The eve of Halloween is marked in the city by the appearance of pop-up costume stores. One has filled a corner a block from my apartment building. In the many aisles within, I recognized a few items that would have been recognized in the Halloweens of my mid-century youth: pointy witches’ hats; plastic jack-o’-lanterns for receiving candy and pennies; tinselly little tiaras for junior princesses. Most of the other holiday gear was a lesson in how much popular culture has passed me by. Who are these figures that you can dress up as? I did read the Harry Potter books, and I have seen the faces of all the various homicidal maniacs, though never the movies in which they appeared (and appeared and appeared). When my late documentary director Leo Eaton taught film school in Austin, two of his students made The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; Leo’s van appears in the movie. When he mentioned this years later to a junior colleague, the youngster exclaimed, “You are retro hip!” Some costumes need no introduction. The outfits for sexy young ladies — nurses, flappers; legs, bosoms — can go straight to an Ivy League sorority. The infant costumes can be cute: baby cows, baby cops. We feed them, they order us around.
On Halloween night itself come those trying to shock. Easiest and dullest are the sex jokes. Nuns flashing phalluses are a hardy perennial. Homosexuals are so amusing, especially ex-Catholic homosexuals. One costume, reported to me by a photographer who used to roam the Village as the night went on, looking for subjects, sounded truly queasy-making: a man in a pink suit, pillbox hat, and white gloves matching those Jackie Kennedy wore in the convertible in Dallas, complete with bloodstains. Is there any sorrow like unto our sorrow?
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