On All My Halloween Costumes
"We had a micro-argument after I said I’ve always preferred a DIY approach."
October 26, 2019
Brooklyn, New York
I was 25 years old
Patrick invited us to a party for tonight but it didn’t start until 11:00. So there was no rush getting home from work and then over to Austin’s. Still tried my best to make as quick a turnaround as possible. Brought supplies to Austin’s so I could make my new favorite cocktail, which I’m calling a VicKy (vodka and “cayennade” kombucha, with fresh lime). And though things felt slightly cordial, there did seem to be an air of improvement for us. Though we were both still in our moods. We dressed up as Wayne and Garth. It was his idea but I was fine with it. Especially since he was willing to foot the $50 bill on the Wayne’s World hat for me and a vintage Aerosmith tee for him. We had a micro-argument that week after I said how I’ve always preferred a DIY approach to my Halloween costumes. He didn’t so much disagree as make it clear that that opinion of mine was wrong. Bless him.
We looked cute. Didn’t bother with wigs, thank God. We had Jessie take our picture. Sarah was also bopping around, what with the fact that she lives with them now—the North Carolina girl who stayed over the night that we all saw Samia. Abby has officially moved out at this point, which briefly left Austin with the stress of adding yet another potentially-crazed stranger to his household. Quincy, 2.0. But, sweet relief: a familiar face. And she’s just the sweetest thing. Still very wide-eyed in the face of all things New York.
For the most part, though, Austin and I just hung out in his room. Biding time til we headed out to Gowanus. Of all places. He played me some Shania Twain songs. We were getting along just fine. Ubered our way there and back and, even in a car, it took a half hour each way. I owed Austin for something so I said I’d take care of the cover charge, which I swore was promoted as $10 per person but ended up being $20 each. And whatever, obviously—we rarely go out like this and it was Halloween weekend but the shock factor certainly brought out a glaringly cheap side of me. Got drinks from the bar and made our way into the crowd to meet up with Patrick, his boyfriend, and a girl friend of theirs.
Charlene was hosting the show and eventually performed to an Avril Lavigne song. That was a treat. I’d never seen her live before and she really is just one of a kind. The premier queen of this, my Brooklyn youth. Surely a personality that will be inseparable from this exact juncture of the waning twentyteens. “I saw her when...” etc. etc. (...years after literally everyone else in this borough had seen her.) I can’t say I had $40 worth of fun but it was a good time.
Saw Ethan from the museum, from afar at first. I was going to approach him at some point but he beat me to it. Not only a fellow Tenementer but my future director, of course. Gonna play a British soldier in his Revolutionary War-set short film next month. He was dressed up as a Fjällräven backpack. Purple pants and shirt and had crafted a big label to strap to his chest. I admired the homemadeness, obviously. Introduced Ethan to Austin and Austin to Ethan before asking Ethan for his assessment on being a Sunday educator (him) and whether it’s superior to working on Saturdays (like me). I’m sure we collectively survive by telling ourselves that our designated weekend shift is the better option. He loves working Sundays but I feel like I’d hate it. That said: I try not to do things on Friday nights so I’m not hungover for work but then I’m usually too tired to do anything on Saturday nights. And there goes the weekend. So who knows.
He danced with us for a little bit but I was feeling too boozeless and Austin seemed ready to go. We left around 2:00 or so. The cars were very expensive so, to escape the congestion and the cost, I suggested my usual trick of walking a couple blocks away to a quieter place, to see if that made a difference. We saved $2. Austin stopped me to take a picture at one point, saying something about my hair or my eyes. I can’t even remember. Maybe he just thought I looked cute. I haven’t seen the picture yet.
October 27, 2021
Brooklyn, New York
I am 27 years old
At nine years old, I boycotted Halloween. But more on that later. Because, pre-sentience, I appeared to like the holiday just fine. I didn’t have any agency in the matter but I did have an Aunt Patti—a skilled enough seamstress to make costumes from scratch for me and my sisters. A November baby, I was a stocky 11 months old when I got dressed up as a skunk for my first Halloween. Black fabric and tufts of white feather boa with a cut-out just gaping enough to accommodate the massive face on my massive head. In certain photos, I look like a nun—which feels prophetic. At age four, and again in another Aunt Patti original, I was an elephant. I’m not being hard on myself when I say there was a very brief window of my childhood when I was cute. As a toddler, I was a dead ringer for my Grandpa Burns. He was born in 1928. And by, say, seven years old, in thanks to a too-rigidly gelled hair flip and a constantly flushed complexion, I started looking very, “Don’t ya know there’s a war goin’ on?!” All this to say that, as a pre-k pachyderm, I was cute.
Going into elementary school, I was still willing to act my age. Showing up to kindergarten as a very Dracula-looking vampire, accessorizing my cape and fangs with this gaudy, faux-jeweled cross necklace that came from either a PartyCity or my mother’s caboodle. Obsessed with Buffy at the time, loving and idolizing and desperate to be Sarah Michelle Gellar, it was still a couple years until I could ask for a gold crucifix just like hers as a communion present. But, in the meantime, fingering that dainty and beautiful chain around my neck felt so exciting and glamorous and right, even though I was old enough already to know it was wrong.
As with most endings in life, I had no way of knowing that 2002’s Halloween would be my last—for the next decade. That said: my resentment of the holiday had already taken root. The antics of it all just feeling impossibly adolescent to me: an eight-year-old still several years away from actual adolescence. My deeper, more subconscious discomfort with pretending to be someone I wasn’t not exactly accessible to me quite yet. So, without consulting anyone on the matter, I figured I’d get my face painted up and wear the closest thing I owned to a costume: the suit I got, naturally, for my communion the year prior. My mother was halfway through bloodying up my face when she connected the dots that her child was about to attend his suburban New Jersey grammar school dressed up as a dead businessman—a cool 12-and-a-half months after September 11th. She told me to put on a plaid shirt and overalls and off I went to Miss Redzinski’s third grade classroom dressed up as a zombie scarecrow. My black eyes and stitched mouth scowling all day long as I pledged, then and there, that me and Halloween were over.
Unfortunately never one to lack in willfulness, I stuck to my pledge. Halloween 2003 rolled around and I showed up to school decidedly, protestingly out of costume. Come middle school, my moral opposition to the holiday became, if nothing else, a less visible hill I was willing to die upon. No more costumed parades around the school, less and less expectation to trick-or-treat with friends. And so, ten entire years passed before I’d deign to wear another costume. But then, in my freshman year, as close as I’d ever come to giving anything “the college try,” I wore jammers from my high school swim team, a golden medal I received upon my induction into the National Honor Society, and went shirtless under an unzipped windbreaker—I was Michael Phelps. Juliette took a photo of me in costume in which my jawline looked dangerous and I inexplicably had abs. I made it my Facebook profile picture and it got more likes than anything else I’d ever posted. No better than a test rat with a taste for sugar, desperate for another cube, me and Halloween were back together.
In the years since, I’ve dressed up as Andy Warhol. As Kramer. As my old Emmanuel professor Chris Craig. I had a two-year stint where I played around with a certain West Village person’s name, going first as “Sarah Jurassic Parker” and then as “Sarah Jessica Parking Ticket.” Fearing predictability but still fond of wordplay, I dressed up for my first Halloween in New York as “Linda Trip Fontaine.” A la The Virgin Suicides heartthrob, I had long hair and wore aviators with vaguely Nixon-era looking Chelsea boots, coupled with the blazer, skirt, and visible wire of the Clinton-era’s foremost rat. I went to a party where the attendees who bothered to ask me who I was mostly just said “oh” in response. Then, of course, we were Wayne’s World. And I haven’t dressed up since. Perhaps I don’t need to explain why October of 2020 went without a costume but Halloween of this not-actually-post post-pandemic year is right around the corner and I have nothing planned. It’s not on purpose—if party plans come up, I’m sure I could throw something together but it’s okay if they don’t. I’m still a Saturday educator so when I get off work this weekend and head to the train, it’s likely I’ll walk past kids going into Duane Reade to ask for candy, that I’ll see girls dressed as Megan Fox fighting on the corner of Orchard Street with their Machine Gun Kelly boyfriends. And if I feel even a little sad, I hope I can remember how badly I once wanted exactly this, a day to walk through costumed crowds in all my own clothes and feel certain I was being so completely myself.
I always think even more of you when Halloween comes. I only loved it because I got to make you and your sisters costumes. Nice read bought back Great loving memories. Happy Halloween my Lovey 🎃❤️