Do you love Halloween? Do you hate Halloween? Do you find it to be too much pressure to go out and pick something and then buy things and then dress up? Do you live for this one day every year? Are you an actor who feels like you are always celebrating Halloween so another day where you have to dress up totally sucks? Do you find Halloween offensive? Did you find the ultimate costume this year?

I asked enough different questions. Go ahead.

-- Anonymous, October 29, 1999

Answers

Wow, I haven't even read the entry yet, but here is this new question.

I love Halloween, but I often find it's too much pressure. My dearly beloved lives for Halloween but gets a little self-conscious about dressing up. He always wants to do and be something really exciting, but often it just doesn't work out and it winds up being a big disappointment. (Like, I don't know, the time we both put a ton of effort into our costumes, but I drank too many margaritas and fell asleep before we left the house.)

This year is going to be fun. I'm in costume right now, dressed as a very slutty vampire, and we're going to a party on Saturday. Instead of trying to come up with something unique, we went for classics this year -- vampire and pirate -- and as a result, I think it's going to be more fun than usual.

-- Anonymous, October 29, 1999

I have to admit it. I'm a Halloween junkie. I love the bad costumes, the stupid haunted houses, the screaming kids, the goopy pumpkin insides, the overwhelming amounts of sugar pumping though everyone's systems. I don't care how many plays I'm in at the time, how many things there are to be performing with, Halloween is my thing. Second only to Christmas.

-- Anonymous, October 29, 1999

I hate Halloween. Just hate it. The only thing I like about it is, since we moved to the 'burbs, I get to sit on the porch and give candy to the little kids. I hated it in college because there was just way too much pressure to dress up all cool, and the only thing I could ever assemble was the slutty vampire thing, which I just couldn't pull off very well, so I would go around feeling like a troll all night. Bleh.

-- Anonymous, October 29, 1999

LOVE IT!

i've always thought of october as "my month" since my birthday is in there. right along with thanksgiving (i'm canadian) and halloween. best month EVER. and hey, free chocolate right?

i love to dress up and all that - but i suck at thinking of costumes. i mean, i think about it TOO much and instead of going with my gut, i overthink it and my costume ends up sucking. but every year i've gone with my gut (about 3 years) it's been great!

so i'm going to do that this year. i also have something like 3 parties i've been invited to - oh yeah, feelin' like little miss popular - since my social life *finally* got started. there is *no* way i'm not going to have fun. does that sentence makes sense?

of course i'm going to be totally last minute about it and put my costume together tomorrow.

-- Anonymous, October 29, 1999

ooooh, i looooove halloween! i'm in college and last year i made the BEST genie costume out of victoria's secret pj's and lots of glitter, and this year i have an awesome fairy costume, that i get to reuse part of for my hloiday outfit. :) i even have feathery wings... :) yay, halloween rocks. the only sucky thing is that this year there is really no place to go, excpet a friend of mine's room where there is a party, but not many people will be there. oh, well, that's ok. i'll just be a halloween fairy and wander around... :)

-- Anonymous, October 29, 1999

Do I love Halloween?

I love Halloween as I love the air that I breathe, the food that I eat, the...

OK, enough of that crappy prose. Yep, Halloween is pretty good in my book. I'm trying to type with absurdly long black fake nails held on by a superglue/titanium welding combo commonly known as nail glue, I spent way too much money on fake vampire teeth which are still the best I've ever used, my makeup is melting, my scalp itches under my wig, my feet are killing me and my breasts are half hanging out of my velvet dress while I sit here in my cubicle. But I love every minute of it and will glady do it again tomorrow night. Besides, I won runner-up for scariest costume at work. What could be better?

-- Anonymous, October 29, 1999

You get to dress as tacky or as weirdly as you want, you're encouraged to scare people, as a kid you get free candy or you can pull mischief--are even encouraged to---what's not to love?

Al of Nova Notes.

-- Anonymous, October 29, 1999

i really like halloween. it's the candy! where i work, we're allowed to bring in family members or our pets and today a woman i work with brought in her younger daughter, all dressed up like a princess, it was the most adorable thing. i dunno, i don't dress up anymore, my boyfriend and i wanted to go as The Tick and Arthur but we were lazy getting our stuff together. we're just gonna go to 6th Street and look at all the costumes like we did last year.

-- Anonymous, October 29, 1999

Hey Diandra,

If you're going to Sixth Street tomorrow you should stop by the Velveeta Room and check out the Monks. I'll be the one in the giant Milk bottle costume.

-- Anonymous, October 30, 1999

That milk bottle costume has a lot of mileage (if it is the same one I'm thinking about). God bless MTV.

-- Anonymous, October 30, 1999

The genocide must stop! Every year, millions of my people are slaughtered. Why? To be carved into silly faces, or scary ones, or ...*shudder*... CREATIVE ones! So that you people can eat their brains, and put a decorative candle inside their hollowed-out skulls! My people are more than just a special Baskin Robbins flavor, dammit! One day there will come a great reckoning, and then you will see how much you like it when we light YOUR heads on fire and roll them down the street! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

-- Anonymous, October 30, 1999

Love it, love it, love it! Even though I'm turning 17 in 11 days (yay!!) I still have plans to go trick-or-treating with my friends tomorrow. Unfortunately, halloween snuck up on me this year and I forgot to make a Wonder Woman costume like I orignally planned. Luckily, some of my clothes (including my lace-all-the-way-to-knee-black-leather boots) can be transformed (with the help of a hat and made-in-5-mins cape) into a witches costume. And it actually turned out pretty good (I tried it on). My mom went to fashion design school, so we always had the best homemade costumes (I Dream of Jeannie, 3 ballerina bears, a pair of elephants, numerous clowns). Last year though I think was her crowning achievement: I came home from a debate tournament and had to leave 15 mins later to go to a party at a friend's house. I had no costume but Mom had bought several yards of white satin and gold cord. So what does she do? Cut a hole in the satin, stick over my head, wind it around me and secure with cord (I wore clothes underneath). In my hair I wore some pearls and volia! I was a goddess:)

-- Anonymous, October 30, 1999

Yeah, I think Halloween is great... really loved it when I was a kid... rigging up a cool costume and going out with friends trick or treating for hours, man, we'd do the entire neighborhood, up one street and down the next, on and on for hours, getting so much candy!

Once, when I was in college, six of us (me and the two guys I shared a house with and our girl friends) went to a Halloween costume ball on campus dressed as Spiderman... each one of us had made a Spiderman costume. We thought maybe we could get a prize in the group costume category but no luck (the winner in that category was four people who came as the Gingerbread Cottage). We did manage to really confuse a guy who had been drinking a bit too much "Wait a minute! I was just talking to you over there, how'd you get over here ahead of me?"

A few years ago I went to a Halloween party dressed as a 1040 form. I took a 1040 tax form and kept blowing it up on a photocopier and then pasted the pieces on a large sheet of posterboard (actually two, front side and back side) and wore it like a sandwich sign board... a big hit, people told me that I was the scariest costume they'd seen... Halloween was a couple nights later so I wore it while taking my kids around trick or treating... (This was in upstate NY... it began to snow during trick or treating and snowed so much overnight that schools were closed in the morning.)

My daughter made great costumes this year for herself and her boyfiend... she found patterns someplace on the Internet for Link costumes (as in Legend of Zelda)... looks good... they wore them to school on Friday (they attend different high schools) and went out to a party tonight...

Last year, on the day after Halloween I had to fly to Mexico City (business trip) so I was there for Day of the Dead... Those folks really get into that whole thing... family picnics in cemetaries where ancestors are buried, etc.

-- Anonymous, October 30, 1999

Tara and I made the most bitchin' costume for me this year. I was a craps table! It had all the odds and everything on it. Every bet you could make, other than weird hop bets that aren't on most tables anyway, was represented. Tara was a dealer and she kept doing that hang thing that dealers do when they left the table. WOO WOO! VIVA LAS VEGAS!!!!!! Oh, and on my back was the word "CRAP."

-- Anonymous, October 30, 1999

I came up with a great costume this year. I'm going as Magritte's painting "The Son of Man". That's the one where the guy is wearing a bowler hat and has a big green apple in front of his face. I got a bowler hat and a big plastic green apple to hang from the front of it. I'm going to wear a suit and tie just like the painting and they I'm rigging a picture frame to wear on my shoulders. It rocks!

I love reading about everyone's cool costumes. It's all good ideas for the future!

-- Anonymous, October 31, 1999

Yep, All Hallow's Eve is right up there in my book. Of course, I'm a junior in high school, so I'm much too cool and sophisticated to dress up and go solicit complete strangers for candy while their yappy dogs (Precious, anyone?) nip at my heels.

Of course what's not to like about seeing Garfield's Halloweeen special for the...8th year in a row? Seriously, I can never get enough. I'm not being sarcastic. "Sixty men all lost at sea, all of them drunk except for me!" Ha ha. Never gets old.

Andrea

-- Anonymous, October 31, 1999

Yes, well I am a senior in high school, and Halloween will NEVER lose its wonder. I went to the Rocky Horror Picture Show on Friday and I am going to go caroling tonight - in German.
I love this holiday.

-- Anonymous, October 31, 1999

I lost interest in Halloween in middle school. You know, the whole teenage "I'm too mature for such things" phase.

Well, I dressed up this year for the first time in, gosh, must be fifteen years. Whoopie - I'm childish again!

I went as a Beat poet, all dressed in black. I was mistaken so many times for a snotty Frenchman that I started sneering and speaking like Taylor instead. It worked!

-- Anonymous, October 31, 1999

I don't care if I'm too old to go trick or treating. I just love the dressing up part of it all. I'm still regretting the fact that I do get to be Wonder Woman. Ah well. Tonight I (the witch, which my friends have taken it upon themselves to say stuff like: "oh, you won't have to do much" :) will be cavorting with a geisha (my friend), Mercury Girl (my sister dressed head to toe in silver, I made up the mercury part:), Ricky Martin (my sister's boyfriend, he really does remind a person of Ricky Martin and has about the same (lack of) dancing skills), and another friend who is dressing up as someone from Cabaret which frightens me a tad...

-- Anonymous, October 31, 1999

Once you are over the age of 13, it's all about the costumes.

-- Anonymous, October 31, 1999

I always start out thinking, no big deal. Buy some candy, hand it out, get some reading done.

Then, on Halloween, I think, well, maybe I'll put on a costume. I wander around the house, ok, got a big poofy shirt, big pants, boots, belt, I'm a pirate. Cool! Hey, my daughter has two stuffed parrots I can safety pin to the shoulders! Great! OOhh, I'll take this big chest, looks like a pirate's chest, put some boxes in it so it's only an inch or two deep, fill it up with candy and it looks like we have, like 50 POUNDS OF CANDY HERE! Bwah hah hah! No, that's not right. Harr, mateys, prepare to be boarded! Ar har har!

So then I get into it.

Wish I had a cannon.

-- Anonymous, November 01, 1999

i found the ultimate costume for next year. the theater that i work in is a theater in the round - and it has the world's ugliest bright red seats. so next year (this year i was jaromir jagr, complete with bad hair) i'm going to dress up as the theater - wear all red, with black elbow gloves for arm rests, belt my pants with safety cables from lights, wear patch cords around my neck, and carry a large power drill.

my friend ernie is going to be the technical director here at school to go with my theater. it's the best idea i've had in years.

-- Anonymous, November 01, 1999

Oh boy do I love Halloween! Why would actors ever get sick of dressing up? I've done horrible shows just to get to wear cool costumes- I'm like the Michael Caine of theater fashion.

Well, this year our friend Joseph had the pirate themed party (complete with his back porch transformed into a ship with a sail, ladders, the whole schmeer), so originally I was going to be a pirate as I have a sword that's perfect for the part. Then I realized that I probably shouldn't have a sharp pointy thing at a party as rambunctious as this was sure to be. Next I was going to be either a parrot or a cabin boy, but I didn't want to be anyone's toady. Finally I decided on a pirate radio station. I built a tower for my head (although most people thought it was an oil derrick- damn Texans) strapped a cd player around my neck and had a t-shirt with 'FCC' printed on it, under which I wrote 'Fascists Censoring Creativity'. Original, yes; comfortable, no. I had to put the jam box down after only a half hour and I threw the tower into the fire when I got sick of catching it in trees and poking people whenever I bent down.

Next year the theme is James Bond, so I have to figure out something a little more practical. Any ideas besides the obvious? Right now I'm thinking of the George Lazenby Bond with a kilt.

-- Anonymous, November 02, 1999