Spook and Circumstance

One night recently my friend Vicki and I decided to take a walk from Klekolo where we were enjoying some treats after an electronics exchange of sorts. I had picked up a phone battery for our friend Kristina and Kristina had a video camera to lend to Vicki. We all met at Klekolo, unfortunately without Kristina's six year old who that day was elsewhere, but is usually everywhere his mom is, and entertaining us with his amazingly adult vocabulary and memory and lots of really cute giggling.

After the coffee shop swap meet, Vicki and I were heading down Main Street and we passed by three different camera crews. They seemed to be on every corner. We didn't see any news trucks, so finally at the third crew our curiosity got the better of us and we stopped and asked what was going on. There was a Middlesex Community College media class project in progress. The video crews were doing man-on-the-street interviews, and we ended up on camera talking about the Sun Chips bag controversy. If you feel out of the news loop, don't. Until stumbling into this video project I was completely in the dark about the Sun Chips biodegradable noisy bag “fiasco”. I later found some articles about it online including this one from the Wall Street Journal. After our sound bytes were recorded for posterity and hopefully a good grade in the class for two hard-working students, Vicki and I continued down Main Street to Rite-Aid to look for fake blood.

You might think she was getting her Halloween costume ready, and if you knew Vicki and how enthusiastic she is about Halloween every year that would be an excellent guess. However you'd be wrong. She needed the fake blood for a workplace safety training video she is creating for her job. The ironic thing about this was that she was on a second attempt to make the video, because the first attempt was botched by an actual injury with much blood loss and combined with hypothermia that led to some mild shock. She's all better now, but she still has to get this video done, and with fake blood, despite all the real blood that was lost at the first attempt. So while on her mission to get prepared for her own video, she helped some student videographers.

The search for fake blood led us to the Halloween aisle and had me cringing thinking about the awful Halloween costumes Vicki has somehow convinced me to dress in and wear in attendance at some party or another over the years. Beer Wench and Devil come to mind. One year we went to a party that had a Best Costume contest with (thankfully anonymous) written ballots. Vicki made the honest mistake of writing Sumo to vote for a stocky woman who was dressed as a Geisha. There was serious threat of punches being thrown and we left in a hurry.

This year, I expect Halloween to be a relatively quiet night of the usual handing out candy to trick-or-treaters. I am very glad that it falls on a day my husband is off work this year because he enjoys giving out the candy a lot more than I do, and I think that he puts a style into it that I just can't muster. Even though I am not a big fan of dressing up or handing out candy, I really like the fact that in Middletown kids go door-to-door trick-or-treating. I think that it's a sign of vibrant and healthy neighborhoods. Of course, there is also the leftover candy to be dealt with. But I am not complaining about that! Happy Halloween!