Happy Halloween

Technically, Halloween ended a little over a half hour ago, but still.....

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. This year, for the first time in a while*, I dressed up as a still-alive real person. Usually, I go with something more conceptual/bizarre/inappropriate (like in 8th grade when I dressed up as Uma Thurman's character from Pulp Fiction, complete with fake cocaine under my nostrils and a needle sticking out of my chest).

I kept it simple this year and dressed up as Katy Perry. Really, I was just looking for an excuse to wear a pastel wig. Don't pretend you don't know what that feels like.

My mom e-mailed me this disturbing picture today:


and she wrote a comment that this could have been her and her Dad back in the day. It's true -- my grandfather so favored Jack Daniels that for years I thought Mr. Daniels was a close friend of the family. At every holiday gathering, people would joke about how close Grandpa and Jack were ("Where's Grandpa?" "Oh, he's spending a little time with Jack Daniels"). When I saw the label on a Jack Daniels bottle, my first thought was, "oh, that's so funny, it's the same name as Grandpa's best friend!"

Ah, innocence.

My favorite Halloween story is actually not really fit for public consumption (it involves my older brother repeating a very un-PC gross joke he learned from our cousin while treat-or-treating), but a close second is when my younger brother Richard, when he was 6 or so, eagerly told people while trick-or-treating that he was collecting money for a unicycle instead of UNICEF.

*the last time I dressed up as a real, live person was in 2001, when I went as Nancy Kerrigan and my best friend Kim was Tonya Harding. She chased me around all night with a crowbar.