With Halloween, my favourite holiday of the year, approaching and the word "undertaker" being mentioned on a podcast today, I was reminded of a story from when I younger.
One Halloween, my sister, two boys from my neighbourhood Chris and Vito, and I were playing in our street's park before we would go back to our houses to get our costumes ready. I'm not sure how old I was, but I do know that I was old enough to go trick or treating by myself that night, and to hopefully to fulfill my obligation as a suburban preteen boy by causing light mayhem*, but also still young enough that I was in my neighbourhood park.
*My friends and I always acted like we were crazy, but the only thing we ever egged was a moving GoTrain.
My sister would be trick or treating with my dad, but the rest of us were trying to plan out our night. Vito's house would be hosting a haunted house in their garage, which we knew would be fun, but we also wanted to make sure we got out and walked around, both to see and be seen and to get candy, which I guess was also a mark of how young I still was, as I was definitely looking forward to eating candy constantly for the next week. We were especially excited by the fact that Vito had bought a replica Freddy Krueger glove, which seemed like the coolest costume prop in the world, even though none of us had seen any of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.
As we were hanging out, this random kid walked down the street and approached us. He had long hair covered by a David Foster Wallace bandana, a plain black t-shirt with the word "undertaker" spelled out in cut-out white paper and taped on, and talked like Dooley from King of the Hill. We talked for a little bit and then he tried to get us to guess what his costume. I assumed that dressing up as the wrestler the Undertaker by wearing a shirt that just had that word taped onto it was too impossibly stupid so we tried other things. After a few minutes, he said "I'll make this a little more obvious" and took out a pair of aviator sunglasses and put them on Caruso style, which didn't help us at all. I eventually asked "Are you the Undertaker?" and couldn't believe that I was right.
This has to be the worst costume I have even seen. A bandana, a pair of sunglasses, and a t-shirt with the person's named taped to it. Unbelievable. For this reason though, it also just the best. I feel like I love shitty Halloween costumes, and in my opinion any homemade costumes trumps every store-bought one. Probably my favourite Halloween costume of all-time is the time my friend Pat wore a cheap sequined silver fedora on top of a Darth Vader mask and went as "Darth Vader in a fedora".* Maybe this guy is where that interest started?
*We were high both when we thought of this and when he wore it. No one else thought it was funny. At this party, I made my own Finn the Human costume and before we got there everyone said another guy had dressed up as him as well. When we got there, his was some fancy one he had bought at a store and mine was made out of a bathroom towel. It ruined his night and made me laugh so much.
When I got home that night, my sister told me that she had seen this guy again that night when she stopped by the haunted house at Vito. The guy just held out the glove and said "Freddy Krueger." He loves naming characters!
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