What a different Halloween this one will be. It seems my holiday season has been getting differenter and differenter the past few years and that’s okay with me. I am not one who wants, craves or needs Tradition, other than presents and turkey. I like presents on Christmas, and if I didn’t get turkey sandwiches somewhere between October and January, I think I might die.
But I was talking about this year’s Halloween being different. For AT LEAST the past 22 years I have been dressing up for Halloween. There was a period of time between high school and going to work when I didn’t think it was mature or I was dressing my children for Halloween, and sat out the costuming myself. When I went back to work in 1984 I went back to appearing in costume on Halloween with a vengeance! I LOVE dressing up and putting on weird makeup. There just is no other day you can do it, without the possibility of seeming like a loon. (Unless you are in a play, which probably was the reason I was in several of them. Make-up—costumes!) Even then, some very straight-laced, uptight, rules-regulated, purse-lipped people think you are deranged. I’ve been the usual gypsy fortune-teller, a cat with a velvet coat, a nerd (one of the more popular concoctions), the crazy receptionist from that TV show starring Drew Carey, but I think my favorite was my own version of Spider Woman, with spiked silver hair, cobwebs all over my desk, spiders on my shoulder and “spider relocation” bags.
This year, however, I will be in New York City on Halloween. In Greenwich Village to be exact and I am told there will be a parade of the locals. Now that sounds like a Halloween to remember. I’ve been shown pictures of this parade and I have made sure my camera is charged and ready because I want to bring back some pictures of these wild NYC people in the bizarre outfits I am expecting. I won’t have a costume per say, but I guess maybe I’ll look like the country bumpkin (rhymes with pumpkin) I am, which could be disguise enough.
