All Hallow's: On Being the Wrong Kind of Person

1982-1990 Little Orphan Annie. Two main reasons for this: 1) it is cheap to put together – I am redheaded and already surrounded by dogs and other children in crappy clothes; 2) though still quite young, I already look like Halloween in a dress.

1991 Things Kansas made me do (part I). This year: bucktoothed old man mask, one of Grandpa's pipes, Dad's "I fought the lawn and the lawn won" t-shirt with pillow shoved under to look like an old man stomach. (This bricolage becomes a better Halloween strategy, if only nominally, when you're no longer in the 6th grade. Note: 1) how no one else seems to be dressed up; 2) that no one is looking at me, probably because I am terrifying; 3) the girl in the background holding a rifle.)

1992-2000 Nothing, explicitly. Implicitly, straight person and/or "girl." I think you’ll see that, year round, this is an enormous failure.

(1995 Exception: Headless Hillary Clinton, or Things Kansas made me do, part II. If dressing as an old man is one option for a budding Kansas lesbian with a man-body, then the other is a horrifying headless effigy of Hillary Clinton. Both costumes were meant as satire but ended up as a kind of self-mockery. (While the old man provoked nervous laughter, Headless Hillary made everyone afraid. But too afraid to say anything about it.) Perhaps this is too high-flown, however. Most likely I just found a bunch of crap in the basement and threw it together into something barely coherent. This nonchalance about dressing up gets me in trouble later when I partner with a girl who loves Halloween but lacks ambition. Her perspective, as I understood it, was that I pretty much ruined Halloween by thinking a person could just make something meaningful out of crap from a basement, and that my lassitude rubbed off, preventing her, year after year, from making that epic Medusa costume. References to Headless Hillary and girlfriend's copious wine consumption could not disrupt this narrative.)2001 The Pope. The only other interruption of my abstinence between 1992-2006. I was in love, and making an Episcopal mitre out of cardboard and felt meant getting to hang out at the crappy apartment of the girl I liked, who at that time still refused to sleep with me.

2002 The lost year I spent drunk in New Mexico. I have no idea what happened on Halloween. Probably something bad.

2003-2005 Trauma, of the relationship variety, by which I am punished for not being the right kind of Halloween person. (see 1995)

2006 In a vain – and hasty – attempt to make amends for being the wrong kind of person: Gene Shalit Joins the Navy (curly wig and eyebrows made of chest hair kit from Halloween Headquarters’ bargain bin, Navy uniform, wide-eyed innocence.) This costume, of course, only reinforces the point.

2007 Turns out I'm still the wrong kind of person.

2008 Ideas welcome.

-- Punch