It's Halloween and the treats have already started. My neighbor rapped on my front door last night bearing gifts of caramel apples. "I just couldn't wait!" she giggled handing over the candy fruit. There is something about Halloween that makes everyone act like a kid.
Maybe it is the sheer nonsense of the holiday, and the freedom to indulge in pretend silliness - a healthy activity according to late breaking studies.
Halloween has always been my personal favorite; less about costumes than about candy and more importantly, of safely indulging in heart racing acts of terror. For what is Halloween without a good haunted house, blasting soundtracks of ghostly moaning, piercing screams, and thumping heartbeats?
When I was at St. Anselm's it was the purview of the 8th Grade class to block off the raised gymnasium stage and create a maze of frightful pit stops for our younger classmates. We went to town, boiling pots of spaghetti for guts, opening cans of olives for eyeballs, and squishing jiggly jell-o for I don't know what. It didn't matter as long as it made the younger kids squeal.
We all had a part to play, dressed as the living dead, witches, ghouls or executioners, and we were going to play our parts well. We turned out the lights, turned up the cassette player and waited anxiously for our prey.
We took sadistic delight in blindfolding the excited youngsters, spinning them around until they were dizzy and then leading them up the back stairs - pulling more like - to guide them through the transformed stage. We made sure they tangled themselves in the crepe paper strips dangling from the ceiling, took silly string blasts full in the face and when they hesitated, shoved their hands into the bowls of disgusting and absolutely inedible food.
We knew we had succeeded when they finally made it through the other side, not quite as brave and smiling as when they started. And we made money on the deal. 50 cents a head if memory serves.
When the lights finally went up and we surveyed the mess that we had to clean, there were no regrets...only longings of our own. If only WE had upper classmen to scare the living daylights out of us! And the longing never ends.
From now until Oct. 31st I will be on the hunt for a good horror flick and I won't be satisfied until I find one that makes me feel just like those poor unsuspecting innocents felt all those years ago.
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