“Who are you supposed to be?’ When asking children this, you usually lose the “supposed to.” Kids have enough of those. You are supposed to wash your hands, play nicely with your siblings, sleep with the lights off. In college the “supposed to” adds the always-necessary bite of sarcasm. There are other ways to ask the question, but I enjoy the ambiguity of the phrase. It’s a question that is really only appropriate one night of the year, or coming from a sage of a figure in the emotional climax of this year’s Oscar favorite. I get the urge to ask this question of people all the time, even in the off-season. Every once in a while I do. A backpack and three-inch heels? A handlebar mustache and $300 bike shoes? Thank God for the 31st.
As a sociology major, I could claim Halloween is a riot of undressed desire concealed under masks and make up, also the recession-proof source of income for Hershey’s and those companies who sell fake cobwebs. Modern factory-made cobwebs? Analyze that one when you’ve got a spare meditative moment. Year after year, hundreds of girls exhibit either immense creativity or an astounding lack of it, to reveal their oft-concealed organic shape. Mostly this means more cosmetics than are usually acceptable and an insistence on wearing not only, but solely, the pieces of apparel 2009 deems sexual. This does not mean girls wear a whole outfit of sexy gear, but rather it means that a girl can decide to go out in just the most alluring elements of her wardrobe. Perhaps she only has a provocative pair of heels but not a similarly come-hither top. Not a problem, she can go topless – a bra will do. Or suppose she has a shirt that could make heads roll but not an accompanying skirt, these fearless Halloween devotees brave the elements sans culottes. It’s easy to mock the girls without pants or laugh at that one who may or may not have lost the accessory that made her leotard and heels into a costume. As my wise roommate noted, however, Halloween can just be your chance to perform as something you aren’t. These girls wear leotards in public because they don’t get to normally. After 12-odd years of dance class, I know leotards are less than flattering, and make the restroom impossible, but the leotard girls may have a point.
Another category of costume furthers this holiday theory. You are just as likely to see college- age children on the streets as actual ones. The difference between the trick-or-treaters going from house to house in Brookline and the revelers going from bar to bar on Harvard is not so pronounced. The appeal of dressing up like your childhood ideal is undiminished after childhood. The streets are crowded with literal and figurative ghosts: We are haunted by flappers, princesses and monsters from preschool days. This holiday weekend saw the resurrection of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, last encountered as plastic figurines on my cousin’s kitchen floor. Thing One and Thing Two – racier models of the Suessian creations – garnished the windows of the American Apparel on Newbury Street, that infamous den of sin and spandex. This duality doesn’t fade. Fortunately, just as you become really too old for elastic wings you can officially have kids of your own.
I dressed up like a friend of mine. This wasn’t really a stretch on my part, because I dress a little like him anyway. I had to acquire almost no new clothing and nothing I wouldn’t wear again. It was a performance of subtlety. It qualified as a costume in my mind because I know how important a shade of plaid can be. I went to all four years of American high school—much more like a John Hughes movie than the liberals of the Washington, D.C. area would like to admit—and I know the width of my jeans makes a world of difference. Sometimes I even wish the categories were as simple as the princess, the jock and the brain. Occasionally, I can still dress for hours, a holdover from high school when I would rearrange endless combinations of seemingly identical T-shirts. To me they were really an accumulation of characters: vintage from the West Coast, elderly survivors of my childhood and veterans from my mom’s high school days. I hoped I would put it all together and look like me. Picture evidence is terrifying. Growing up and going away has confirmed and denied my conviction that what I’m wearing is an important or convincing costume. I still pay a shocking amount of attention to my classmate’s attire, trying to ascertain place of birth and life aspirations from pocket placement. I practice these skills long past October, and some days I still look in the mirror with that creepy-crawly question, “Who are you supposed to be?”
BERICK: Playing dress up
Published: Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Updated: Tuesday, November 3, 2009
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