Halloween

I dragged ED into Manhattan to see the Jens Lekman show at Webster Hall (a little more on that later). As it was the weekend before Halloween, half the city was in costume (as was all of Jens Lekman's all-girl Swedish band, to which ED remarked, "I hope they don't always do that." I had to reply, "I'm afraid they probably do"). I don't really like Halloween, but I figure I'd dedicate a post to it since some of my favorite people really do, including CC who has been counting down the days until she can wear her latest weird Asian fetishist costume, and JMBP, who basically loves the candy.

Walking around Manhattan on Halloween, a number of things become clear. Women love to dress up in whatever their approximation of sexy is, which too often isn't sexy. Lots of people aren't clever. People in costumes driving cars are surprisingly menacing, even if they don't mean to be. If you have the misfortune to be in the fratty part of town, instead of the gay part of town, on Halloween, the fratty part of town looks basically like the gay part of town, except fatter and uglier. One of the most fun things to watch is girls in ridiculous costumes deal with transportation. For example, the girl dressed as a sexy turtle, who ran stumblingly in high heels down 14th street smoking as much of a cigarette as she could before literally falling into a cab that her friends were holding while throwing the half-smoked cigarette hastily to the ground, at a group of passers-by. Or the two slightly chubby Latinas dressed as vamp-maids, trying lucklessly to hail a cab on the wrong side of the street just outside Union Square.

My three favorite costumes of the weekend: (1) the girl at the FCFT show (new album out, by the way) who dressed up as the iPod commercials, but basically just looked like she was in blackface, and who, when I left the party at 3 in the morning, was standing under an awning on a darkened street, avoiding the rain, staring out as a pair of eyes and a cigarette from the blackness; (2) the couple ED and I passed walking up Park Place last night, two adults in full-sized Teletubbies costumes, who looked like complete idiots facing forwards, but were adorable when viewed from behind, waddling down the lamp-lit street at midnight; and (3) the guy on the subway with the O.J. Simpson jersey. Actually, I don't think that was a costume.

The accompanying photos are from a Flickr search for 'Halloween costume' - the cream of a sorry crop that basically validates my premise. Click through if you want to see dogs in superhero costumes, people who dress up their babies aiming for the entirely too-low bar of 'cute,' and a lot of women for whom sexiness is circumscribed entirely within the pantyhose and bra departments of your local Target or Wal-Mart.

If, like me, you're skipping Halloween this year, maybe you will want to read this reminiscence about Mr. Rogers, instead:

According to a TV Guide piece on him, Fred Rogers drove a plain old Impala for years. One day, however, the car was stolen from the street near the TV station. When Rogers filed a police report, the story was picked up by every newspaper, radio and media outlet around town. Amazingly, within 48 hours the car was left in the exact spot where it was taken from, with an apology on the dashboard. It read, “If we’d known it was yours, we never would have taken it.”