I'm not into Halloween. As a kid it was cool. I got candy. It was fun to dress up. In college, it always seemed like too big a deal. Always poor and lazy, I never went all out for a costume like some of my friends. I'd go as a nerd or something equally generic. One year, friends convinced me to dress up, so I went to K-Mart the day of Halloween and the costume section was picked bare. I walked over to the recently erected winter holiday section, bought some fake snow and fake icicles and went as winter. I sat around as winter all night, getting drunk at a tame party.
Halloween bores me, people dressed as the same movie characters, the same TV characters, the same comic characters, the same figures from pop culture. I'm guilty. I've gone out in a cheap polyester Elvis costume. One year, I paired with a friend and we went as Kevin Federline and Britney Spears, just like thousands of other people. Yawn.
Of course, there's the default for most young women: the slutty anything. Slutty librarian, police officer, firefighter, milkmaid, oncologist, etc. You go out and see the same cheap costumes sprung from little plastic packages. It's easy. Hey, I was lazy, too. I get it. Put it on display, but don't put too much thought into it. I'll always hold a special place in my heart for the slutty Snow Whites and Cinderellas doing the walk of shame on November 1st, all the promiscuous fairies and princesses who made someone's dreams come true, at least for a while.
Sure, you'll see a handful of interesting original costumes created with thought and skill. I applaud those people, but I applaud the standard, too, the women of the what-you-see-is-what-you-get mindset.
I haven't dressed up for Halloween in quite awhile. The past few years, I've done dinner theater, which usually meant a late sober night, dressed in your faithful narrator's standard garb, Chucks and jeans, throw in some hopes of a little Halloween fun.
On such a Halloween night, I found a party and met a woman dressed as Carmen Sandiego. The red hat, the red trench coat, I thought it was simple yet great and the woman was really cute. After slamming several drinks on an empty stomach, I made out with Carmen in the kitchen of a house party, standing next to an albino dressed as a black cat. Eventually Carmen's friends dragged her away, but we had traded phone numbers.
We met up for dinner about a week later, and Carmen was still cute, but, dang, girl had some big curves under the trench coat. Totally not a deal-breaker for yours truly, but the fact that she worked at a bank and lived with her parents sank the whole deal. I never saw her again.
It's great to see a good costume amongst the Halloween standards, but if it's too concealing, you might want to make sure you know what you're getting.
