The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind...a halloweeeeen story!!

Dim the lights and sit by the campfire for this story.  There is a spooky tone to it....Okay, not real spooky, just my wandering mind (better it wander to the paranormal than the thoughts it has when I am a 12 year old boy...)


So my kid has a real job.  A 9 to 5 er (actually an 830-530er but you know what I mean).  He needed his social security card to bring to work tomorrow.  He is a bit nervous as he wants to make a good impression so having everything they ask for is essential in his getting good sleep tonight.  Yesterday, his father and I went to the store to buy him a few shirts as a "good luck" present.  We find some nice ones (even if the father was dubious about the purple strip one, but I know this kid and he'll look a treat in it) and took them home to be laundered and ironed.  The phone rings and aforementioned son reminded me to bring the soc card.  I looked in the file and gasp!!! No card!! I'm freaking out. I keep yelling "Father Father!! Where is sons card??".  No answer.  I'm running around and the father overhears and says "oh, I put it with the shirts I ironed". WHEW!  So all is well...until the morning.......

Grab a bag, put shirts, card, other mail in the bag.  Flop it in the back seat.  Now this is a very very big bag and the contents are very small and down in the bottom of the bag. Oh, let me mention...it is a winnie the pooh blustery day in the city.  It is a detail to take note of.  Traffic is light, we make the city in record time.  I get out of the car, grab the bag  being careful to hold it just so to avoid the newly pressed shirts getting wrinkled and walk to his apartment.  We take shirts out of bag and HORROR!!! No social security card!  We shake out mail, shirts, stuff on his bed and determine that, nope, card is not there.  I run down to the car and look in the back seat and around the car, nope, card is not there. THERE IS NOW A PANIC!!!  It is decided that the card never made it into the bag (although deep down inside I believe it did).  I can't explain this.  I hop in the car and head for home to see if I can find the prankster playing government identification.  I'm heading close to home when it hits me.....this would be my late mothers idea of a perfect Halloween joke...her's and my late brothers.....I say out loud "HEY...ENOUGH IS ENOUGH...I know you are pranking me, but my son?? He is your buddy!! He is your shining light!! This is going to effect the one you love the most! It won't just f me up mother! It is going to f up the light of your now former life!!"  Approximately 35 seconds later my phone rings...it is my son.."Mom, you are not going to believe it, dad and I were outside looking around and I bent down to look under the cars on the opposite side of the road and when I stood up I looked to my right and there it was...blowing in the grass down the street. Damn thing had to be out there for 45 minutes or so..but i have it"......Hmmmm....coincidence that he found it just after I reminded my late mother who would suffer from her prank???  Could be, but as it is Halloween eve, I think not....I'm sleeping with one eye open tonight.

It Was the Best Halloween Costume…It Was Worst Halloween Costume…

It might not seem so apparent today, but there was a time, when I was younger, when I was often told that I looked a lot like the recently deceased actor, Christopher Reeve. He was probably remembered best for his role in the Superman movies. During the time when these movies were popular, I must've got the comment at least 3-4 times a week, "Hey did anyone ever tell you that you look like Christopher Reeve?" It did get very old. I didn't mind so much being compared to the actor Reeve as much as hearing that I looked like Clark Kent. Rarely did anyone actually say I looked like Superman…it was always Clark Kent.

So during the height of my celebrity doppelganger period, I decided it appropriate to dress for a huge Halloween party as the mild-mannered Clark Kent. Most people thought this was a lame costume attempt, as I only had to wear a cheap grey suit and horn-rimmed glasses to pull it off. Many of my friends at this party thought it was a cheap and lazy cop-out. What many people at the party didn't know was that I actually went through great pains, the week prior, to create a Superman costume that I wore underneath the suit and tie. My plan was to transform into the super hero at a later point in the evening when many at this party would be quite drunk/stoned. The costume was easy enough to make. All I needed was a powder blue leotard, tights, an iron on appliqué of the superman emblem for my chest, a pair of red shorts and socks, and a piece of red material for a cape. It all went beautifully… at least for a while. In fact, it went so well that many people didn't realize that I was the same person later transformed.

As the evening wore on, I realized there was a big problem. I hadn't thought about the fact that I would be drinking several pitchers of beer during the party. This costume was not designed for frequent bathroom visits. Imagine for a moment the contortions one must go through to quickly extricate one's manhood from a pair of shorts, a leotard and tights?! It was a nightmare! It seems to me that I ended up cutting an access port through the nylon at some point later in the night. It was a great costume; it was just very bad in function. Still, I think my friend, Frank, had it worse that night. I recall that he went to the party dressed as Robin Hood, but all night people mistook him for Peter Pan.