Self Portrait as a pirate.
Okay so I’ve never been a big Halloween person. I was trying to come up with some Halloween memories and I could only come up with three:
Halloween 1979
I was five years old. At my sister Gay Lynn’s insistence, my family dressed up as KISS. I was Gene Simmons, my sister was Paul “Star Child” Stanley, and my mom was Peter Criss. We tried to get my other sister, who my mother refers to as her “black child,” to be Ace Frehley, but nothing doing.
Halloween 1998
I was a theatre major at SLU and had to take a costume construction class, so I made a super hero costume during my shop hours. I took a black long sleeve shirt and put a silver “W” emblem on the chest for Wraith. I took the cups from a bra that had somehow been left in my dresser, painted them silver and used them as shoulder pads that attached the cape to the shirt. I added wrist guards, elbow and knee pads from my roller blade gear that I also painted silver and some silver high top shoes. Two things I remember about that night: a drunk kid with a mohawk who saw the “W” on my chest and decided that I was “What-Man,” which he called me for the rest of the night and the fact that, much to my surprise, I got laid. I was on a second date with this young, pro-life, Catholic girl so I was totally not expecting to get laid and didn’t even bring a change of clothes. I spent the night in her dorm room and had to do the walk of shame across campus the next morning…in a super hero costume.
Halloween 2002 (by far, my favorite)
At least I think it was 2002. I was walking through the Central West End with my boy Archer on a weekend afternoon. The businesses in the CWE were giving free candy to kids in costume, so there were all these clusters of little goblins and ghosts going from store to store with their plastic candy bags. At one point I said to Archer, “If you were a role-play fetishist and a pedophile, Halloween would be the bee’s knees.” I can say these types of things to Archer without him calling the authorities, which is one of the reasons he and I get along.
We were having coffee at Coffee Cartel when one little boy in a Bat-Man costume came in by himself with his plastic bag. He asked the gay college kid behind the counter, “Are you giving away free candy?”
He replied, “No, we’re giving away free scoops of ice cream.”
The little boy paused. He thought for a minute. Looked outside at the sunlight. Looked at the ice cream. Looked in his candy bag. Archer and I stopped talking and watched silently. We could almost hear the wheels turning in the little Bat-Man’s head…how much free candy would he miss out on if he stopped collecting long enough to eat his ice cream before it melted? The little boy looked back to the kid behind the counter, “Can I come back later?”
The kid behind the counter smiled, “Sure.”
And with that, little Bat-Man took his bag and happily bopped out the door in the cutest and most un-Dark Knightly way.
Now thats to cute batman