Yesterday I bought a pair of fangs. Yep. Good old fashion prosthetic vampire fangs. They look pretty damn real but does walking around in normal clothes with a pair of fangs make a costume? 

Dictionary.com says its – a fashion of dress appropriate to a particular occasion or season.

Ok so yes. So why a vampire? I wanted to be Darth Vader – probably should have gone there – but frankly at 100 dollars a day on the rental I couldn’t afford it. So I settled for the cheapest, simplest solution – my favorite childhood memory other than the Sith Lord himself -the vampire. 

Halloween isn’t really about dressing up in a costume or the candy( ok maybe a little). Its about becoming, just for one day, someone or something else. Its about taking off your daily mask you wear and dawning a new set of rules and expectations to play with. Its the one day a year where “normal” people do not have to be afraid to be “weird” and write it off to “Whatever man it was halloween and I wanted to wear that superman suit.” Lets be honest here – if randomly on a tuesday in March you saw a guy walking down the street wearing a superman suit you’d probably think he was bit of a nutter, but on Halloween that nutter is probably your accountant. 

He can for that short time become superman, act like superman, and not be afraid of anyone judging him. Just like when we were kids and the world was what you imagined it could be. We have somehow told ourselves that it isn’t ok to pretend on most days. We aren’t allowed to imagine being part of a great space battle or a deep sea exploration and act it out -because that’s crazy. Adults don’t do that. We exist in the real world -not some childhood fantasy – where we have deadlines, responsibilities and yogurt. 

Do you remember when your pretend machine stopped working and your reality machine turned on? When it was no longer “cool” to play cops and robbers, or climb a tree while pretending to be exploring the dark jungles of Africa? When being older mattered and the day dreams of youth were just that dreams. It is a sad thing this loss of pretend. We artists are luckier than most I think because we get to keep our pretend machine. We get to imagine other worlds, become other beings doing amazing things, escaping, traveling – to us every day is a journey in the pretend machine. We get to live it and be mocked, praised and envied for it. 

For the rest of you, Halloween is your out. Society gives you this one day to become a kid again and pretend. So use it. You get to put on that red blanket as a cape, dawn your blue pj’s, scrawl a messed up S on your chest and say to the world “Up, up and away!”  Because on Monday, its back to eating yogurt.

J