Halloween is for Adults

It’s Halloween, and I’m running around town dressed like a cat, with a tail and paws and a big cat head.

I stand out, and I’m in my element. Although I’ve become an introvert in my middle age, and although I don’t feel totally comfortable drawing attention to myself, I revel in watching the faces of people as they look amused and puzzled. I guess adults don’t dress for Halloween in the middle of the workday. They should have come by my workplace (an academic building on a college campus), where a dozen of us took a group picture in our costumes.

I never had as much fun at Halloween as a child as I do now. First, the costumes we had as children were pretty abysmal. Plastic masks with tissue-paper “outfits”, so incomprehensible that the garment identified what the mask was supposed to represent. So the monster outfit had a picture of a monster on the front. My imagination was much better on details than those costumes. Second, Halloween seemed like another one of those days where my classmates would gang up on me, probably because I got into Halloween a bit too much. Didn’t everyone pretend to be whatever was on the front of their costumes?

And now there’s a thriving market for adult Halloween costumes, although many of them are “adult” Halloween costumes (“Sexy vampire”, anyone? And why are there no sexy male vampire costumes? Male vampires can be really sexy.) And there’s even more of us pulling together our costumes from odds and ends — a black shawl here, a witch’s hat there. Or the colleague of mine who dressed up as a soccer mom, complete with snacks. Or people like me who have a small closet of outfits.

So I’m going to have fun while it’s Halloween. I sit at Starbucks, and if I see someone I know, I put on my cat head again and say hi. Tomorrow I can be an adult again, or as much of an adult as I ever am.