All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

My husband and I are that nice middle aged couple who don’t go to Halloween parties anymore and give out pretzels to trick-or-treaters so that if there are any leftovers in the house, we can indulge without going off our diets. And we’re fine with that.


As a child, though, Halloween was always one of my favorite holidays, right next to Christmas. Trick-or-treat was a big deal, and there was none of these time-limited-periods-on-a-Sunday-afternoon that some communities try to get away with nowadays. In Swissvale, where I grew up, trick or treat always took place on October 31st, and there were no time limits. We would carry pillowcases as our treat bags and trick-or-treat until we couldn’t walk the hills anymore or until the pillowcases were full.

But the part of Halloween I liked the best was dressing up – in my case, as a Gypsy. I liked dressing up as a Gypsy so much that I chose that as my costume almost every year of my childhood. I wore a colorful one of my Grandma’s babushkas on my head and another around my waist. My mother lent me some of her costume jewelry - big hoop earrings and beaded necklaces - for the occasion, and let me put on her rouge and bright red lipstick. I would also draw a little beauty mark on my cheek. It sure was a nice break from those navy blue jumpers they made us wear every day at St. Anselm’s.

My favorite costume as a teenager was when I went to St. Anselm’s annual Halloween dance as Huckleberry Finn when I was a high school freshman. I found a straw hat and a corncob pipe, blackened my front tooth with a piece of black construction paper, tucked my hair up under the hat, and wore my favorite flannel shirt and denim cutoffs with pair of suspenders. This set me apart from my classmates in many ways. I don’t remember any of them dressing up as their favorite character from literature, and even my true friends who loved me just the way I was thought my obsession with Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn was a little odd.

Without a doubt, though, my most inspired costume was the time I went to a Halloween party (when I was an adult) as a Freudian Slip. I wore a full white slip with the following velcroed on the front:

Sigmund Freud (1856—1939)

Father of Psychoanalysis

Manic Depressive

Insomniac

Once asked “What do women want?”

The answers:

1) A blackish square-ish, round-ish purse that is not too large but is large enough to carry all she needs that can easily go from work to a night out, and

2) A man whose ego has his id firmly under control but who has enough of a superego to be socially acceptable and gainfully employed.

Honestly, what women want is that simple.  I don’t know why Freud was so clueless on the topic.