I can't say it was as much as a success as last year's fright fest; we were short on volunteers, had an injury on cement, an 8 year old threatened to sue us and I personally received multiple requests for "better candy". But we all had a good time and lost our voices.
Here's a picture of this year's crew looking especially excited about Halloween
The set up didn't take too long, mostly because we could still see the marks and holes from last year's staples and hooks. I'm sure we'll lose some sort of housing deposit from all this, but isn't making a few kids scream and/or cry on Halloween worth doing some damage to walls and ceilings?
Keith (who drove all the way up from LA) and Alex moved all the furniture while I took a shower (bonus!) and then they busted out some serious staple gun action and had the tarps up in no time.
The rigged bats, spiders and skull looked right at home by 2:00 and by 4:00 we were all able to kick back on the cobwebby back porch with a beer.
We had a visit from our littlest trick-or-treater, Ernie the Egg (along with his mom Molly the Toast and friend Julianne the Canadian bacon) at 4:30. I wish that I had pictures of that little Egg, because he sure was cute... and never threatened to sue us. He was so brave he even walked through the house, with Molly behind him of course, when it looked like this
with a soundtrack of screaming women and squealing pigs playing in the background. One thing Ernie the Egg was not very fond of were gloves which looked like skeleton hands.
Around 6:30 business picked up, I think we really got into the swing of things as the fourth group came through.
R.M. was our official greeter again. He helped us out by giving us fair warning of what was coming our way by shouting things like "Welcome, very little one!" or "Enter, disillusioned teens!"
Keith and Greg were stationed in the living room; Greg worked the long side of the room all by himself and if I didn't know any better I would have sworn there were three people behind that tarp. Here are three actual people behind the tarps. I promise it looked much more frightening without the flash.
Sean was in the closet... really, for scaring purposes! And Alex worked all sorts of magic in the kitchen, even though he couldn't see out of his mask.
I got to hand out candy and gawk at people as they would walk through and then trip as I would tell them to watch their step.
Highlights of the evening for me included the girl in the potato costume which couldn't fit through the back door, the father and son who had to leave because the kid got so scared when he saw his dad flinch, giving kids who came through more than once those crappy little flavored Tootsie Rolls, the very timid boy who was dressed as Harry Potter and was forced by his mother to come back to thank me for candy, and I'll never forget the kid who came through swinging his candy filled pillow case repeatedly screaming "you ain't gonna git me, suckas!"
We closed up shop at 8:30 and had the apartment looking decent around 9:00.
Then we ate a bunch of pizza and left over candy while watching old Simpson's Halloween episodes.
I don't know if this is the sugar-high crash talking or if I'm just getting old, but this entertaining kids business takes a lot out of me. I think next year I'm just going to put a bowl of candy outside and shout "ONLY ONE PIECE!" from the window while I watch Wife Swap.
No comments:
Post a Comment