Spook Nite

Every so often around this time of year, I'll have a random dream set at my old grade school's Halloween festival, a mythic event known as Spook Nite.

As you can well imagine, Spook Nite was a place of plastic witch cauldrons filled with dried ice, and cotton spider webs from plastic craft-store packaging, and big chaffs of wheat propped up in the corners of the hallways. Each classroom featured some typical Halloween activity: a giant cardboard pumpkin with paper streamers for teeth, between which you reached, flinching, to retrieve a plastic black widow ring. A cake walk to which the mothers brought cakes, and old records were played on a record player as the children walked around on the numbers. The boy scouts took over the haunted house, my brother among them, and ratcheted things to inappropriately boyish limits, with fake blood and meat grinders and ground hamburger, and boys jumping out of dry ice clouds to scare the living crap out of 6-year-olds in "Greatest American Hero" costumes.

At the end of the night, you went to the cafeteria and ate pumpkin cookies with that smooth, hard orange frosting while your parents drank coffee out of Styrofoam cups. By then you'd been dragging the tail of your mouse costume behind you all night, and it was covered in dirt and hay from the hay bales stacked all over the place, that the kids had stomped into confetti.

I miss it.