Scariest, Spookiest OC Halloween Ever! (Red Emma)

     Hey, boys and ghouls, it’s that extra-spooky time of year, Halloween Eve, a celebration of ancestor worship, imagination and, yes, the occasion for Red Emma’s annual re-telling of our favorite revelatory anecdote about life as we know it here in Dissentland. The “social construction of reality,” Red Emma likes to remind his students, is a phrase used in the title of an important sociology text, a helpful and instructive synthesis of ideas built on the research of well, everybody, including Alfred Schutz, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Franz Boas, that whole gang.

     Warning!  This is an entirely true story, and so scary and spooky and frightening you may want to stop reading here, now, to avoid the hair-raising fright that it illustrates about life in the OC (which I like to pronounce “ock” for even bigger and more scarifying effect!)

     So:  It was fifteen years ago, Red and the Rebel Girl lived in a small beachside community in South County.  It was, indeed, Halloween.  We’d carved the pumpkin, decorated our little trailer, and purchased the treats (good stuff, like Snickers and Three Musketeers, not junk). Dusk settled, there was a knock on the door.  Red Emma answered, to discover a princess, a pirate and a monster of some kind. “Trick or treat,” hollered the kids.  Red loves that moment. 

     Immediately behind the trio of revelers stood, on our porch, the mother, this evening’s parent in charge.  I knew her.  A handsome woman, mid-thirties, she’d costumed herself in what was obviously her own old high school song girl or cheerleader outfit. She looked good, a sexy woman, though let’s say that she did not fit into the song costume that night as she had as a young girl. Zaftig works for Red, and I smiled warmly, and acknowledged her, offering the usual small talk about how much I liked Halloween with a frisson of perhaps Eros tossed gently in her direction.

     Then I noticed, standing a few yards back, in the twilight dark just outside the reach of my porch light, a couple, a woman and a man, same age as the sexy mom cheerleader.  Maybe one of the kids’ parents?  Aunt and uncle, or family friends along for the trick-or-treating. 

     They wore nearly identical ensembles:  big cowboy hats, tapered blue jeans, shit-kicker boots, and leather belts with giant belt buckles and magnificent floral Western shirts with mother of pearl buttons.   

     Now, here it’s important to remind you, Gentle Reader, that this was Halloween Eve but that it was also South Orange County circa 1998, in a universe which often celebrates obliviousness.  And that reality, as I remind my students, is generally assumed to be “constructed” by groups, by citizens, based on an agreed-upon, if fluid and broad, set of perceptions.  And, did I mention, it was Halloween?

     Red Emma considered the scene, Rubenesque mother in costume.  Princess, pirate, monster.  And the two adults in the shadows.

     “It’s so great,” Red offered, distributing the last of the quality chocolates, and admiring again song girl-woman and nodding in the direction of the presumptive cow-gal and cow-fella, “that the parents are dressed up too.” 

     Silence.  Nothing.  Sexy mom went a little pale.  From out of the twilight stepped the cowman, rodeo rider, line-dancer, whatever he was, thumbs in his belt loops, I kid you not.

     Slowly, carefully, he answered.  “We’re not dressed up,” he said.

*     *     * 

     And so concludes this year’s telling of the scariest, spookiest Halloween story you will ever be told, except of course for what you hear and read and see on so much commercial media, where it is possible to imagine the construction of reality in which Tea Baggers, birthers, Libertarians are, we are told, not at all what they seem:  racists, nativists, No-Nothings, pro-war nationalists, reborn John Birchers and members of the White Citizens Council, Prop 13 voters, anti-Voting Rights Act Goldwater Republicans, shills for the Koch Brothers, admirers of Newt, and on and on.

     The four truest and scariest words of this Halloween-election season?
     They’re not dressed up. 

Spooky Halloween music for you kids


In honor of Prop 19