Halloween Recap 2007

This was a pretty pleasant Halloween.

No houses on our block were hit with eggs. Nobody wrote rude things on houses with shaving cream. I don’t know if I should be happy neighborhood kids are well-behaved or disappointed that local kids don’t have the energy and spirit to get up to the pointless kind of random bad behavior kids are supposed to now and then.

Halloween started off on a seriously macabre note.

Wednesday afternoon I was walking to the grocery store and I saw a news van from Chicago’s ABC affiliate setting up for a live remote outside our city hall. I chatted with one of the producers and asked what story they were going to cover. He said they were going to do a piece about the steps law enforcement was taking to keep children away from registered sex offenders during trick or treating. I thought, Oh, great, Chicago is all out of pedophiles so the news people have to come out here and associate our suburb with that sort of thing . . .

Once trick or treating got under way, however, everything stayed up-beat.

The coolest kid’s costume I saw was a high-tech Darth Vader suit. The helmet had a microphone, amplifier and sound processor built-in. When the little boy talked—“Trick or treat!” “Thank you!”—the hardware picked up the words, processed them and output a loud, Darth Vader voice: “Trick or treat!” “Thank you!”

Most of the kids were very young. We did have one pair of older teenagers. The girl was dressed something like a sexy, military policeman and the boy was dressed something like a sexy nurse. That made me homesick for the north side of Chicago where you see stuff like that pretty much every Friday night throughout the year.

My favorite costume was Angie’s. Angie’s feeling better—thank Heavens!—and was dressed as Raggedy Ann. The whole “living doll” look suited her very much. However as soon as I saw her I immediately thought of Pris from “Blade Runner.” (Angie insists she’s never seen the movie, but I wonder how much the ‘look’ of Pris has filtered out through the fashion industry, music videos and other movies? I wonder if the wild child in Angie’s deepest, secret soul used the Raggedy Ann look as a kind of acceptable ‘cover’ to indulge in some sexy, living doll android glamour?)

(“Blade Runner” certainly is a very visual movie. However I cannot strongly enough recommend everyone first read the book by Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?” It is not only vastly better than the movie—it’s one of my favorite books of all time—but the movie actually reverses [!] the theme and conclusion of the book. And, yes, I know Dick never said anything bad about the movie, but some people have estimated he made more money from selling the book to Hollywood than he had throughout his entire career writing manuscripts. Of course he didn’t say anything bad. He may have been quietly nuts, but he wasn’t stupid.)

Angie’s blog: Sentimental Small Talk