Halloweeird

With Halloween firmly in our collective rearviews, I must confess that the quality and effort I saw many everyday Chicagoans put into their costumes this year really impressed me.

The best costumes are often the ones that blend most seamlessly into their environment. The first such fully-proportioned outfit belonged to some guy I saw in an alleyway near the train I take after work to get home. This guy got an early jump on the Friday night festivities by dressing in full hobo rag regalia. Not only had this middle-aged gentleman soiled and worn down his secondhand clothes, but he also managed to capture the sour odor of an average metropolitan city bum. The costume was dead-on. I found him sitting on a alley grate pretending to fall asleep. I kicked the "bum's" boot. When he "awoke" he remained in character by asking me for a dollar. Great. Just great stuff. He really went the whole way with the costume. So I played along and handed a dollar to the guy, whom I imagined was a banker or perhaps a business executive. I mean, how else could he have left the office early enough to work himself over so authentically? Irony plays a large part in the best costumes and so it would only be poetic for the man so ingeniously portraying a street tramp to be a man of business or finance.

The" bum" took things a little far for my taste by refusing to give me my dollar back now that the fun in-character exchange was over. I gave him a dollar because he was pretending to be a bum and so, ha-ha. When he didn't give the dollar back, it occurred to me that this shrewd profiteering from a Halloween costume is precisely the type of guile that allowed him to be such a successful enough businessman to take off from work early on a Friday. Fair enough, sir. You may keep my dollar.

I went on my way, took the train home and marveled at the myriad other neat Halloween costumes. Not all of them were as involved as the bum's get-up, but most had a certain charm.

The second-best set of costumes I saw belonged to an inordinately large group of chicks in front of a private high school a block from my house. A bunch of tarty girls probably conspiring to crash some nearby party were all dressed in the exact same Catholic school outfits. I was impressed with the sheer number of girls dressing as slutty school girls, if not underwhelmed by their overall imagination.

So well done to that gaggle of girls dressed in matching slutty school uniforms in front of Fenwick High. And a happy Halloween to the rest of you until next year.