So,
Halloween. We meet once more. There seems to be a rule in my life that every halloween has to have something weird go down. My first car accident. Getting dumped. And so forth. This year's was no exception.
It started out simply enough. I was going to join some friends to go trick-or-treating in the neighborhoods around campus. There are those who say that college kids are too old for such things. To them, I say that "free candy" == good. I'd like to see anybody argue with that logic.
Anyways, the people I was going to go out with left early, and I missed them. I decided to go see who-all I could round up to go to a party with, instead. As I was walking out the door, however, some girls down my hall noticed my costume.
See, I was going as Jesus. People are always telling me that I look just like him, and there are other similarities we're both bearded semi-Jews who like tools and go barefoot a lot) so it seemed the natural choice. The costume was simple- my bathrobe over black pants and a white t-shirt, wearing birkenstocks, and carrying a cross made from my hockey stick and a cardboard tube.
The aforementioned girls were going as Catholic schoolgirls. "Fallen" ones. Plaid skirts hiked up, white jumpers tied up to show midriff. Hair in pigtails. Pierced navels. Lots of makeup. The works. They decided that they needed a picture of themselves with Jesus, which I was more than happy to provide. Then they invited me to go downtown with them. Turns out that they were going to go meet what turned out to be some mutual friends down at the pub, and that some other friends of ours were supposedly playing in a band down there that night. This sounded like a good time, so I went down with them.
We got to the bar, and found that there was a cover charge that night. One of the girls decided that she'd pay the charge to go in and see if our friends were there, while we waited outside. While we were waitng, we drew quite a bit of attention. People saw the cross, came to check it out, and then stayed when they saw my companions. People were stopping to talk with us, the girls were constantly explaining that no, they weren't going as Britney Spears. I was being asked to "put in a good word for me with the Big Guy, eh?". People were buying us drinks, and coming outside to drink them with us.
Finally, a pretty sketchy (and very, very drunk) woman came out, saying "Jesus, I've got a surprise for you!". She then proceeded to flash me. This was a simple procedure, as her costume was basically a single piece of tiger-print cloth wrapped around her (that's literally all she was wearing, head to toe). She held the flash for about twenty seconds, while myself and my friends tried to figure out what we were supposed to do. Finally, the bouncer started giving her a Look, she wrapped herself back up, and went back inside, giggling all the while.
A few minutes later, our friend who'd gone inside came out and said that the people we were looking for weren't there, and that we'd missed the band that we'd came to see. A quick huddle ensued. It was decided that they would go call their friends to see where they were. The answer came back: not home. In other words, at some party. Without us. We headed back to campus, where there was a message waiting: "1019 Weber, around the back, up the stairs, middle door. If anybody asks, you're with Matt". Off we went, to find that nobody was at the given address. We headed back home. A new phone message: "Yeah, so everybody left 1019. Now we're all at 1123 Nevada." Thus began the wild goose chase.
To make a long story short, we ended up driving from house to house, and probably visited every Halloween party for several blocks in every direction, never finding the specific friends we were looking for, but running into quite a few others. We finally found them, around midnight, at the college-sponsored showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A joyous reunion ensued, made all the more joyous by the amount that we had collectively had to drink by that point. By the time everybody started doing the Time Warp (including one of my past professors, who was there dressed in goth-drag), I figured that it was probably time to go and get sleep.
All in all, while this was certainly a less painful or destructive halloween than those in years past, it was equally strange. I've never heard so many bad "Jesus Christ! What're you doing here?" jokes in my life... but then again, I've never had that many drinks given to me free before. Maybe I should do this more often...