Like many other small towns, we have an annual Halloween parade where elementary school kids don their favorite alter egos and march up Main Street. Three hundred princesses, mummys, storm troopers, witches and a host of other little wide eyed spectres paddle past a crowd of beaming parents, onlookers and stalled traffic. It’s a treat.
This year, of course, I had a couple of dogs in this race: Batman running in the K, and Lady Gaga in the 4th. I put all I had on both of them to win. I better have because I made Kit’s homemade Gaga costume: blonde wig, Tish’s old jacket with newsprint shoulder padding, a pair of pippilongstockings, an industrial strength stapler, foamcore, and a silver glitter pen. Just how the real Gaga would do it! It turned out he was the only Gaga in the entire pack. Doc had a prefab Batman affair that only needed fitting. So after I finished the costumes, I made cookies for Kit’s class party because he isn’t making friends so easily and I figured I could grease the skids with some good old fashioned sugar, butter and chocolate. I watched the parade from a street corner perch and when they got home, they pawed through bags full of goodies, exchanging war stories about wardrobe malfunctions, people they saw, and candy they’d already gobbled.
Now comes the fun part: spending the night telling them they’ve had enough candy, watching them go through the roof because they’ve had too much candy, breaking up fights over whose candy is who’s and unfair tradzies, keeping them from feeding their candy to the dogs, and following trails of wrappers like breadcrumbs around the house like discarded jetsam in the wake of a tug boat. Oh, and Kit brought the cookies back because the other kids said they were burnt!
Some help I turned out to be. And to think Halloween doesn’t even arrive until Sunday.