LY #45 But everyone is an outcast!

At least those of us who have been bought into some form of identification with outcast characters.  People form groups, groups create outcasts.  Except for certain times of cultural explosion when people partake of the magic elixer that lets everyone become an outcast.  Is this what Bakhtin (or was it Volosinov?) meant by the Carnivalesque?

The contemporary growth in the United States of Halloween as something more than a kids trick or treating event may have evolved from American gay culture.  In a November 6, 2007 Advocate article, "Halloween: Is the Party Over?", writer Will Doig talked with gay parade organizers who said that sometime in the 80s the great gay district Halloween events became heavily attended by straights.  He noted that   "Across the country Halloween festival organizers were coming to the same realization: Their local gayborhood parties were attracting an annual pilgrimage or heterosexuals — college kids in pea coats, suburban Republicans, teens from the rough side of town. They arrived, costume-free, to get drunk, climb lampposts, whoop and gawk, take pictures, and, occasionally, harass."  He quoted Basil Twist, the puppeteer designer of the Potter movie Dementors, thinks that for straight people are "living vicariously through us because of the freedom we have, that freedom that everybody's capable of, but poor straight people, they can't always hit that mark."

But something else of great importance happened in the 80s to turn Halloween into a big, straight party:  Chuck Martinez, a magician working for a San Diego Sears Robuck in the mid-1970s convinced his bosses that it would be profitable to open a Halloween section once a year.  Throughout the eighties he worked with Sears to create Halloween Popups all over the country.

Though the nineties more pop-ups appeared.  In 1999 Spirit Halloween ran 63 temporary stores.  In 2011,  there were 300 Spirit popups and 400 of its competitor, Halloween USA.  According to the National Retail Association, "Americans are expected to spend $2.6 billion on Halloween costumes for adults, children and pets. Total spending – including candy and decorations – is expected to reach $6.9 billion"  And you'll also enjoy the pithy tiny animated history videos at The History Channel.  I loved the one called "Halloween Goes Commercial."

All this data suggests to me that many Americans feel a connection to the dark, the outsider, the one who runs amok.  So, in other words, my childhood identification with Larry Talbot, The Wolf Man, just makes me an average American.

I loved the holiday when I was a kid and made much of it.  In this old photo, you see me and my oldest friend as high school age monsters on my parent's porch.  (I think this porch turned up in a novel he wrote a few years back about a serial killer, as did the rest of that childhood house.)  I believe that we might have made some people scream that year, because we pretended to be stuffed decorations and suddenly jumped out at people. We may have made one kid wet his pants.