Well, alright, so my crippling agoraphobia ensures I won't be within three or four miles of the parade, but I have well-placed cameras all over the city and I like to watch. Anyway, like I may or may not have said, it's Halloween and I have seen exactly one costume. This makes me sad. Now I am thinking about the few times I was down at the parade and all the clever crap I saw. I think this calls for a short list. At the risk of leaving something out, here are the main costume-types you will see at the Halloween parade:
1) Skanks
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| Clone wars: you lose! |
The first and most ubiquitous costume, you will notice is, necessarily, the least original. This is the sexy-"whatever" costume. You've seen them: sexy-"Supergirl," sexy-"Wonder Woman," sexy-"Condoleeza Rice," and on and on. This is the costume that hasn't been clever or original in years but shows as much skin as possible without getting you arrested for being a dirty whore.
On the other hand it's a good thing, you know, because when you're picking pockets or rubbing up on people's bums at the parade, it is helpful that all the real cops are distracted by photo-snapping sexy girl-cops who, for whatever reason, can't get over the novelty of this practice. Real-cop + sexy-cop = fucking brilliant photo op!
2) Fruits
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| Funny? You think this is funny? I was born this way! |
Next is the inscrutable social-commentary costume. Personally, I appreciate the deep thought that usually goes into these costumes, provided the wearer is a sentient being and not a mannequin in the window at American Apparel. But honestly I can't tell with this one. Is this ironic self-reference or self-referential irony? Is this clown wearing a hipster costume or the other way around? I am thinking this guy simply cut the sleeves off his rare vintage clown sweater and now he is just a sad sack.
You will probably see him walking around the city, looking just like this, for weeks after the parade. He will appear nonplussed but don't be fooled, on the inside he is secretly gushing at the genius of this monumental social statement.
3) Jocks
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| "I curated this myself." |
Next, a personal favorite, is the artisanal costume. Now, when I hear that something is artisanal, I take this to mean it was "composed" by a master craftsman, utilizing years of learning and experience, and through many man-hours of intense work, finally bringing to fruition a product of unparallelled achievement, and would probably sell for "Dubai-money" on the open market. If only said craftsman weren't staunchly opposed to everything capitalist (with the exception of said craftsman's trust-fund). Example: "Yo Tod, did you check out that new artisanal sloppy-joe place? Yea bro, check it, they run it out of this über-vintage VW bus and each sloppy-joe is like totally curated by hand! Yea, the dude who owns it is throwing this mega party at his loft on Delancy."
But, alas, upon closer inspection, it appears to be a rather lazy, unrefined artisanal cardboard box. The people you'll usually see wearing these are either impoverished adolescents (who don't belong in the bar after dark anyway) or arrogant juicers who ride the assumption that the schmuckery of their costumes will be ameliorated by their "epic" personalities.
4) Everybody Else
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| "We are all beautiful...in different ways." |
Lastly, but unfortunately not leastly, is this costume. This is one of the most common and most popular costumes ever. It is so popular that I see them everywhere long after Halloween has ended. This costume, known colloquially as the "Asian-Face" costume, must have started like all things viral: someone had a great, original idea, "exhibited" it but once and then it spread like wildfire - completely uncontrollable and out of hand.
But this year I have seen practically none of these, begging the question: Where is the respect for tradition anymore? In an effort come up with an answer I did a little digging into the history of the holiday. What I found literally horrified me way more than any 80's horror flick ever did. It seems that Halloween is not actually a legitimate holiday. Apparently what we are celebrating here is merely a bastardization of long-gone pagan rituals such as Pomona, Parentalia and Samhain, except without the redeeming practice of human sacrifice. Talk about a disappointment.
So then why do we celebrate this nonsense holiday? Is there a secret society of malicious dentists behind this national travesty? According to a cursory interweb search on the subject, yes. Yes there is:
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| "I call this one the bone-tickler." |
The interesting thing is that no one much cared for Halloween or the rituals associated with it. Seventeenth century Protestants were denouncing Halloween as a foppish, unorthodox muckery of their great fun-loving religion, the Puritans of early New-England, superstitious witch-hunters and early robber-barons that they were, shat on it as well. And it's no wonder. Only in relatively recent years has this fiendishly leftist holiday had anything to do with free candy or girls in slut-skirts. It was not until the rowdy red-nosed Irish and Scottish migrated to the Americas in the mid nineteenth century - and, owing to their serious case of the drunk-munchies and whimsical love of adultery - did Halloween finally establish itself as the windfall of all candy and, not to mention, lingerie-as-outerwear manufacturers everywhere.
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| First pimp in the candy biz |
So why are we so crazy about this dumb holiday? Might it be our pent up desires to run proverbially amok, get crazy on sugar and food coloring, get drunk and publicly make asses of ourselves (sure go ahead and pretend you don't do that daily)? Do we feel the need to costume ourselves in cleverness (see above)? Or get trapped for forty-five minutes in a roiling sea of sweaty paper, plastic and cardboard-box-covered people just to get a glimpse of some befeathered morons dirty-dancing on a shitty float in the shape of a giant tombstone before finally succumbing to heatstroke and vomiting into a cross-dresser's leather corset? Well, come to think of it, maybe that is just reason enough.
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