Rocky Horror Acceptance Show

If I don’t clean all this uncooked rice out of my pockets before I do my laundry, will I have clean clothes and a snack when the washer’s done? And rice krispies when the dryer finishes?

Such are the questions one asks after the late night performance of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and what else should one do on Halloween in San Francisco? What, hand out candy? I think we’re one of those cities with more dogs than children, and from what I hear all the kids get crated off to the mall for trick-or-treating anyway. Kids spending time in a mall, now that’s scary.

For my part, I took my variously costumed self to the Clay Theater with some friends from our rock climbing group. I’m used to seeing them in harnesses and chalk, now I got to see pink wigs, 1920’s throwbacks, and a red crushed velvet pimp suit that stood out in the crowd. Heck, it woulda stood out at a parrot convention.

But in a crowd like that, standing out is every bit as encouraged as blending in. Everything goes, and you can spend the evening in the sort of easy camaraderie with strangers that comes when we all drop our fusty attitudes and remember that no one really cares. About any of the crap we think they care about. Because even if they do? Who cares?

They warn you that there’ll be swearing, sexuality, homosexuality, and people in lingerie, and if you’re going to be offended, get the f*** out now. The three people who pretend to storm out prove the rule, and everyone relaxes in the knowledge that it’s a group of people who came together with the same idea, the same ethos of acceptance, and it feels like freedom. Celebrate with handfuls of rice and the other traditional manifestations, and be raucous in public.

The late night bus back to Oakland formed the “After” version of the earlier BART train’s “Before.” At 7:00 all the costumes were clean, the makeup was precise, and the faces were alert. Sometime after November started, as the bus bumped over the bridge it looked more like a triage center for someone’s tangled imagination. And I sat there, between a dinosaur who lost his head somewhere and Slash with hair in hand, and felt right at home.

Can it be Halloween again soon, please?

Trick or treat? Or not.

Granted, I have no children. This places me solidly in the spectator box when it comes to child-rearing, but I noticed a pattern when asking friends if they would be giving out candy to kids this year:

I'm gonna be bold and suggest that if we're worried about
violence and kids, maybe allow the trick or treating, but cut
back on the stabbed-in-the-head costumes?

“We don’t get them in my neighborhood.” Not a pattern, really, more of a uniform chorus of the same sentence. So...where have all the kiddies gone?

“Our neighborhood is full of kids. We see them come out of their houses in full costumes and we get the candy ready, then they get in cars and drive to the mall.”

Wh- Wh- What? The mall?!? Wh- Why? (In my opinion, kids should never be allowed to go to the damn mall, but that’s just me.)

“They do their trick-or-treating at school. People come in, set up a trunk or a table, and pass out candy there.”

Th- Th- That’s not trick-or-treating! That’s grocery shopping.

Why the shift? I feel like in the 80s we were plenty scared of kidnappers, razor blades and poison in candy (the latter of which has never happened, by the way), not to mention ample cause to bemoan, in our pre-adolescent voices, the reflective tape totally messing up our costumes! We’re gonna stay on the sidewalk, mom, there are no cars there! Gawd!

But we went. And we had a barge-load of fun every year. Running door to door, swapping insider tips with friends met along the way as to who as giving out the best stuff, and mapping out the neighborhood in your mind for optimal candy-ation. I would not be surprised to learn that whoever created mapquest was inspired by childhood candy-mapping.

“Skip the one-sided cul-de-sac, it’s not cost effective!”

It seems sad to me that people are so scared of each other these days that we’ve taken this experience away from our kids, especially given that we actually live in the safest time in human history, it’s just that we also live in an age tragically miseducated by the 24 hour news cycle. (Note, that US media article still manages to focus on violence. But unless you think your kid is at risk of engaging in a holy war, the Brits were a little more on track.)

But as I mentioned, I ain’t got none of them little critters, so I don’t really get to talk.

Well. There is one. A certain four year old, whose continued well-being feels like arguably the single most important task of the planet today… Would I want him trick-or-treating? The answer?

Shit yes! He’s going to LOVE it!

But then again, he lives in a small town, and has two responsible parents to chaperon his tiny Iron Man butt.

Big city? Packs of kids wandering loose? Would I want him in one of those in a few years? I….don’t know.

What about you? (Vote in the poll on the vagabondurgres.com version of this blog.)