Holiday tricky for Halloween-impaired
Halloween, like dancing, learning a foreign language or throwing a curveball, always has been one of those things I feel as if I should be able to do naturally, almost effortlessly. Instead, Halloween, like dancing, learning a foreign language or throwing a curveball, always has been something that eludes me.
As a little kid in rural Indiana, I remember grabbing a football (Mom said it was a “Gale Sayers costume”) and being driven to the houses of my grandma and other old ladies from church so that I could collect popcorn balls, candy corn and Circus Peanuts, a 19th-century orange-flavored concoction that tasted like a stale marshmallow version of St. Joseph's Aspirin.
As a young, procrastinating adult stopping by a costume shop Halloween night on my way to a party, I played the pitiful fool and bought a Mr. T mask. Since the hot and scratchy mask made it impossible to eat, drink or talk, I ended up carrying that burden in my hand all night simply to show to people who asked why I didn't have a costume. In an attempt to remedy that poor choice, I made an even worse decision the following year by showing up to a party dressed as the victim in a real-life murder of a homeless man who had been killed by an arrow. I shudder today even thinking about that costume, which was so wrong it has stopped me from attempting a costume in the last 25 years.
Lots of us Halloween-wannabes are costume-impaired. Northwestern University, embarrassed by photos that popped up on Facebook last Halloween, had to distribute an e-mail this week reminding students not to don blackface or wear costumes that make fun of races, religions and entire classes of people. I don't remember Halloween being that big of a deal when I was a student at Northwestern. We were too intimidated by the debauchery at Southern Illinois University's annual Halloween bash/riot in Carbondale to even give Halloween the old college try.
S.I.U. stamped out that custom some years ago and apparently has a better handle on Halloween now since it doesn't even need to send out reminders telling students to shun racism. But I understand the tensions of Halloween appropriateness.
Before we had kids in school, I mocked our grade school for sending out a flier asking kids to shun any costume with a link to violence (vampire, ninja, knight, zombie), and dress instead as a vegetable. While I admit that a kid dressed in a scratch-and-sniff Brussels sprouts costume could terrify my wife, it seemed silly to me back then. But I no longer have any faith in my opinions about Halloween.
It seems wrong for a boy to masquerade as a soldier when teens just a few years older have died fighting our current wars. But I have no moral authority to make a fuss when I let my kids shoot Nazi zombies in their video games, probably because they seem healthier than my boyhood hours spent making my G.I. Joe torture the World War II Japanese soldier to the point where his arms fell off.
Kid costumes sometimes cross the line. Adult costumes don't even have a line. Strolling through one of those Halloween stores that pop up in vacant storefronts this time of year, I wonder who buys the preposterously proportioned “Wet T-shirt Contest-Winner” costume or the Genie with the giant three-wishes-for-a-rub lamp covering his crotch.
Halloween forces us to separate fantasy from reality. I get that. Our front pages ache with sad stories of young deaths and tragedy, while Halloween happily embraces the grisly and macabre. My struggle seems to be that I am no better today at separating funny and appropriate from sick and twisted than I was as a kid.
For instance, while wading through our scary movie options for Saturday night, I am reminded that the last time my family watched the classic zombie flick “Night of the Living Dead” was on the couch with my brother, Bill, last November after he was diagnosed with the bile-duct cancer that would kill him by the end of summer.
“Don't worry,” Uncle Bill assured his three nephews as we watched the dead come back to life and feed on the flesh of the living. “I won't come back and do that.”
I'm not sure whether remembering that moment should make me laugh or cry, so I do a bit a both. Halloween is tricky.