It's Andy Fish!

Happy Halloween! It falls on a Friday this year– that can’t be good. Tomorrow night we’re going to a murder mytery dinner at a high end hotel- should be fun– it gets good reviews and the food is supposed to be very good.

Halloween as a kid meant either buying a store bought cheapo Ben Cooper style costume at Woolworth’s or Kresge’s or McCrory’s.

Pretty much every year, I picked out a BATMAN™ costume. I know at least one year I went with SPIDER-MAN™, but Batman was my usual go-to. The stores never displayed those costumes with the colorful masks hanging out—no, they laid them flat in their boxes so you could only read the character name and size printed on top. I’m sure if I’d actually seen the Frankenstein, Herman Munster, or Dracula masks, I might have been swayed. My friend once got the SUPERMAN™ costume, and it came with a red mask like in the ad above, which puzzled us to no end.

The great thing about those costumes was that they made sure you knew exactly who you were looking at. If the mask didn’t have the character’s name across the forehead, then it was emblazoned right on the chest. And unlike some of the goofier costumes, Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man didn’t have pictures of the characters running toward you—they at least tried to mimic the real costume.

When I was younger, my mom would take me trick-or-treating from house to house. Later, my sister took over that job, and eventually, my friends and I were old enough to roam the neighborhood on our own. By then, store-bought costumes weren’t cool anymore—we started making our own.
Halloween 1977 was the year of Star Wars. One of my friends built an elaborate C-3PO costume out of cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil, complete with a full-size R2-D2 cobbled together from whatever he could find. (If memory serves, R2’s dome was curved, but the top was flat.) We had to push him along like a parade float. I wore a Darth Vader costume made mostly from felt and glue, with a lampshade serving as my helmet. The last member of our trio went as Chewbacca in a full-body fur suit.

We thought we looked incredible—until the very first house. The woman who answered the door clasped her hands and exclaimed,
“Oh my goodness! It’s the Wizard of Oz folks!”

I guess it would have helped if we’d had the character names printed across our chests.