The Life and Times of a Halloweenie

I love Halloween. I love the fall weather, I love the midgetine candy bars, and I love the way Halloween gets everyone outside and talking to their neighbors. However, just like my forbidden love for Taco Bell, there's a very good reason why I shouldn't love Halloween: I hate being scared, and just about everything inherent to the celebration of Halloween scares me. I'm very easily startled, and I would say that I tend to blur the line between reality and fantasy when I'm frightened, except that I do not know of a single point in my life at which I have ever actually recognized any line between reality and fantasy. If I watch a horror movie, the characters follow me to bed and stare at me all night. If I encounter someone in a seasonally scary mask, they may as well snuggle up to me as I lay me down to sleep, because that mask is burned into my brain, terrifying me into sleeping with my eyes open all night long.

One of my dad's favorite stories from the The Life & Times Of Grace is torn from the pages of Halloween 1991, when Yours Timidly dressed as Cleopatra and traipsed about the neighborhood with the other kids. The dad gang ambled behind us, preventing the boys from getting into trouble, and going to the doors of particularly "scary" houses to collect candy on my behalf, since I refused to cross the property lines of any yards decorated with otherworldly foam headstones and DayGlo skulls. As we walked between two particular houses, absolutely nothing was happening. No other kids were around. No stray dogs were barking. It was calm as calm could be. And then Dad ruined it.

From ten feet behind me, in a deadpan stolen from the throat of Ben Stein, Dad said -did not scream, yell, menace, or pant- he said, "Look. Grace. A. Real. Witch." AND I WAS GONE. Legend has it that I hiked my royal Cleopatra robes to my knees, ditched my bucket of midgetine candy bars, and fled for the street, wimpering the whole way. I don't know where I was going, since I don't know where I thought "the witch" was; for all I knew I was running straight into her loving caress. But wherever I was headed, I was getting there in record time, and with a smashing gold snake headdress.

In the last 18 years, absolutely nothing has changed. I mean, I can't fit into that Cleopatra outfit any more, but I still jump at my own shadow while celebrating Halloween in a decidedly nonfrightening costume. Why would I want to be something that scares me when I look in the mirror? For once, I am exercising common sense here, people. To demonstrate what I mean by "decidedly nonfrightening," let's take a short tour through the last few years of my costumes.

Freshman year of college, before I had any sense whatsoever, and when I lived within shouting distance of someone who could loan me a spangly pink bra. And a see-through button-down. And who could spray-paint a plaid skirt onto me. That's my bestifer Shelley next to me, and the Dutch exchange student behind me. Eight years later, I still have no freaking clue what the other girl was supposed to be. She looks like she wants to beat some serious ass. While holding an appletini.
This was Halloween 2008, when I dressed as a tennis mom. See how clever I was, with my punny tennis racket of petit fours? I was serving up a good time. Interestingly, our neighbors thought that my tennis dress was lingerie, and I was giving out candy to their children in lingerie. And tennis shoes? Hm. Apropos of nothing, please note the melodramatic teal walls.

Apparently when I said I had never gone as anything frightening for Halloween, I was unaware of the existence of this picture. Phoooooooo. Ooooooooo. Let's move on. MOVE ON!

And thus we arrive at Halloween 2009, when I dressed as The Goddess of Everything. I would call myself "Pandeia," pan for "everything" and deia for "goddess," but some other mythological bitch claimed that already. It's moments like these, where I explain the Latin origins of my made-up Halloween costume nerdery, that I think we can really appreciate what I mean when I say thank God I am not dating any more.
Do I look regal here? Do I look regal enough that you could forget that I tried to create a legitimate Latin name for myself? Let's not talk about me for a minute. Let's talk about how my regal robes coordinate with the paint job in the front hall, which is no longer the color of mildew.

After a couple hours of giving out candy in my robes, which I am sure the neighbors thought was me tumbling out the door in a bedsheet, Lawyer Boy and I went to the Halloween party that our friends Molly and Lee were throwing. Molly and Lee had turned their house into a full-blown haunted half-acre, complete with an animatronic skeleton, giant video screens, and a haunted maze out back. Strobe lights flickered over the fog-filled backyard as the screams of terrified trick-or-treaters erupted from within the maze, the occasional crying child careening out of the exit, damaged for life.

So of course, I went near none of it. I was perfectly content to stay in the house, sipping Firefly lemonades and socializing with my fellow deity, Lawyer Boy:

Lawyer Boy was the God of Animal House, or, as many of our friends have aptly surmised, the lazy one. I particularly like the axe in the back of this picture. We could have used it to cut up the mini quiches, had we started to run low. That's just about all the Halloween carnage I can handle.