Spectral Sugar High

It was Halloween a couple of nights ago, but I haven't had the chance to post anything about it. Until now. Boo.

Two years ago, when Max was two and a half years old (was he really that young so recently?), he was in the waning days of his ceiling fan obsession -- he'd recall the exact number of ceiling fans in homes he had visited once the prior year, and we'd have to stop in the fan section of Lowes on every trip there; the obsession died down when we moved to Brooklyn, into an apartment with four ceiling fans -- and so Cathleen figured she'd create a fan costume for him for Halloween. But when Max learned that his cousin Miriam was going as Batman, he wanted to go as Batman also. He had no idea what Batman was, but that didn't matter much to him. Cathleen wasn't ready to part with her ceiling fan vision, and so she created a brilliant Batfan costume for him. I can't describe it, but you've got to trust me that it was brilliant, and he loved it. Last year, Max was in direct touch with his obsession, and said he wanted to go as a TV. Cathleen made him a clever TV costume, and he was psyched.

This past year has all been about pirates for him (ask him to sing "The Pirate King" from Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Pirates of Penzance" for you), and so we naturally assumed he'd want to go as a pirate. Nope, wasn't the least bit interested. He wanted to dress up as...a whole musical band, and Eliza could be the singer. Cool idea, we thought; we could deck him out in several instruments, he'd have fun creating a ruckus, Eliza's inevitably derivative costume wouldn't be too demeaning for her. A week later he decided he wanted to be a fire-breathing dragon. Oy. That would require an effort, but we could have Eliza go as the marshmallow that he was toasting (not sure if that was his idea or Cathleen's). Mercifully, he moved on from that idea after a week, and finally settled on wanting to dress up as a ghost. My boy and his classic sensibilities. Cathleen. who normally reserves her well of creativity for her writing, started describing a semi-elaborate costume plan that involved flowing strips of white cloth and clear plastic and the like. I turned to Max and asked him what a ghost costume looked like. "You stick a towel over your head and cut out holes for eyes," he explained. Bingo. The kid had completely internalized "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown." We decided that Eliza, too, would be a ghost, but given her legendary resistance to any form of restraint or cover, she'd be a ghost that resembled more of a cute little girl with a flowing white cape.

When it was time to don the costumes for trick-or-treating, Cathleen could not find the ghost cape she had sewn for Eliza, and so she quickly put together a new ghost costume for her, which basically left Eliza looking like she was dressed in a white potato sack toga. I left work early that day and met up with Cathleen and the kids on our block, where they had just begun there trick-or-treating. Max was in full costume for those five minutes, and then he decided that he was having too much trouble seeing out of his eye-holes; his costume morphed into the cute little boy ghost with a flowing white cape.

Sophie and Joseph, decked out in almost luminescent wigs, with Miriam (Supergirl!) and Rachel (Screw your costume fascism!) joined us for the long haul. Max began a little meltdown tantrum action, and I was naive enough to try to reason with him about what was irking him in life. Just when all looked lost, Cathleen dipped into his plastic trick-or-treat pumpkin bag and produced a lollipop for his consumption. Let the sugar begin!

Trick-or-treating in Brooklyn is a vastly different experience than doing so in Yorktown. Growing up in a 60-lot housing subdivision, we would go to every single house, ring the doorbell or knock on the door and acquire a haul of candy. Well, you didn't knock on the Gans' door because their son allegedly had committed suicide, and it was risky to go to the Kronen's house because Mrs. Kronen actually might have been a witch, but definitely go to the Fatigates because they have money and no doubt will give big candy. In Brooklyn, you only go to the houses where people are sitting outside on their stoop with a bowl of candy. No knocking on doors or ringing doorbells; it's simply approaching people who are already out there, hoping to be approached. It simplifies the transaction and reduces everyone's anxiety, and allows you to measure a block's worth by the number of stoop-sitting candy providers (our block, for those keeping score at home, sucks).

We trick-or-treated down Dean Street in Boerum Hill (including along the block featured in Jonathan Lethem's "The Fortress of Solitude"), down to Hoyt Street. I was carrying Eliza pretty much the entire way, as she got her money's worth out of a sticky pink lollipop, and as we walked down Hoyt we fell behind the rest of our crew who had crossed the middle of the street to gain access to the only candy available on the block. By the time we caught up, I found the kids receiving candy from Hope Davis. Hope Davis! I've always loved her in all of those movies that I can't remember that she was in, though I do remember seeing her act live in a production of Tennessee Williams' "Camino Real" at the Williamstown Theater Festival almost a decade ago. And here she was, having beckoned us to come across the street to her home, chatting up Sophie and Joseph to the point that I quietly asked myself, "Sophie and Joseph know Hope Davis?" She was crazy friendly, and as pretty as you'd expect. Brooklyn, folks, Brooklyn. Take that, Hollywood.

We completed our candy gathering tour up Wyckoff to St. Marks. Eliza wanted to walk a lot of the way home, she being so jacked up on tootsie rolls and lollipops that she was running and levitating at times. We returned to our stoop, met up with Claudia, brought out our building's five jack-o-lanterns and began distributing candy to costumed passersby. Max, at first, balked at the notion that we would actually give away candy, but then he got into the routine, alternating ingestion with dissemination. Miriam was really into giving out the candy, and ultimately who held the candy bowl became a power struggle. By 7:30 we decided that we had set back our children's nutritional development sufficiently, and we took them inside to get ready for bed. Crash! That was the sound of Max's blood sugar, followed by his inability to cope with the world (after his stories were over, he cried that he hadn't seen me tuck him in, and twice cried that he hadn't seen me turn out the lights).

After dining on some Cathleen-made pumpkin soup, we watched some TV and called it a night.