Assignment: Write a report on a historical figure, event, or invention, then come to the school Halloween parade dressed like that.
My best friend chose Florence Nightingale, the legendary nurse, and a reasonable choice for a ten-year-old girl in Catholic school. I could have picked Betsy Ross or Amelia Earhart or even the Boston Tea Party.
But no. I chose TNT, dynamite.
Halloween, 1993. Scranton, PA.Perhaps I thought it would be easier to write about an invention than a person: more straightforward facts, fewer layers to uncover. How could one distill someone's life into a fifth-grade book report? How could I possibly do someone justice in three double-spaced, handwritten pages of looseleaf? And why read an entire biography when I could just summarize a short encyclopedia entry?
I thought I was being clever, but in my haste to get the report over with, I forgot about the second part of the assignment and inadvertently condemned myself to the most ridiculous Halloween costume I've ever worn or seen.
I'm sure I waited until the weekend before the parade to start thinking about how to fashion something that would resemble the topic of my choosing. I'm sure I was stressed and probably being hard on myself and definitely taking it out on my parents. I might have cried. I might have yelled. I might have tried to convince them to let me stay home from school "sick" that day.
I can’t remember if I asked for my Dad's help (I only recall going to him for homework help once, when I was struggling to learn fractions) or if he jumped into problem-solving mode to put me out of my misery (and his). But I do remember kneeling on the dining room floor over two yards of thick brown paper used to protect the floor around the baker’s feet from calcifying stickiness in my grandfather's doughnut shop where my dad was working.
I remember him rolling me up in it and tracing the circumference of my armpits, measuring and marking the length of my face and the height from my knees to my head. I remember carefully cutting from a bolt of bright red fabric my mom had with her super sharp tailor scissors. I remember glue oozing through the fabric, gumming up my fingertips and darkening along the seam where I pressed it to the paper.
I remember cutting a length of the rope we used to tie the dog up outside for the wick. And I remember my mom fishing around the bottom of a craft bin for the perfect finishing touch: a tangle of bright green foil stars to wrap around the wick.
I remember being giddy with excitement to change into my costume after lunch on the day of the parade. I remember an adult (was it my teacher? Did my parents come into the classroom to do this?) having to help me into it as I stretched my arms up high above my head as if I was about to blast off into the air, like a real explosive.
I remember barely being able to walk around the perimeter of the gym during the parade because of the way the costume constricted my knees. I remember feeling lopsided and holding my arms out from my body like a life-sized Lego man.
And I remember someone asking, "What are you?" and scoffing because wasn't it obvious?
"I'm dynamite."
What was your favorite/worst/most ridiculous/most memorable Halloween costume?
Credits
Jubi by Balmorhea
Check out a sweet music video for this song on my YouTube playlist.
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