Ghosts are good enough
I miss my neighbor, Fran, who moved last summer, but in all honesty, I won’t miss her today.
For today is Halloween, the day the kids dress up in costumes for the parade at school.
It wasn’t that I didn’t admire the creations Fran was able to sew for her children each year; but, since my sewing ability is limited to cutting holes in a sheet to make Caspar the Friendly Ghost outfit for 14 years in a row the comparison between her kids and mine on Halloween sometimes became too much to bear.
What’s more, living next door to the Givenchy of Halloween costumes inspired me to make them the most impossible outfits imaginable.
“Mom, can I be a robot this year?” one would ask. “You get these boxes, string them together with wire, spray them silver …”
Last year Fran designed a walking witch’s hat that looked straight out of Disneyon-parade. Another year one of her kids was The Flying Nun. So what, you might ask. There were several Flying Nuns. But I think Fran’s nun could fly.
Our kids seem to alternate between being gypsy fortune tellers (lots of beads, bracelets and my bowling ball) and witches (my basic black dress without pearls). And as I say, I’ve lost count how many times they’ve been ghosts. We lose more pillow slips that way. Only, much to my chagrin, one year I heard a mother comment to another at the parade, “Look, a ghost wearing tattle-gray.”
Brian’s perennial costume was a bum’s outfit. A fact my husband would never let me forget because he claimed that Brian’s ensemble and the suit he wore to work the next day were one and the same.
“At least let me have first dibs in the morning,” he would ask Brian.
However, since I am not handy with the needle, I have attempted to be original. For example, one year I had Kathy dress up in one of my dresses and go as “a kid whose mother was too cheap to buy a Halloween costume.”
There was one hitch: people thought she was either Granny of The Beverly Hillbillies or Ma Kettle.
Then there was the year I sent Elaine as Madame Butterfly. I thought it was one of my better inspirations.
“You can be Madame Butterfly,” I said enthusiastically. “Here take this shower kimono and wear these sandals. It’ll be perfect.
I ask you, do you see any possible resemblance between Madam Butterfly and a prizefighter, just because the kimonos were similar? It didn’t help matters that she had forgotten to carry the fan.
In all my years, however, in concocting Halloween outfits for my kids, I’ve had only one open rebellion.
In the third grade I dressed Brian up as Peter Pan, leotards and all. The school called to report he refused to march in the parade and was hiding in the shrubbery.
In later years, he explained, “Mom, nobody with six sisters should ever have to dress up as Peter Pan.” I had to agree. Next year he’ll be a bum.
This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on Oct. 31, 1977.