DragonWriter’s Neighborhood

By the time you had kids, you had established yourself as a theatrical costumer. While most of your clients were theatre groups, you also sewed for weddings, school groups, goths, Renaissance faire freaks, and drag queens. Occasionally, someone asked you to make a Halloween costume, but most of them wanted something generic with no real creativity involved. Boring.

But once your first child was old enough to trick-or-treat, everything changed. You delighted in designing cute little costumes for her. When she was three, she asked to be a pink butterfly and you made a beautiful costume, complete with big, sparkly, wire-and-tulle wings. You thought she would be happy when she put it on, but instead she just frowned.

“What's wrong?” you asked. “Don't you like your costume?”

“I like it,” she said, “but it doesn't work.”

You had no idea what she meant by that, so you asked her. She looked up at you with a sad little face and said “It doesn't make me fly.”

So you had to explain to her why a costume couldn't make a human fly. Maybe she understood or maybe she didn't, but she got lots of candy on Halloween and the costume won third prize in a national magazine's costume contest.

The next year her brother was able to trick-or-treat, and you dressed him as Batman ... or, more appropriately, Batbaby in training pants. He was only a year old and loved running around in his Batman cape. That wasn't the last Batman costume you would make for him. Several years later, he wanted to be Batman again.

And so for the next several years, you made any costume your children could think of ... from superheroes to princesses to Disney characters, and they won lots of costume competitions along the way. People started asking you to make costumes for their children, especially if they were going to enter a competition. Your costumes either won or placed every time. They got noticed, and you made more money.

You even made costumes for yourself. You wore them when you took the kids to Halloween parties and also when you took them trick-or-treating around the neighborhood. One of your most memorable costumes was a Rapunzel outfit with hair made from old wigs that you tied together and wrapped with sequin strings. It trailed on the floor and was so heavy it gave you headaches when you wore it. But it looked good. Your Cleopatra costume was pretty nice too, with a skirt made of strips of different colored sequined fabric and a heavy jeweled collar.

Eventually, however, the kids grew up, you got divorced, and your bad back forced you to quit the costuming business. But you got a job with a major shipping company, and when you found out they dressed up for Halloween, you threw some old things together just for old times sake. You knew it wouldn't be good enough to win their competition ... after all, the company had over 200 employees. But apparently, your thrown-together costume impressed them, because you were one of the three winners.

And now? Now you live with your new husband in a country that doesn't celebrate Halloween, although they do dress up for certain occasions. Your back is a quite a bit better now, and you are thinking of starting another costuming business. It might succeed, or it might fail, but it doesn't really matter. You'll be doing what you love to do ... a passion that started long long ago when you started dressing up to go trick-or-treating on October 31.

Wearing costumes and getting candy, however, is not the only aspect of Halloween. When you were in Brownies, you went to your first haunted house. You remember feeling anxious when the bus pulled up to the old house, but once you got inside there was no time to be scared. You all joined hands and ran through the house. You didn't get to see much of anything, you went through it so fast. But you weren't afraid at all. You came to the natural conclusion that haunted houses were not scary.

A few years later, when you were about ten or eleven, you asked your mother to take you and your sister to the local haunted house. The two of you walked through alone from room to room, where witches, ghosts, and other monsters tried to scare you. You knew they were just people dressed up and anyway, you were more interested in the way the rooms were decorated. There was one you particularly liked. There was a giant spider web made of rope and a woman dressed like a spider up in the corner of it. You were intrigued and wondered how they made it.

Then you came to a room with a gorilla in a cage. When you tried to edge past him, he reached through the bars and tried to grab you. For some strange reason, even though you had to know in the back of your mind it was just some dude in a monkey suit, you and your sister both started screaming. Someone who worked there came and showed you that the gorilla wouldn't harm you, but it was too late. The two of you were too frightened, and had to be led out of the haunted house, crying.

At fourteen, you looked back on that incident with embarrassment. How could you have been so ... well ... juvenile? And how could your mother still think you were like that? She flat out refused when you asked to go to the haunted house that year. She said she was afraid you would get scared again. It was so unfair that you had to listen to your friends tell about how cool it was. And you had to make up lies when they asked you when you were going. You certainly couldn't tell them the truth ... that your mother was treating you like a baby. That would be just too embarrassing.

You were obsessed with haunted houses, though, and decided that if you couldn't go to one, you would make your own to scare the neighborhood kids. You decorated the garage with paper ghosts hanging from the ceiling, and you even made a bowl of spaghetti so that the kids would have to reach into the bowl of “brains” to get their candy. The kids who came were quite impressed, though not scared. Still, you considered your little haunted house a raging success and it helped ease the disappointment you felt at not being able to go to the real one.

The next year you were a bit more clever about getting to the haunted house. When you found out that one of your best friends was going, you arranged to spend the night with her so you could go together. The haunted house was at the mall, where you met a couple of other friends waiting in line. You were a bit worried at first that your mother was right and you would be petrified again, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. Most of the “ghouls” were teenage boys, and they would grab you as you walked by. You later found out that several women had made complaints about the “ghouls” grabbing them in inappropriate places, but you and your friends didn't care where they grabbed you. After all, you were fifteen, your hormones were raging, and you went back seven times.

The next time you remember going to a haunted house was three years later. You decided to take your boyfriend and pretend to be scared so he could protect you. Unfortunately, your boyfriend had been smoking the wacky weed before he picked you up, and he didn't get the hint. He went through the haunted house making funny comments and insulting all the “spooks.” It was hilarious, and you laughed so hard you thought you would die.

Fast forward four years. At twenty-two, you married that same boyfriend, who had joined the Army, and moved to another state. On Halloween, you got together with another couple and decided to find something “Halloweeny” to do. So you all jumped on your motorcycles and rode to the local haunted house.

The person who led you through introduced himself as a cannibal, and promised that you would be frightened when you left the house. You told him he couldn't scare you no matter how hard he tried, and he said: “Then you are the person I will eat next.”

You didn't miss a beat. “Only in your wildest, most erotic fantasies,” you said.

His face turned nine shades of red.

Everyone else laughed.

Later on, the same guy crept up behind you when he thought you weren't looking. You saw him out of the corner of your eye, though, and when he was almost close enough to touch you, you turned around really fast and whispered “boo.” He nearly jumped out of his costume.

It was a fun night, but at the end of it, you realized that haunted houses no longer held the appeal they once did. You were too old for trick-or-treat and bored with haunted houses. You thought this was the end of your Halloween fun.

Then you had kids.

Your first memory of Halloween is rather cloudy. You were probably no older than three. You remember sitting in the back of a car wearing a bride costume, watching other children trick-or-treating. You wanted to go too, but your parents wouldn't let you get out of the car. They just kept driving around the neighborhood slowly. You remember them saying something about moving. Perhaps they were scoping out a neighborhood they were thinking about moving into, or maybe they told you you could not get out of the car because it was moving. When you grew older, you never did ask your mother about it. Perhaps it was never really important, because, after all, you do remember getting some candy that night. And that was what really mattered.

Your next memory was maybe a year or two later. You were in a store looking at the Halloween costumes. The costumes came in big flat boxes with clear tops so you could see the mask that came with the costume. You were very excited at being able to pick your own and you searched carefully for the perfect one. You don't remember which one you chose, but it was most likely some kind of princess. You had an obsession with princesses back in those days.

You remember how you felt on Halloween when you put the costume on. It didn't matter that it consisted of a cheap scratchy plastic dress, a bit of lace, and a hard plastic mask that felt funny when you breathed. When you wore it, you believed you really were a princess and that everyone who saw you believed it too. For one magical night a year, you truly got to be someone else. There was nothing better than that.

Flash forward another year or so. You wore a bigger size costume now, and you had chosen to be Cinderella. But when you took the costume out of the box, you were not as thrilled with it as before. The mask looked fake with its bright yellow plastic hair, but the most horrible part was the dress itself. It had “Cinderella” written across the front of it along with scenes from the Disney movie. You might have been seven, but you weren't born yesterday. You knew that Cinderella would not wear a dress with her name and pictures of herself on it. You were very disappointed and did not feel at all like Cinderella when you went trick-or-treating that year. But you still got lots of candy and the candy was good.

The next year you became a Brownie, and at one of their parties, everyone was supposed to dress like hobos. With the help of your parents, you pieced together a costume out of old clothes, dirtied your face, and tied a filled handkerchief to the back of an old broom handle. You were quite surprised to find out there was a costume competition, and even more surprised that you won it.

That incident boosted your confidence and you never looked at those boxed Halloween costumes again. You made your own. You don't remember all of them, but you know one year you went as a gypsy wearing several skirts and your mother's old costume jewelry. You loved that costume and received many compliments on it.

When you were about twelve and getting a bit too old for trick-or-treat, your mother asked you to take your younger sister around the neighborhood. You wanted candy too, so you made yourself a witch costume, complete with an ugly mask. Not only did you get lots of candy, you terrorized the younger kids by scaring the wits out of them. It was a good night.

That was the last year you went trick-or-treating. But your love of costumes continued.

At eighteen, you went to your first nightclub Halloween party, and entered the costume competition, wearing a costume you had designed yourself. You won two hundred bucks. During the following Halloween seasons, you went from nightclub to nightclub winning competitions and raking in the cash. People were impressed with your skills and asked you to make costumes for them. Theatre groups started hiring you as well. Soon you had your own small costuming business.