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"Halloween Edition"
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david jakupca
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Oct 31, 2007 05:58 PST
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BEREA BUZZLETTER
"Halloween Edition"
The current Berea temperature is 48 under sunny skies. For Halloween
tonight, expect a high of 68 during the day
but dropping to 45 after sunset. Trick or treating is officially held
in Berea from 6 to 8 p.m., with no rain in the forecast.
On BereaBuzz.com ( http://www.bereabuzz.com ) today:
- It's "Halloween with Snow." Humorist Jan C. Snow answers the
question "What are you dressing up as?"
- In answer to inquiries: Yes, BereaBuzz.com will be
publishing its "General Election Recommendations for Voters" on
candidates and issues on Berea's ballot.
We hope you have a good day.
The BereaBuzz.com workerbees
"Be a Part of the Buzz in Berea!"
Be a Smart Advertiser in Berea via Spon-@BereaBuzz.com
"What Are You Dressing Up As?"
By Jan C. Snow
Sunday 10.28.07
Last week, someone asked me a question for which I had no ready
answer... a question no one's asked me for decades. "So what are you
going to be for Halloween?" my friend wanted to know. "With any luck,
gone," I told her.
She rephrased the query. "No, I mean, what are you dressing up as?"
Me? Dressing up? I suppose I could buy some pantyhose and heels, put
on a skirt and disguise myself as a grownup. That would fool almost
anyone who knows me, but I'm not willing to be that uncomfortable even
for a few hours.
I'm not so old that I don't remember when "What are you going to be for
Halloween?" was a question of elementary school importance, second only
to "What are you getting for Christmas?" Neither am I too old to be
embarrassed by the memory of my nearly annual foray into pink
princessness. This vain exercise was interrupted only by the year I
dressed as a cowgirl in what were really just my everyday second-grade
clothes... a Dale Evans fringed leather skirt and vest that I wore to
school day after day after day with red boots that allowed me to ride
without a horse. (My mother was a patient woman.)
Part of the difficulty with the pink princess thing was that I was so
decidedly unprincess-like: not one pretty thing about me. I was always
slightly grubby around the edges, a skinny, long-legged kid with scrawny
wrists sticking from the sleeves of my pseudo-gossamer gown. No one
would ever take me for fairy-tale royalty. Add to that, pink
paradoxically washes out my complexion, making me look as if I'm about
to come down with the flu.
Then there are the glasses, without which, even as a kid, I was barely
ambulatory. Put the glasses on over the silver-lame half-mask and
you're a horror movie insect. Slide the mask over the glasses and you
give a distorted, space-alien shape to the face. Either way, I soon
consigned the mask to the bottom of my bag, all the better to scurry
quickly from house to house and devote myself to the real work of
efficiently collecting as much candy as possible. We lived in a small
town and, masked or not, everybody knew who you were anyway.
Dreams of Disney princesshood die hard but self-awareness soon won out.
Shortly after I reached double digits, I took refuge in the generic bum
disguise... trashy jeans and an old jacket of Dad's over a faded flannel
shirt... not that different from most of my current wardrobe, although
the look was accessorized with an artificial 5-o'clock shadow and a
shapeless felt hat found in the back of the hall closet. This worked
much better for me. Most of my friends were boys, and I slipped into
being just one of the gang.
My mother heartily approved of my approach, which took her out of the
costume-providing business entirely. A no-nonsense and decidedly
non-crafty person, Mom once attended a party, for which invitees were
instructed to dress as geographical locations, wearing her everyday
clothing with an alarm clock hung from a cord around her neck. She was
Wake Island. You have to admire that kind of simplicity.
I stretched the bum thing into young adulthood, thus weathering years
when my female contemporaries favored the sexy Catwoman-Bat Girl-Wonder
Woman look, something I knew wouldn't work any better for me than pink
princessness. I envied my friend Tom's annual disguise as a nun on
roller skates, but I possessed neither the habit or the balance for
that.
In my full adulthood, I've adopted a truly minimalist approach to the
whole Halloween thing. When I find myself in any sort of
disguise-mandatory situation, I wear the black jeans and turtleneck that
are normal attire and top the ensemble with a T-shirt that reads, "This
is my costume."
Unfortunately, the T-shirt, as you might expect, is jack-o'lantern
orange, the one color I look worse in than pink. Still, I think Mom
would be proud. Copyright 2000-2007 © Jan C. Snow
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