Shalloween

Another Halloween is fast approaching, and I look forward to a year like this one. For the second time in as many years, it takes place on a weekend where I can trick or treat with the kids and survey all the great costumes in the neighborhood.

What I love the most is the joy I see on the kids' faces as they traverse from house to house in search of some unique piece of candy that the world has never seen before. More than any other holiday, religious or otherwise, Halloween is truly about the children.

This is precisely why I have an issue when the adults take it too seriously. I'm not talking about getting dressed up for a Halloween party, or those Munsters and Addams Family nutjobs that turn their houses into a Wes Craven movie set. I'm referring to those adults that spend hours at the costume shop in hot pursuit of the perfect outfit.

The ideal costume is different depending on which sociological and psychological category you fall into.

SEXY SINGLES

If a woman wants to dress up, she has no choice but to wear something out of an Elliot Spitzer sex fantasy. It's not just the nurses I'm talking about. There's the sexy cop, the hot clown, the smoking cowgirl. Even the Toy Story costumes are off the charts. Fortunately, for the Halloween industry, the single woman has no problem playing a stripper in disguise. In fact, they hope that just the right costume at the
right party will lead to getting lucky or at the very least lead to the distribution of a few phone numbers to an Indiana Jones, a character from Twilight, or a gangster.


And that's only if the men wear more traditional costumes. Just this weekend, I saw a host of equally explicit male choices in the cop and doctor categories. Let's see, in law enforcement there was a choice from "The Department of Erections". On the medical side, there were two gynecologists - - "Dr. Seymour Bush" and "Dr. Howie Feltersnatch." Classy stuff. I stood and waited for a few minutes to see the kind of person that would wear these outfits, but I suspect that they only come out after midnight, and break into the store.

MIRROR IMAGE

There's a second group of Halloweeners that feel compelled to project their true selves in the form of a costume. For some reason, they surmise that you don't really know them and this is a golden opportunity to reveal their "true selves" Typically, these are not of the flattering variety, like a man who always wanted to be an astronaut but didn't tell anyone, or a woman who once gave up her dream to become a nun. No, these usually involve the Grim Reaper, a circus ringleader with a menacing whip, or some form of Jason or Freddy Krueger. Are these normal people dressed as killers, or are they really killers dressed as killers? And I don't need to go into any great detail about the witches.

TRANSFORMERS

This last category is the most tolerable of the three. These are people that may or may not be OK with who they are, but just want to take a day off and be someone else. Some people gravitate towards celebrities they idolize or demonize, or they possibly select something reflective of their childhood innocence like a fairy or a Disney princess. Men could be pilots or cowboys and both are pretty acceptable to me. After all, without a good variety of internships in this country, it's possible that many of these guys could have changed their vocation if they were only exposed to the field at an early age. So I say let the surgeons, policemen, and ballet dancers have their fun. It just may lead to second careers.

No matter which category you fall into, just make sure you leave some candy for the kids.