The Freelance Retort: Another Halloween…in the books

Another Halloween is in the books

It’s the day after and I’m still pretty beat.

It’s getting harder and harder to wash the eggs off my car, every year

Even harder to throw them.

At least they’re good eggs…organic, I think from the new Whole Foods.

They really don’t smell as bad when the yoke congeals.

Besides that, we must have given out well over a thousand pieces of candy last night…minus the couple of dozen pieces I ate myself.

We get a lot of kids…like in the movies, “A lot of kids”.

I think because word got out that we actually have more than our share of real ghouls living on the street.

Well, mostly living.

You know…Zombies, vampires, witches…that kind of ghoul.

Even a nice family of werewolves.

I mean, most of the time they’re nice. You just don’t want to be around them when their newspaper is late.

But who doesn’t get annoyed by that?

So the kids come, fill the streets and really eat the monsters up…which is a nice change.

But it also means we have to a have a lot of candy on hand, because no one wants to be outdone by the undead.

Plus you don’t want to run out of treats and force a kid to trick you.

That puts a lot of pressure on a 6 year old.

Of course, last year, most folks, like me, who live in the northeast, were left holding the bag…or bags by “Super Storm Sandy”. Literally, about 10 bags totaling over a thousand pieces of candy.

Amidst all the devastation, Halloween was postponed, deservedly so, and no one was quite sure when it was re-scheduled. I even had some “Trick or Treaters” stop by in March, dressed as politicians…but for the most part they weren’t very believable.

So , even I couldn’t take care of all the leftovers. There must have been a half dozen or so jawbreakers left at Thanksgiving.

Activity in the neighborhood was also at an all-time low.

But not this year…this year it was Trick or Treat central again.

Kind of nice to see because when I was a kid, there wasn’t as much hub bub on the streets…but I still loved Halloween.

It was the only time I could walk around the neighborhood and people didn’t make fun of what I was wearing.

When I was real little, I dressed mostly in those store bought jobs with the ill-fitting masks that made it difficult to see, let alone breath.

But that was half the fun.

I was everything: Zoro, Bozo, Superman, Raggedy Ann (my year of confusion) to my best but most obscure costume…Elio Chicon the second baseman for the NY Mets in 1962, which my dad insisted everyone would get.

They didn’t.

Ahhhhh…Those were the days.

Now, all the kids go out in these elaborate outfits that look like they were designed by Hollywood special effects guys.

Some are so realistic, they’re down-right spooky, which led to the confusion that time when one of the actual Zombies stopped by to chew the fat.

Luckily, he brought his own.

And every year, it seems the kids gravitate to whatever character from whatever movie or TV show is popular at that moment.

Buzz Lightyear, Batman, Little Mermaid, Iron Man, Thor.

A few years back, before I knew who Hannah Montana was, I couldn’t understand why the streets were filled with all these little girls in blonde wigs and short skirts.

This year, I half expected to see those same girls dressed up like the current version of Hannah, but luckily we were spared, except for my neighbor Ira who looked pretty good with that spiked hairdo and, to be honest, really knows how to work the twerk. .

So, as I said at the beginning, because you have to start some place….another Halloween is in the books.

I’ve seen a lot of them. Knocked on a lot of doors and rang a lot of bells…maybe even yours.

I was the one about 3 feet tall in the blue Mets cap, pounding my glove yelling “Yo la tengo, Yo la tengo.”

I was very believable…and you would have known that if you were a Met fan…and opened up the door…

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