I Want Candy

Ahhh, Halloween...

Some of my favorite Halloween memories involve dressing up for costume parties when I was in my 20s and first living on my own as an adult. Every costume I ever wore (punk rocker, biker chick, Miss America) always somehow included one common accessory -- handcuffs. I guess I used to be a lot bolder, because I distinctly remember cuffing guys to me during parties. I wouldn't even speak to them...I'd just go up to one I thought was cute and wordlessly cuff him. (Let's all say it together: It is a really good thing I met Canetto when I did.)

There's a great Halloween story that involves my dad, back when we lived in an apartment complex in Syracuse, New York. My sister and I had gone out trick-or-treating dressed as Frankenstein (her) and an angel (me). We were probably 4 and 5 at the time.To make my costume, my mom had dressed me in an old white nightgown of hers and had made fantastic cardboard wings that she covered with aluminum foil --giving me a wingspan of a good three and a half to four feet across. She also made me a halo out of a shaped wire coat hanger -- also covered with aluminum foil. My sister and I trick-or-treated for a couple of hours and then came home to immediately begin gorging on candy. (Okay, fine...I was the one who was apparently intent on upping my risk factor for diabetes. She was one of those annoying able-to-delay-gratification types who would be pulling out her treat bag the following summer to sift through the treats and then select a single piece of candy to savor. And of course, I was convinced she did this simply to torture me.)

With our trick-or-treating done, my father decided that he and a friend should enjoy some trick-or-treating themselves. So, he put my costume on over a pair of jeans, and headed out with a beer stein. Since we lived in an apartment complex, he manged to get his stein filled up very quickly with whatever beer or hard liquor our neighbors had on hand...all of them thinking this was very funny, of course.

He was gone for a while on this mission and when he returned home, he tried to walk through the front door into our apartment, but could not. He tried again -- no luck. Confused as to why he could not walk through the doorway, he tried again. Still -- stuck on the front porch. My (sober, and therefore unamused) mother intervened at this point and managed to get his drunk self focused long enough to understand that he simply needed to turn sideways to fit his giant angel wings through the door.

The Devil is in the details,
Brutalism