Halloween costume 1972

There are no photos and that's a mercy

We live in Irvington on the Indianapolis east side. The neighborhood is named for Washington Irving, author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, published in 1820. Fifty years later, Irvington’s founders thought the terrain looked like the town in the story and named it for the author. Some neighbors leave a little bit of their Halloween decor out all year. A witch by the outdoor lamp post. A ghost in the porch window. Some folks begin decorating around Labor Day, and the rest of us catch up beginning October 1. I am not a fan of autumn, but I do love walking our dog, Katie, through the neighborhood this time of year, watching the decorations go up. Our entire neighborhood collectively losing its mind. People trying to top what they did last year.

This includes my husband. We have different notions of Halloween. For him, the scarier and creepier, the better. If he hasn’t created the most frightening set on the block, he’s miserable. I’m the exact opposite. One Halloween several years ago, he had a job working the night shift. He was so disappointed he didn’t decorate. A little girl who remembered our house from the previous year asked, her face full of concern, if we had gotten divorced. He’s decorated faithfully ever since.

My Halloween costume tastes tend toward things I enjoy. Last year, I joined a group costume effort at work with a Barbie theme, a take-off on the movie. I was “Indianapolis 500 Winner Barbie.” I have a Raggedy Anne costume I pulled together in the 1990s that makes use of my red curly hair. I have a Dorothy outfit but Katie is entirely too large to be Toto. I also can be the Cat in the Hat or Sam I Am when it suits me. 

When I was a kid, I was a tomboy, most comfortable in t-shirts, jeans, and sneakers. Very much still in my “Batman” phase at that time, I watched reruns every chance I got.  Regardless, I was still smarting that I hadn’t been pretty enough to be a Christmas angel during the first-grade pageant. I, along with a handful of other kids who were also goofy looking, was a jumping jack. There was a little song and everything. A jumping jack. Sheesh. As a third-grader, I wanted to be a fairy princess with angel wings for Halloween. I’d been wearing store-bought costumes until this point, and was sure I could find something at Hill’s or Danners. Instead, my mother dug out a fancy dress and tried to zip me into it. She’d been in some Southern belle beauty pageant where she won first-runner up. I was pudgy at the time -- puberty slamming into me like an Indy car on pole day. Boobs, the bane of my being, already forcing me into a training bra. Instead of the costume I wanted, what I got was a dress that didn’t fit with cardboard, surfboard-shaped wings stapled to it, a crown cut out of a cereal box covered in aluminum foil smashing my curls, and her swiss dot kitchen curtains fashioned into a caplet to cover my shoulders. The dress was strapless and I had to wear my bra or I’d start sagging, she said. I remember her tearing the curtains down and cackling that I would be just like Scarlet O’Hara. I didn’t know who Scarlet was, but I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be a thing like her. My mother had no talent for reading the room. If she had, she’d have picked up on the fact that I didn’t want to step foot outside the house in the getup she’d fashioned for me. But by then I’d learned that the thing to fear was her, not the mocking of my peers. On Halloween that year, I remember carefully packing the costume into a paper grocery bag and carrying it on the bus to school, then shoving it into the cubby where we hung up our coats in our classroom. I have no memory of putting it on when it was time to get into our costumes for the class Halloween party. Someone would have had to tie the laces in the back, which were fashioned out of rope just like Elly May Clampett wore as a belt. I still cringe when I think about this costume and it’s been more than 50 years. 

I managed to take charge of my own Halloween costumes after that, if I took part at all. Marrying someone who loves Halloween brought back the fun of it for me, but I still cannot do the scary thing with him. Instead, now I have a couple of Batman outfits. One is firmly in the “Batman ‘66” era, and the other is more like the 1989 version. The ‘89 costume has an added bonus in that it’s comprised entirely of running gear, except for the cape. I can take part in the Irvington Vampire Run while wearing it, cape fluttering in the breeze as I zip through the neighborhood. I even have Katie in on the act. She “gets” to wear a red t-shirt with an R on the side. Her Robin to my Batman. She’s a great sidekick. I know she hates the t-shirt, but she loves me and puts up with it long enough for us to walk around the neighborhood before dusk. When it’s full dark, it’s my cue to help hand out candy to the kiddos like me who aren’t into the scary stuff. But most of our trick-or-treaters creep up to the porch steps to be scared out of their minds by my husband, and our son when he’s around to take part. Everyone wins.