Halloween is a weird holiday. I think we all like any cultural excuse to once again act like children and play dress-up. The way we dress in our daily lives is pretty boring, even for those of us who consider ourselves fairly stylish. I mean, being stylish is nice, but it basically boils down to choosing the fancier cashmere sweater over the plainer wool. Anyway, at least we have this one day to go nuts and dress up the way only theater actors get to do regularly. One thing I am always jealous of women for is their monopoly on lipstick. Sure, if I were a rock star or a drag queen, I too could wear it. But I'm not. So I hereby declare that I will always choose Halloween costumes which allow me to wear lipstick.

Now some might think I took the easy path by dressing up as the same thing as I did last year. And they'd be right. Thing is, I just didn't have much time to pull a costume together. And I really only want to don traditional Halloween costumes--I like witches, ghosts, werewolves, the undead, monsters, etc. I'm not one to dress up as a sexy stewardess (though the lipstick opportunity there is great). I almost decided to be a mummy this year, but I just couldn't really pull it together quickly enough. So I was a vampire again. I like that one, because you get to talk with a Transylvanian accent and make all kinds of jokes about not sleeping and about blood.

This year I was flanked by two non-traditional characters--though no less scary than witches, I suppose: Paula as Donnatella Versace and Christopher as a punk-rock Marie Antoinette. They both had amazing wigs. Christopher styled his himself, too. We went to a party at a colleague's of Paula. We saw hip-hoppers, gay cops, "tacky fags", Napoleon Dynamite, Axl Rose, and that perennial favorite: Martha (of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). Martha was a brilliant costume, actually (if you haven't seen the movie you must).

We went to a bar afterward, and I eventually shed my fangs, my cape, and my tie. Christopher never did shed his head though, as all we children of the revolution had been hoping.

Click all these pix for larger. More pix here.