[This pretty much duplicates an earlier entry, but the wonder of the modern world is that nobody remembers anything for more than 35 seconds. So no apologies this time. It’s a ramble pinned to the fall breezes.]
As a kid, on Halloween I could become a legitimate fool for a day: Unlike the rest of the year there were no rules, no one or nothing I could offend, nothing I could “do wrong.”
After we moved from suburban Havertown to Philly, Mom made me a strange costume based on a Welsh tradition of the “button king.” (Or so she claimed… I haven’t been able to find any reference to such a Welsh oddity online, though a guy in South Carolina, Dalton Stevens, was known as the Button King for decorating all his clothes, including his shoes, with thousands of buttons.)
She bought me kid-size dungaree overalls and sewed buttons in patterns all over it for my third-grade Halloween. The next year, she added yet more buttons. It was something special, and I liked it. We had a Halloween parade at that third-grade public school – walking around the concrete schoolyard in a line, costumed – but I have no memory of parades at Catholic school, starting the next year.
One Halloween I dressed as a girl – can’t imagine doing that in any other situation; I would have been mortified to the point of sinking into the ground like Rumpelstiltskin – a gypsy girl in a long, flowing, patterned skirt, my cheeks rouged. That was the year some yob tried to steal my goodie bag. I was short but I warn’t no fragile girl,. I held on like a pit bull and kept the bag.
No idea why, but I don’t remember other costumes from my kidhood, though I fervently prowled the Powelton Villages streets annually for treats. I’m much clearer on my adult party-going on All Hallows Eve.
In 1968 I bought the one and only suit I’ve ever owned; I wore it seldom. By the late ’80s, the seam on one leg had parted and I’d stapled it together. I realized that a) I’d put on weight, and b) I’d lost whatever minimal interest I’d had in suits, so I gave it to daughter Morgan’s then husband, Leo.
But over several years earlier I’d worn it to Halloween parties, because dressing as a junior exec was, to my mind, the most ridiculous costume I could think of (though it did make me stand straighter with a drink in my hand).
For one party, with no costume handy, I turned the jacket inside out, wore it backwards, tied my wristwatch to my forehead, carried an umbrella turned upsidedown and entered as an alien from an unpronounceable planet. A simple, if not especially inspired, goof.
When I was first courting Linda – OK, when I was first thinking of courting Linda – I went to a party across the way on Baring St., where she danced in a gossamer butterfly costume. I had tied a pillow to my back and thrown an old horseish blanket over me, carried a walking stick, and hulked along as a hunchback. But ah… underneath I wore an attempt at a kilt and some minor regalia: For you see, I was not a humble beggar, but the King in disguise.
I had planned to throw off the blanket around midnight and announce my true assumed identity, but when the time came, I couldn’t bring it off. Such overt exhibitionism before uncertain acquaintances… I didn’t have it in me then; nor most times since. Instead, I went home, made the change there, unobserved, then reappeared as the King. It was something I guess, but no flash in that.
But my favorite (and most renowned) Halloween appearance, years earlier, did feature extravagant exhibitionism. I wonder where the impetus came from? It’s the kind of thing that I usually internalize, coming through in my writing but hiding in daily life.
It was back when I was living in the House on 34th St. in the early ’60s (you’ve heard about this domicile before; maybe you even remember it), after returning from my disaster of grad school at Stanford.
At the time, Penn still dormed men and women separately. The women’s dorm was a block and a half from the House, in a textured-brick rectangle with alternating horizontal and vertical windows, designed by Eero Saarinen to look like a forbidding castle, complete with a bridge over a non-existent moat. The top was fringed with outward-curving metal prongs like sparse hair (later removed; later still, reinstated?).
Yet the inside held an airy, white-painted court outfitted as a unisex dining hall during lunch, where the “coeds” were allowed to mingle with male humanity. I think the building is still some form of dorm, with the open playing fields that filled the rest of that block now turned into clunky smaller buildings that bring Penn more income.
Anyway, come Halloween, I was taken with the idea of impersonating Christ on the road to his crucifixion. Dressed only in a loincloth, fashioned from a hunk of sheet, and a crown of thorns, woven from a dead vine, I pasted a fuller false beard over my less impressive real one and dribbled red food coloring down my forehead.
To complete the transformation, I tacked a scroll reading “INRI” to the horizontal member of a hastily assembled cross, which I dragged along 34th St. (a major traffic artery) and into the women’s dorm. I fell the requisite three times along the way. I have, somewhere, a picture to document this crazed but, I declare, inspired feat.
Halloween for Linda and me pooped out over the two decades we lived in the rear section of our Baring St. house. Few kids found us back there (and of those, the majority were ferried to Powelton from outlying areas by their parents, who dumped them on our Victorian street corner and waited with the motor running for them to accumulate loot).
Upstate, Halloween has been a major decorating holiday that almost rivals Christmas, but our house is invisible from the road, and the official outlook on trick or treating is oddly circumscribed, as though the local establishment fears that kids out on their own at unregulated hours might be disemboweled by ghouls.
I’ve pretty much lost my holiday spirit anyway. None of the celebratory days or seasons that temporarily rescued my youth from dankness mean much to me now. But almost every day at home seems celebratory, because we’re living in commune with good people, our dog, our cat, a half a zillion trees, and the occasional bear on the front pork.
I’ve got nothing to complain about. Though that won’t stop me, of course
lickhaven 