of her plentiful supply of obscene insults. But she didn’t tell me about it.

My grade school had a Halloween costume contest every year. My most imaginative and carefully crafted costumes never seemed to get any traction. Robot, Spock, Gill Man, Dracula. It didn’t matter. I was always out in the first or second round. The winner was usually one of the hobos. The hobos were often the jocks as well.

One year, when I was in sixth or seventh grade, my parents attended. They sussed out what was happening in short order. Although the judging was ostensibly by loudness-of-applause, one of the teachers, standing in the back of the auditorium, was signalling who was in and who was out and who finally won.

That teacher was Mr. Louis, who evidently had a long memory.

Mom had never put two and two together until that year. That was when she told me about her giving the bum’s rush to a certain encyclopedia salesman. It took a lot of pleading to convince her that a rematch with Mr. Louis could only make things worse for me, and I only had a year or two left at PS#4 anyway. But the story explained a lot about Mr. Louis’ behavior toward me over the years.

I never again entered the Halloween costume contest.