Tales from the Dork Side: Halloween, Part 1, The Anti-clown

We love Halloween around here.

We’ll have a special thing for Trick-or-treaters this year: French fries. Yep, we’re going to dump a bunch of fries into a bucket and drop handfuls into their candy sacks. If the fries get cold we’ll just pop them into the microwave before the next trick-or-treater comes along. And before you start thinking we’re mean, yes, we will include little packets of ketchup.

I miss the Halloweens of my childhood. Kellie (my childhood best friend) and I would meet up somewhere between our houses, with our moms and sometimes older siblings, and begin our begging rounds. We were encouraged to go up to doors sans parents, as no one was worried we’d be kidnapped and tortured. It was the 1970’s, pre-razor blades in candy apples, so no one ever even checked the candy before we snarfed it.

One Halloween Kellie was a witch and I was – or was supposed to be – a ghost. I was wanting desperately to be something scary after several Halloweens of being something cute or someone historical (no one recognized that I was Martha Washington the previous year). I got my old sheet ready, cutting out eyes and a mouth and devising ways to get the sheet to actually stay on me without having it slide off and having to readjust it before each door. Mom solved that… sort of.

Mom was pissed off that Halloween, as I remember it. As I prepared my costume she popped in on me and told me I was not going to be a ghost because she’d already bought me a clown mask, and clown masks cost money! What? A clown? I never said anything about wanting to be a clown! Clowns weren’t scary… at least not in the 1970’s before mass clown-fear became a thing.

I fought this. We went back and forth for what felt like hours, but it was probably just really minutes, and I lost. I was allowed to be a ghost for about fifteen minutes of trick-or-treating, which added up to about four houses worth of ghost. Then I was to somehow change into a clown, though I really didn’t have the rest of a clown costume, just a mask. I’ll never forgive her for what she did to me (which is okay, because she’ll never forgive me for being a super-asshole teenager… and I definitely and defiantly was). She thought it would be cute for me to wear that thing on the back of my head. As in ghost in the front, clown in the back, which would have been perfect if I’d had the ability to spin my head and really scare the crap out of people, but I didn’t, so it blew chunks. It did, however, solve the problem of my sheet sliding off, because an elastic cord secured the clown mask to the back of my head, prevented sheet-slide, and choked the shit out of me at the same time.

I love my mom. She did embarrassing stuff to me, which gives me stories. And sometimes she even solves my problems by choking me. I think I’ll go pass out french fries from her house this year.

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