By S.L. Wisenberg
It must be a sign of age not to know anyone throwing a Halloween party. In my 20s everybody was always having parties, and in grad school, costume parties for no reason. We’d dress up as the Virgin/Whore Dichotomy or Free-Floating Anxiety. (Free-Floating Anxiety told me later that she would beat her head against walls, literally.) We even had a prom. I made a dance card and collected the signatures of my partners, sure at least a few of them would be famous someday.
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In my early 30s, we’d dress up as Daylight Savings Time or a Stranger in These Here Parts and drive south to Joy Darrow’s famous Halloween party in her big old house on Prairie Avenue. She was a well-known photographer and journalist. At first we were sort of invited–friend of a friend of a friend–then it became clear it was open to anyone who’d pay the cover charge. The food and drink were free, and spread among the rooms in her gallery downstairs. I remember a photographer who wore a tuxedo and was shooting people with a squirt gun. Unfortunately he startled my friend Frieda, who–I think I remember this right–threw lettuce on his head. I met a reporter there who was, for that night, Carmen Miranda, with fruit piled on her head (I think there were a few Carmen Mirandas that night). We later became friends. It must have been a long time ago because I remember a guy whose costume consisted of miniature roads and cars. He was a freeway that had collapsed during the Bay Area earthquake.
But I swear there was a time when my real friends had Halloween parties. I think. But at some point, your friends, instead of having Halloween parties, have bowls of candy to buy and set out for the neighborhood kids, then children of their own who dress up, and then, for example, a child who is too old and independent (tenth grade) to help his father carve a jack-o’-lantern, which he used to love to do. This last bit I heard Halloween afternoon from a friend.
Everyone seemed young and innocent and collegiate, sort of like the crowds at the parties I used to go to with my friend Jessica (aka Carmen Miranda)–non-costume parties, thrown by very young, very small people in apartments with big furniture and low ceilings and I’d think about the time I saw President Eisenhower in a parade. (It was 1960 in Houston and I was in kindergarten.) Nothing makes you feel older and more alienated than being among tiny pretty women wearing more makeup than you wore in the entire 1980s and talking about celebrities you’ve never heard of. Here they seemed as young, but welcoming, well, accepting; we were invited to the same party, no? And we were all in costume. I felt comfortable, much more comfortable than the guy in a burlap sack standing near us holding a Streetwise looked. There were three Brownies, sashes and all, sitting together on a white couch, and nearby, a woman all in red who said, in response to my question, that she was not the devil. She was something from an old animated film. You’re too young to remember, she said, and I thought, I doubt it.
I got the hiccups, and Phil said boo a few times but it didn’t help. We went downstairs to the kitchen for some water, but that didn’t help. We passed the Streetwise vendor, who looked like he hadn’t moved.
Niquie and Phil had to get up at six the next morning to stand in line to reserve a Park District building for their wedding in June. We had planned, once we were back at their apartment, to carve a pumpkin, but instead Niquie put it in the window among some big plants and I went home.
