Pictured: Mountie (Non-Sexy Variety)
Island Packet – I am not a very good-looking woman, which I think is the primary reason I’m having trouble coming up with a decent Halloween costume this year. (It’s also the main reason I kept getting turned down for sororities, not that I’m still bitter about that, stupid Zeta Tau Alpha, I hate you so much.)
Indeed, if you have visited any costume stores lately, you might have noticed that they look less like costume stores and more like places that Britney Spears might shop, if she could stay sober long enough to park the car. Costume stores these days feature an irrationally large percentage of rack space devoted entirely to Sexy versions of average things: Sexy Nurse, Sexy Doctor, Sexy Soccer Player, Naughty Navigator, Sexy Mountie, Support Our Troops Sexy Adult (really), Sexy Wilma Flintstone (I can send you the link to these if you want). One newsroom staffer reported stumbling across a costume for a Sexy Cab Driver, which is, of course, something that has never happened in the history of the human experience. (However, if it does happen, I suggest immediately that we cancel Halloween and institute National I Found A Sexy Cab Driver Day, which we could commemorate by briefly increasing the national speed limit to 200 mph and growing splendid beards.)
Meanwhile, the non-sexy demographic, of which I am a proud lifelong member, is forced to resort tolame, unsexy costumes, such as Chewbacca, or Fred Thompson..
This might be a gender thing. Guy costumes, historically, are comparatively lame and most seem to come straight out of the Cliche Costume Handbook For Guys Who Prefer Ready-Made Costumes Sold In A Plastic Bag: vampire, pirate, Jedi, pimp, president.
If I seem unusually bitter about this, it’s because I’ve outgrown the only good costume I’ve ever had in my life, which was E.T. That was a good costume because it was 1982, I was 7, and my mom sewed it for me. It looked fantastic and timely, except that I kept tripping and falling down in it, and ended up resembling not so much E.T. as an extremely clumsy brownie.
I’m not sure when Halloween got like this. Back in my day, which was 1943, Halloween was a time of wholesome childlike innocence, pristine and unspoiled as the remaining 11 acres along S.C. 170 not being scraped clean for development, a time for stomach-clutching sugar highs and good-natured mischief and, occasionally, shenanigans. Oh, the shenanigans! Why, back in my picturesque little neighborhood in Indiana, we were always getting into Halloween roustabouts of some kind, knocking over Old Farmer Winslow’s scarecrow, toilet-papering the soda fountain down at Basketballington Town Square, egging John Mellencamp’s place. It was all Huck Finn-esque boyhood tomfoolery, with the exception of the one time we killed a guy with a hay baler. Long story.
But for the most part, the worst that could happen would be you went to someone’s house who was handing out healthy treats, or your Bubble Yum came already dried out, or you might be out wandering around and run into a clown, which is not cool, because clowns are terrifying, and I don’t care how old you are, but there’s nothing funny about clowns, which can appear in steadily recurring nightmares even if you’re 32 years old and should totally be over this by now. These days, it’s much harder and requires more thought. Unless, of course, someone out there has already sewn up a costume for a Sexy E.T.
Stumble It!
You were a clown when you were real little. Made that one too:) That was before the fear set in.
I hate these “sexy” costumes.
Grumble.
Uh… huh huh. You said rack space. That was cool.
I’ll be, like, dressing as a Sexy Tax Accountant this year. Fartknocker.
my father has a shark costume that was made sometime during the second ice age that he still drags out every few years to wear to parties (although, regrettably, rarely at *halloween*) … to follow the “sexy” costume trend one year we gave it a bra and skank heels.
sexy land shark? didn’t quite catch on. we’re still trying to figure out why.
As I live in a country where only the small children of the most knuckledragging of the social underclass ever even contemplate any sort of a celebration of Halloween, I find all the USA brou-haha really amusing. Isn’t it supposed to be fun? and yet over the past week I have seen the Twitter streams of several noteable, even famous people in which they express really quite extreme angst about what they are going to dress up as at Halloween..
Extraordinary to me… I cant recall ever dressing as anyone other than myself after about 9 years of age, and that was in a school play.
Yes I know “costumed events” do happen here. There are allegedly places you can go to hire costumes etc, but as far as I know, no-one I have ever known has ever needed to visit one.. Dressing up in “fancy dress” is apparently the preserve of some other demographic than mine.. I wonder if I am missing out at all?