Sunday, November 01, 2009

The Year the Grinch Stole Halloween

I like Halloween...a lot. I like the season, the concept, the costumes...the candy.

Conceptually, Halloween is like the most awesome holiday ever! Even better than Christmas because the dressing up doesn't mean going to church and sitting on a rock hard pew in pantyhose. It means becoming something you most decidedly are not which can be a lot of fun. Especially if you don't have to spend most of the night explaining it to people.

This year, I had 2 fabulous ideas for costumes.

1. Stolen from a friend of Dayna's - wearing a burka and a cone bra and going as Rhamadonna.
2. Crazy cat lady

The problem is that I am a consummate procrastinator. So by the time I got around to putting my costume together, it was oh like 3 hours before I was supposed to be anywhere.

So, in a burst of brilliance (or desperation), I procured a "Hello, My Name Is..." name tag and wrote "Miss Ann Thrope" on it. I spent the rest of the evening pretending to hate everyone.

But my costume this year is not the point.

Last night, before I'd gotten the good news call that plans were still on, I was reflecting back on my past Halloweens and various costumes. As an adult, many of my Halloweens have been non-events or relatively unmemorable. But as a kid! I had some great costumes and looked forward to the day every year.

My most favorite Halloween costume of all time was 1982. I was 10 and had decided I wanted to be a bookworm. My mom, dad, and I worked on creating the best bookworm costume evah! Complete with a giant cardboard box decorated to look like a book with a hole cut out of it to use as a handle as well as a place to put my trick or treat candy. It was awesome.


Jane the Bookworm. You can't really see it but my face is green too.


However...

Do any of you remember the Halloween of 1982?

Between September 29 and October 5 of 1982, 7 random people from around the country died of cyanide poisoning traced back to tampered-with Tylenol bottles. As a 10-year-old, this didn't seem to have anything to do with me. Right? RIGHT?!

Wrong.

There I was, best costume ever, visions of miniature Snickers and fun-size Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Tootsie Rolls filling my daydreams and some asshat decides he's going to start randomly poisoning people via common food and drug products...for fun.

Halloween? Canceled.

And that's how the grinch stole Halloween.

By the way, as of this writing, the person responsible for those 7 deaths in 1982 has never been apprehended. That event also changed the way food and drugs were packaged. Because of those events, we will never be able to open another bottle of aspirin without superhero strength, super-human dexterity, and a knife.

And because I was cute and because I can...

1976



1977



1978

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