Friday, September 28, 2007

Recent commentary: Favorite fall thing

What's your favorite thing about fall in Wisconsin?

(published 1-Oct-2007, Appleton Post-Crescent)

Halloween! My wife makes terrific costumes, especially duplicates of costumes from artsy children's movies. Last year she dressed our daughter in the wedding dress from "The Castle Cagliostro". Obscure, hunh? She's very good at papier mache, too. We still have an amazing papier mache mask of Anubis that she made for our second son a dozen years ago. I even managed to squeeze into it when I had bowl duty. Nobody quite knows what to say when Anubis answers the door, you know? The kids, having been drilled never to take candy from strangers, know that it's different on Halloween; but a guy in an Anubis mask holding out a bowl of Snickers and Milk Duds crosses the line somehow. You can almost hear them thinking, "Is this dude like Jason from 'Friday the 13th' and he's going to whip out a chainsaw or something?" How can you beat that?