Let's Get Scary

Sometimes, come Halloween, I ask myself: Who would I dress up as if right now today they announced an actual Halloween for grownups?Back in the old days, little girls went out dressed as princesses or kitty-cats on Halloween; as witches or ghosts, if they could stretch far enough toward the dark side.Little boys seemed to resist the whole dress-up thing somehow, maybe because they got stuffed into jackets and ties a lot more back then. Maybe it felt to them like yet another conspiracy on the part of the females in their lives to deck them out like fools - then go taking their pictures even. So I guess they went out dressed as hobos, most of them, borrowing outsized cast-offs from a handy male grownup, smearing their faces with charcoal.My sister Nan and I went out as hobos ourselves, come to think of it. Nan set the whole tone for my whole childhood, with her nose for the slightly ‘transgressive’ as the saying goes. For one particularly instructive period during a certain autumn, a dead cat came to our attention in an alley we then began visiting the way pilgrims visit a shrine. "A corpse!" we exulted on first discovering it, giddy with that blended jolt of joy and revulsion. We'd have gone out that Halloween CARRYING the dead cat if we'd dared to. If we hadn't by then taken the common childhood pledge to shelter our grownups, innocents that they were, from life's spicier side.Today of course males of every age are far more "plumed" than they once were, and less fixed on the need to seem macho too. It’s my sense that these days little boys' costumes are as elaborate as little girls.  This year they will once again going out dressed to the nines, in masks portraying horror-movie villains: Jason. Chucky and the rest. Every now and then you sometimes even see old Tricky-Dick Nixon, who still enjoys a strange afterlife in the Rogue's Gallery of your standard costume shop.And the point will be what it's always been: To startle. To counter expectation.We had a good friend back in the 80's. Didn't smoke. Didn't drink. Took old bikes from the dump, fixed them up good as new and gave them to kids who didn't have bikes. On the Halloween immediately following one lunatic's murder of several people by slipping poison into random Tylenol bottles, our friend took his kids around for Trick or Treat, himself dressed as a giant Tylenol capsule - and was actually surprised when another dad offered to punch his lights out. THAT escapade countered all our expectations.By partying indoors on Halloween, you can cut down on offers of violence (depending on who you friends are of course) and have fun too - by seeing the dedicated beer guzzler come dressed as a Mormon elder, say, or the biggest Don Juan in the group come decked out as the Pope.I don't go in for much in the way of girlie stuff as a kid; never even wore makeup til I got to be 50. But one year at an adult Halloween party I dressed as Early Cher, in heavy mascara and spangly bathing suit top and hip huggers, and of course a giant wig exploding in cascades of inky curls.I looked ridiculous. It was awesome. And my mate, Sonny to my Cher, looked even better, in the 70's-era peasant shirt our kids found for him, and some baggy bohemian pants and a Prince Valiant wig.Of course with his wire-rimmed glasses, he looked more like early John Denver, or actually with the wig more like Moe of the Three Stooges than either of those two, but still - he SEEMED like Sonny Bono.That’s the fun of Halloween: getting to seem like someone else for the night.So whatever you might be up to tonight, just be careful, like my old cat Abe here. 'Cause you just never do know who you're going to meet.