The Annual Halloween Costume Drama

Mom dreaded Halloween when my brother and I were kids. On the one hand my brother, Kevey, could always be conned by Mom into "being something easy." He was a ghost every year of his young life. But unlike most ghosts, he was never completely white; in fact, he was always the ghost that by coincidence happened to be the color of the sheets that were earmarked for the Goodwill donation bell.

I recall one year in particular when he was a pink satin ghost with butter stains. He didn't seem to care. "My ghost suit smells like popcorn!" he gleefully albeit stupidly proclaimed, running down the hallway in nothing but a pink satin sheet and Underoos. But hey, as long as he got to trick or treat, it didn't seem to matter much to him what he was dressed up as. It was all about the candy.

For me, however, no bigger decision was made all year that was more important than what was I going to be for Halloween. It had to pass my muster list of Halloween Costume Absolutes: (1): It had to be creative. (2): It had to be something or someone that I wanted to be; not Mom. And (3): (which was the most important one), my costume had to be better than anyone on the block, including that Shelly Tuttle.

I also, under any circumstance, did not want to end up like my brother.

Mom and I would start the costume dance around the middle of September. She would ask me what I wanted to be for Halloween and I would tell her I wasn't sure yet, and every year she would ask me if I wanted to be a ghost. "How about a beautiful, lemon colored ghost... Yellow would be lovely with your hair, Bethy." "Mom," I vigorously protested, "you wouldn't even see my hair if I had a sheet on." The Halloween arm-wrestling would end with me telling her I would think about it and get back to her.

Her follow-up tactic was for her to spirit me away to our local Zody's in a lame attempt to interest me in the costume-in-a-box displays. I loved the smell of Zody's, with its stale buttered popcorn combined with the rubber of new shoes. I'm assuming at this point it was Zody's, and not my brother that was responsible for the signature odor that would hit me when the doors whooshed open to reveal Hong Kong costumes piled to the ceiling.