About Halloween and Realizing Who and What You Will Never Be

The question arises at different times of the year. Sometimes I'm the one to ask, and sometimes David is. But the question is always the same: "What are we going to be for Halloween?"

For three years running, it was the twins from The Shining, a costume that inspired much online research about where to source matching adult-sized pinafores, wigs, and white knee socks. One year, I voted for Sam Elliott and Cher in Mask, because how could you not want to look like this for at least one night of your life:

In truth, many of my costume ideas have come from Cher movies, in part because I have never recovered from the time my San Francisco therapist told me I reminded him of her. A lot of them have also come from Barbra Streisand movies. This year, I argued for Kelly Clarkson and Molly the automaton bird, but David reasonably pointed out that the gay community will already have this covered.

But for all our ideas, all our elaborate, best-laid plans to get dressed up and go to the Halloween parade in the Village, the answer to the question, every single goddamn year, is simply: nothing. We haven't manifested any of these costumes, and probably never will.

And at a certain point, our dependable failure transformed Halloween from a night about competitive lawn displays and culturally sanctioned begging into my own existential reckoning. Because as much as I would like to think I'm the kind of person who will channel my creativity/free time/general love of dress-up toward the construction of a Halloween costume, I am just...not.

It was not always thus: there was a time when I was decent at Halloween. This time was the first 30-plus years of my life. I think back to when I was 11 or 12 and insisted on going as a model in one of those high-WASP Ralph Lauren ads, or when I was 30 and went as Natasha Fatale to my boyfriend's Boris Badenov. That my boyfriend actually was named Boris, and Russian, made this perfect, as did the slinky purple dress I wore, a schmatte I'd originally purchased to wear dancing in the gay bars of Birmingham, Al.

I look back on these costumes with fondness and a touch of forensic melancholy: when did I change? Whence commenced the slow morph from person who dressed up to person who insisted that she wanted to but ultimately just couldn't be bothered?

Sometimes I think the truest mark of adulthood is the point at which you go from waiting for your life to start to realizing that it started quite some time ago and you've been here all along, treading around in it. And this is really what I think about when I think about Halloween: not the candy or the 15-foot-tall skeletons* that colonize my neighborhood, or even the costumes, but the point in life when reality quietly and irrevocably subsumes aspiration like a python swallowing a goat. You realize who you are, and that having an individual personality is a bit like having a set weight: you might fluctuate, but you always come back to where you're meant to be, whether you want to or not. Also, to state the obvious, a great many fully grown adults don't feel the need to dress up for Halloween.

Having said all this, I lied to you a little bit. Two years ago, David and I did manage to come up with a Halloween costume. We'd gotten married a month earlier and decided to repurpose our wedding clothes to be a zombie bride and groom. We sat on our stoop and handed out $100 worth of candy in 17 minutes.** Then we walked around for a bit, two ghouls in a crowd, came home, and took off our costumes and make-up. We had exceeded our expectations and proved something to ourselves. Then we went right back to being where we were meant to be.

*This trend seems to have started two or three years ago and I can't help but feel it's some kind of weird intra-neighbor dick-measuring thing.
**Welcome to Park Slope.

What I'm consuming this week:

Reading: Maria Semple's latest novel, Go Gentle.

Watching: The Sentinel, a schlock-tastic 1977 horror movie notable for a) being filmed in Brooklyn Heights, and b) casting Chris Sarandon, Ava Gardner, Jerry Orbach, Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum, Sylvia Miles, Beverly D'Angelo, and Richard Dreyfus all in one movie. (Thanks, Mike and Kristian!)

Listening: This interview with the great Betty Gilpin is so much fun.