Halloween

Each holiday comes with it’s own brand of unpleasantness and disappointment.  New Year’s Eve offers forced joviality along with the prospect of being French kissed by a blowzy stranger with Cold Duck on her breath.  Christmas means spending lots of thought and money on presents for people who already have way too much stuff and enduring long hours with folks you’d never spend five minutes with if you didn’t share a smidge of DNA.     

However, most holidays also have an upside.  Thanksgiving often brings out the charitable side of people who donate to food drives and volunteer too serve dinner to those in need.  Easter signals the final days of winter and sometimes the final round of the Masters.

Then, there’s Halloween, the holiday, with no redeeming features. For starters, it’s not even a proper “holiday” because nobody gets to miss school or work. 

When my brother and I were 4 1/2 we were taken to see a movie called X-76 Bloodrust. I can’t find a single living soul who has ever heard of this movie. Not even John Landis.  What I gleaned about the plot, which was observed through a space between two fingers covering my eyes, was that this undulating creature (that looked like vomit, by the way) was created in a Sparkletts bottle, and if it touched you, you would die. I think it might have been the poorer cousin of The Blob.

The denouement had this vomit creature trying to force its way out of a baggage hold in an airplane and the passengers freaking out. My brother slept with a nightlight for the next 11 years. His head wrapped tightly with the sheet and just the tip of his nose poking out so he could breath, because we all know that monsters can’t touch sheets or blankets. I on the other hand became fascinated with Science Fiction and horror.

Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo, Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein, Bela Lugosi’s and Christopher Lee’s Dracula and Henry Hull’s Werewolf of London (definitely more sexy than Lon Chaney Jr.) I even remember an early Humphrey Bogart chiller called The Return of Dr.X. where he played a man who had been executed and was brought back to life by the laziest of plot devices: electricity. His line to the girl he kidnapped and brought to a remote cabin will stay with me forever: “Don’t bother to scream, no one can hear you”, as he pulls out the biggest fuckin’ hypodermic needle I’d ever seen. Thass what I’m talking ‘bout!

From the NY Time Magazine

For anyone who grew up near Circleville, Ohio, the possibilities of pumpkin are a measure of one's maturity, one's level of sophistication, the depth of one's world view. There, in a town that would otherwise be unknown, is the Circleville Pumpkin Show -- four days of unabashed Americana that, since 1903, have featured seven parades each year and a range of pumpkin contests to rival the Olympics. The medium is accorded such respect that the farmer who produces the largest pumpkin is considered agriculture's own Einstein. The premier pumpkin carver is accorded an awe worthy of Michelangelo.

And Miss Pumpkin. Well, the real mystery about Marilyn Monroe is how she became an American icon without ever being crowned with pumpkin vines and riding astride the float that looks like Cinderella's carriage, far above the rest of us. There we were: hundreds of June and Ward Cleaver couples, holding the hands of little boys who harbored ideas of planting firecrackers inside jack-o'-lanterns and little girls like me, who were worried about slipping knee socks and the possible consequence of a brisk fall wind under our pleated skirts. We all cheered Miss Pumpkin.

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