Halloween 2017 found a fourth-grade me in a skirt suit, clutching the The Washington Post, with a strand of delicate pearls hanging from my neck. “Who are you?” well-meaning, confused adults asked as I opened my pocketbook to receive a Twix bar. “Katherine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post during Watergate!” I would proclaim, half-sheepish, half-proud of my specificity. Sometimes the adults might even award me an extra piece of candy for my creativity.
The idea for that year’s costume had come to me nine months prior, when I sat in the back rows of the Cobble Hill Movie Theater watching The Post—a movie about Katherine Graham and Watergate, starring Meryl Streep. As soon as the credits began to roll, I turned to my dad, telling him I had found my next costume. Although this choice was perhaps my most esoteric, my parents were unsurprised by its obscurity. In previous years I had been Lucille Ball, Carole King, and a nun from The Sound of Music, followed immediately by Tzeitel, the eldest daughter in Fiddler on the Roof. These costumes were often conceived months in advance, followed by careful hunting for the proper components. With the exception of the nun, which required some reliance on Spirit Halloween, I was proud not to buy any premade costume “kits.” As a daughter of brownstone-Brooklyn, my costumes were definitely not the most thoughtfully constructed or creative of the neighborhood, but I did benefit from the laissez-faire attitude that allowed a Jewish seven year-old to waltz around with a giant cross around her neck, hair hidden under a habit.
By the fall of fifth grade I was busy with the ancient Aztecs, marine biology, and my first essay assignments in school, but curiously, no Halloween costume idea had found me. No woman of the twentieth century had inhabited my mind, steered me toward proper accessories, music to listen to, or traits to embody. A friend and I eventually decided to be old ladies, a costume that was assembled from the racks of the Goodwill around the corner from my house, where we each picked a color and loaded up on as many funky pieces as possible. If we were going to be old ladies, we were going to be cool old ladies.
Yet for all the foraging that went into that old-lady costume, it marked the beginning of the end of my costume eccentricity. I still remember my mom’s incredulous look the next year as I told her that my best friend and I would be Elsa and Anna from Frozen, a movie that I had hated when I was younger. Seventh-grade me, however, saw the childish costume as middle school ironic, which felt grown up in its own way. I had always wanted to be mature, but as I grew those parameters were changing. My Anna costume arrived in an Amazon package, my friend applied some brown eyeliner as freckles, and that was that.
My costumes from then on have been altogether unmemorable. Where I had once used dressing up as an opportunity to express my most sacred passions, I now dread Halloween, usually picking some vaguely-sexy mostly-boring costume like a cat, or ninja.
Now in my first semester of college, I have already said yes to a few group costumes engineered by some proactive friends. Some of these get back to the spirit of creativity that was so precious to young me, but they can’t and won’t be free of the awareness that comes with growing up. Where Halloween was once a day for me to emulate any kind of woman and life I was interested in, now it is a night—or, let’s be real, a weekend—to stretch some semi-clever idea to its most flattering, revealing, and sexy end. For now, that is fun, and exactly what a college Halloween costume is supposed to be. When I was younger I longed to be someone mature and grown up; I guess the same applies today, just in a different form. I would be lying though, if I said I didn’t miss the little girl who ran around Brooklyn toting a copy of The Washington Post, a large plastic cross, or Tapestry album cover. I miss her unabashed weirdness and indifference to any gaze besides her own. But as much as I wish to summon her, I think I’d prefer not to know what she would think of my current costumes.
