Fall is here! It’s my favorite time of year – the smell, the changing leaves, signs that all the good holidays are approaching (not that Flag Day isn’t a great holiday, but there’s no special food or gift getting involved).
First up, Halloween. Now, I went to a Catholic school, so we could call it Halloween and we could dress up. Some schools around here call it ”Autumn Festival” or some stupid PC name and the kiddies aren’t allowed to dress up anymore. Because Spiderman and Cinderella are offensive and apparently, they were also characters in the Bible, so those atheists want NOTHING to do with St. Spiderman and his web of lies.
My brother wore this one. Yours probably did, too.
But I digress. I was either a clown or hobo every year, because it was better to make your own costume than pay for a crappy plastic mask that scratched the hell out of your face and had no breathing holes and an elastic string that would inevitably break by the second house you visited. I was a “punk rocker” once in the 80s, which was just basically an excuse to spray paint an old t-shirt and wear two socks that didn’t match. I had no idea what punk rock was back then, but I very often found myself wearing mismatched socks anyway, so at least I had an excuse for it one day of the year.
Wilford has not changed since Cocoon! Well, except now he has diabetes, I guess.
So all the channels are playing every horror movie they can find. And, I must say, those edited for t.v. versions of Friday the 13th are actually frightening when you see the scene fade and then Gus Witherspoon is telling you about his diabetes. I was never a fan of horror movies, and it’s not because I was too scared to watch them, it just didn’t make sense to be scared of slow moving monster-people. I was scared of talking to real people, so I didn’t have time to even think about monster-people.
Maybe I didn’t get it. Teens making out in the woods, okay, eventually I got that. Some 10 year-old boy drowns, his mom decides to kill a bunch of teenagers who had nothing to do with her son’s death and all of a sudden, the dead kid is in his thirties with a receding hairline with no ambition to actually chase people down, but plod quietly behind them with a really heavy tool and wait for one of them to fall down. That isn’t scary to me. That just seems lazy.
Bugs out trick-or-treating by himself seemed so cool to me.
I preferred the special Halloween episodes of my favorite t.v. shows (I still do, actually). Remember The Facts of Life episode where the gals get killed off one by one, and Tootie is left on her own to face the killer? Or how about the M*A*S*H episode where Fr. Mulcahy brings that “dead” soldier back to life? And why do I remember Judd Hirsch dressed up as Dracula talking to the wolfman? But my favorite was when they’d show the Bugs Bunny Halloween special – it all revolved around “Witch Hazel” – the one who lost bobby pins whenever she took off from the room. Maybe that’s why Halloween really isn’t scary to me. I was desensitized by cartoons and fictional t.v. characters. Don’t get me wrong – dark, quiet streets and creaking floors give me the chills every now and then, but it’s not like it’s scarier because it’s Halloween. Plus, I kinda have to keep it together on account of the kiddos.
