The Scariest Thing About Halloween? Baseball Fans

First of all, Happy Halloween! I hope everyone got lots of pumpkin treats and trick-or-treaters at their door.

This Halloween was a pain in the rear end. I'd just gotten up and was getting dressed around quarter after 8AM when Donna, the head front end manager, called. Could I come in as soon as possible? A cashier called out. I wasn't able to get in until around 11. I had to eat breakfast and get my Halloween costume together. I did manage to get Garfield's Halloween Adventure, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and two Monkees horror-oriented episodes, "I Was a Teenage Monster" from the first season and "Monstrous Monkee Mash" from the middle of the second.

I found out why I was called in when I arrived in my wings and flowered wreaths and wand. It was unusually busy for Halloween, with long lines. It seems Philadelphia held a parade to honor the Phillies today...and they couldn't have picked a worse possible day to do it. Kids were out of school (even here in South Jersey), adults called out of work en masse, and two million people were projected to try to make it into Center City. That's where that errant cashier (and many other Acme employees) ended up - the parade. Parades are nice, but making a good paycheck is nicer...and a lot more important when your rent is due.

At least the weather was gorgeous. It was sunny, windless, and warmer than it has been, but not too much for this time of year. As Matt at X-Entertainment mentioned at his annual Halloween Countdown, it even looks like Halloween. The trees are turning lovely colors, all golds and reds and oranges, and they crunch so nicely. Maybe that's why, even after the parade ended, the Acme cleared out and was more like it's usual dead-as-a-doornail Halloween calm.

Most of the adults who worked in the morning didn't dress up, but I saw more costumes as the day went on. There was a college girl in a gorgeous pirate costume (including one heck of a hat), a teenage witch, a dancer, several baseball players (surprise, surprise), a samurai, a black cat, a Scotsman (complete with kilt), and a teenage boy in drag. (Said he lost a bet, poor kid.) We gave out a little candy, but the Audubon Acme is on the busy corner of Nicholson and the Black Horse Pike, where mose kids can't (and shouldn't) cross.

(Note to self: try to get an actual costume together next year. My flower fairy get-up got a lot of snide jokes from older men who thought I was a "Hawaiian Angel" or something. Do it earlier than a week before Halloween, too.)

I got off in time for the tail-half of trick-or-treating. I saw lots of kids on Kendall Boulevard alone roaming up and down streets. Some little ones were with their parents. Older kids were with their siblings or in groups. Teenagers, some in costume, some not bothering, were also roaming in packs.

As I mentioned last year, I was never terribly fond of trick-or-treating. It seemed kind of pointless to me. I've always loved dressing up, though. That's really what I love most about Halloween - getting to dress up and show off my costume and have fun. Of course, when my sisters and I were young, we always had well-made costumes. No dollar-store plastic masks and smocks for us! Mom's a master seamstress and has made our costumes (and "dress-ups") for as long as I can remember.

The earliest Halloween costume I remember was my Disney Fairy Godmother outfit. I had a blue dress and a dark blue cape. We had that dark blue cape for years in the dress-up basket. I couldn't have been any more than three or four. There's a cute picture from about when I'm in first grade of us three girls in our Halloween costumes. Rose is a witch in an old wig spray-painted purple, a long home-made black dress with gold ribbon trim, and a real broom. I'm a queen in a purple gown from some Cape May Stage production Mom did the costumes for, a spray-painted cardboard crown, and a "scepter" made of a craft-store wooden ball and dowel. Anny, barely a year old, is a totally adorable Little Red Riding Hood in a little home-made red felt cape, a pale blue dress, and a blue-and-white striped apron.

Mom has another great picture of home-made costumes from when Rose and I were just starting high school. I was beginning my great obsession with mysteries and old movies and had elected to be a film noir private eye. I wore Mom's black fedora leftover from her Annie Hall phase in the late 70s, Mom's best black tie, old leather shoes, my own white shirt and black jeans, and a cap gun and handcuffs taken from a dollar-store police officer set. Rose, on the other hand, had just gotten into HER great obsession - fantasy novels. She dressed as a "Sun Goddess" in a white gown with gold trim that Mom made, sheer stockings, white heels, a gold spray-painted wire crown, and glittering suns on her cheeks.