What Was Your Favorite Halloween Costume as a Kid?
My favorite Halloween costume was made by a kid, my 11-year-old daughter Sunshine
Texas artist Mary McCleary asked today on Facebook, “What was your favorite Halloween costume as a kid?” and this was my reply. “My favorite Halloween costume was one put together by a kid, my eleven year old daughter, Sunshine.”
BTW, this is another story from the time in my thirties when I was a single mother of two young children.
At the time, I was teaching freshman English and living off the part time salary of $9 an hour, enrolled full time in grad school and working part time at the NEED (North East Emergency Depot) thrift store in an Episcopal Church basement around the corner from where we lived in Northeast Minneapolis. The rent for out first-floor apartment in a two-story wood framed duplex, which was heated only with a gas heater next to the kitchen stove, was only made affordable by a Section 8 rent subsidy.
(The amount of drama I experienced on that thrift store job stays with me, and ever since I’ve been wanting to write about it, partly because it sheds some light on some of the big questions about what makes charity often to be so hurtful to the needy recipients while it is ego-boosting to the also needy ones who sometimes dispense the bounty with their noses in the air and a nobless oblige attitude. But that’s a topic for another day.)
The day before Halloween, I brought my rather preternaturally bright daughter to the thrift store with me. She was a student at the Children's Theatre School, where she had applied on her own initiative and had gotten a scholarship, and she was already acting in a dinner theater production of Annie. Before she had even started at the Children's Theatre School, we responded to a casting call for the show we saw on a bulletin board in the school lobby, and Sunshine had been picked to be one of the singing and dancing orphans in that Chanhassen dinner theater musical show over many other aspiring young actresses who had been taking lessons for years, even though she hadn't yet taken a single class. She just threw herself into the audition just like she threw herself into everything.
At the thrift store, she scanned the racks of clothing crammed together on hangers on racks around the edges of the room and the accessories jumbled on the table. Then she quickly selected a pale blue wool coat, a purse woven like a basket with artificial flowers on top, a hat with more flowers, and a pair of dowdy shoes.
On Halloween, she put on the outfit, and under her hat she wore a grey wig her grandma Betty had gotten for the grandkids' dress-up play. When I took her with me to a party thrown by some graduate students I studied with, some people were wondering why I brought that tiny little old lady with me.
Nobody understood my costume, I was wearing tights and a Children's Theatre sweatshirt, a 37 year old trying to masquerade as a Children's Theatre school student. I didn’t mind. I was so struck with my daughter’s eldritch creativity.
