Gary Brown: Recalling nights spent in Halloween costumes
According to a Fox News report I read online, the most popular Halloween costume this year is Barbie.
So, trick-or-treating in most communities is going to be mostly pink instead of pumpkin orange. Autumn will never be the same.
The least popular costumes, by the way, according to an old Saturday Evening Post article still hanging around the internet, generally include a baby tax attorney, a Blockbuster employee, and a wholesome clown.
Which raises the obvious question, who would think of dressing their baby as a tax attorney, and why?
Taking a pet trick-or-treating? According to Newsweek, three of the most popular pet costumes are pumpkins, hot dogs and bats. Bumblebees and spiders are big, too. Nothing was mentioned about cats going as dogs, or, even more frightening to Fido, the other way around.
Oh, according to a years-past posting at the website of a law firm, the most dangerous Halloween costumes are "invisible suits" – or, full body suits in "all black with no eye holes." We need a lawyer to tell us that it could be bad to walk around dressed in something that nobody can see and you can't see through?
No wonder the nation's SAT scores are dropping in the United States.
Remembering my costumes
Actually, we haven't been really bright for some time. Trust me, I have personal experience with being an idiot at a time when the lack of in-depth thinking about child safety allowed entire families to be filled with relative numbskulls.
As closely as I can recall, my first trick-or-treating costume was a ghost get-up – a simple old single bed sheet that was longer than my legs, into which my mom had cut two eye holes supposedly so I could see.
When I wasn't tripping, the eye holes were sliding up and down or side to side so I had no idea where I was walking. I was bumping into lamp posts, tripping on uneven sidewalks, stumbling on steps, walking into my brothers, and vacantly staring off into the back side of cotton.
In the years that followed, I played my share of cowboys, hobos, horror movie vampires, and wore random masks. Later, I dressed as TV celebrities, sports stars, band members and comic book characters. I'm sure that the homeowners carrying bowls of candy who answered their doorbell rings didn't always know who I was, but they graciously referred to me – along with my siblings – as "cute as a button."
Personally, I've never considered buttons all that cute, but they were the ones with the candy, so I worked with it.
Candy train eventually ended
Those were the days of the "golden era" of trick-or-treating.
Costumes were last-minute and inexpensive. Candy bars were big. Fruit was safe from sharp objects, at least after mom had given them a once-over look for holes that usually aren't present on the skins of apples and bananas. And neighborhoods – no matter how dark from lack of streetlights – still were far from dangerous for walking children because their parents were carrying flashlights and their neighbors illuminated their sidewalks and steps with porch lights.
Most of us carried nearly reflective white pillowcases to collect the candy that mom later would transfer into paper grocery bags so she could hear the paper rustle when we got up to dip into our stashes in the middle of the night.
The highest I ever filled a grocery bag was my last year of trick-or-treating. My neighborhood friend Chuck and I went together when we were in high school. We might have been in college; my memory of it has faded. I know for certain neither of us were married yet.
We went dressed as, well, guys who were too old to be walking around at night without dates.
Anyway, we went trick-or-treating two nights that year. One night we visited half the community, and the next night we visited houses we'd missed the first. I'm not sure that the non-Halloween night people were expecting us. They looked a little surprised. But, a fair amount of homeowners had candy left over so they handed over enough to top off our paper bags.
I don't recall how Chuck's dad reacted when he got home with a post-holiday sweets, but mine just shook his head and went back to reading the newspaper. From behind the local news section, I think I heard him say, "Next year you're not going unless you're wearing a bedsheet so nobody knows you're ours."
Reach Gary at gary.brown.rep@gmail.com. On Twitter: @gbrownREP.
This article originally appeared on The Alliance Review: Gary Brown: Recalling nights spent in Halloween costumes
