Hey, gang!! It’s October 1st!! Time to start devoting your free hours to the biggest issue of the month--pondering another top-notch Halloween costume. Yippeeeee!!!
My grade school get-ups for trick-or-treating were usually something thrown together that was already laying around the house. More than once I was a hobo. I’d start with one of Beans’s big flannel shirts, pull on a pair of his Extra Husky Boy jeans, rolled up at the ankles and tied to my waist with a rope, then stuff my pony tail under an old hat found in the bottom of a closet. Mama Bore would wrap a bandana around a wad of newspaper, then tie it to a long stick for my hobo bindle. She’d wipe some brown shoe polish on my face, spring for a 10-cent black Lone Ranger-style mask, and I’d tramp off into the wilds.
One year, when I was in 4th grade, an older girl loaned me a store-bought costume she’d outgrown. I was Little Red Riding Hood, red dress, red cape, and my long hair held in place by a red cap tied under the chin, looking wolf-a-licious. I won the prize for “Most Beautiful.” There must not have been any Cinderellas or Snow Whites in the bunch that year.
Another time I wore all green and was Peter Pan. All black for a black cat. My hair played an important role the years I was an Indian maiden (pigtails) in a burlap bag/dress and a Japanese girl (single long braid down my back) wearing a pair of Mama Bore’s old kimono-style pajamas.
I don’t recall what kind of costume I had in 1st grade, but I do remember that the boy who sat to my right, Monty, was a tiger. This silly piece of trivia is etched in my brain because when we came back from lunch in our costumes, our teacher Mrs. Rankin told us NOT to sit in our assigned seats. We were going to have a guessing game and try to figure out who was behind each costume. Well, no one knew who the blasted Tiger was because Monty was sitting in his usual spot! Everyone got a huge laugh out of it, and no one accused him of cheating because this was in the 1950s and the term “dirty trickster” had yet to come on the scene. I thought he was a total genius for being so deceitful. At age 6, no less.
Mound School had terrific afternoon Halloween parties. We’d parade around the town square in our snazzy costumes, then come back to have snacks, apple cider and cinnamon rolls were my favorite, and watch movies like “The Three Stooges Meet Frankenstein” in the basement of the school building. There was a lot of screaming and laughing in between all the heavy duty cookie and cupcake consumption, as I recall. Now that I’m an old fogey, I suspect the teachers, god bless ’em, were relieved when the dismissal bell finally rang so we kids could take our massive Sugar High Overloads home and out of their sight. “What a treat to get that over with!!”
Happy costume hunting.
2 comments:
my favorite economy costume was a string mop head with red-sprayed styrofoam balls glued to it, put on my head (it was a new mop), a red checked napkin around my neck and a fork and knife in my mitts. i was a spaghetti dinner. could use the napkin and mop (de-balled) after it was all over.
What a cool idea!!! My big bro was big on using boxes--a robot one year, TV set the next.
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