I’m more than a week behind with a post about Halloween, but it took me that long to recover from our rowdy, candy-infused time. That, and I was busy at work, scurrying around, working hard to squeeze meaninglessness from meaning.
We began our adventures with the neighborhood Halloween Party on Friday night. I had promised, like last year, to do a little magic show for all the kids. I had a few new tricks I wanted to try out, but by seven o’clock I was still woefully unprepared, so while Suzanne and the kids headed over to the party, I was still cramming away, trying to make my fingers bend around oddly shaped coins and vanishing a pitcher of water. To the fraternity of Magicians I realize that briefly practicing a new trick right before a performance is heresy. All the books say over and over again, get a trick down solid before doing it live. Anything else is an insult to magic.
Well, facing a crowd of sugared-up kids without new material would be an insult to my well-being and health. A phalanx of kids ready to storm the Bastille is quite nerve wracking.
When we got to the party, I found out I had about 45 minutes to burn before my show. Now the only thing I had in common with the other adults in the room was that we all breathed oxygen, so instead of enduring painful conversations involving Nascar and “Exit Strategies,” I found an unused, dark room and went through my tricks one last time. I had been preparing a levitation trick for a while (although I didn’t quite have it down yet), but I thought now would be a good time to try it out on some of the kids, so I called a few into the room and told them I was going to show a special pre-magic show magic trick. It took maybe half a second for every single kid in the house to cram into my little darkened room, and once they had all flooded in, I was stuck, shoved against the wall like a Sandinista in front of a firing squad.
The trick works like this: someone gives me a dollar. I crumple it up and place it on my face-up palm. Then, magically, it starts to rise. I make some mystical gestures and then remove my hands, leaving the dollar floating in the air in front of me. Then I blow it, and the dollar floats away from me and comes close to a kid’s face. It returns and then I grab the bill from the air, smooth it out, and hand it back. It’s a nifty trick.
One of the kids, you know the kind, starts arguing with me when I blow the bill in the air. “Hey, you’re blowing it! That’s how it works!”
Of course, it’s already floating. Blowing it merely moves it away from me. That’s the whole point. It’s a shame you can’t say, “Hey you punk, pay attention!” to kids like this. Instead, my usual response is: “Now I will make your head float away from its shoulders. You might feel a little discomfort.”
It’s always fun to see the rude kids grab on to their heads and hold them down, as if they’re holding down a balloon filled with helium.
After I finished, all the kids scurried away, back to their games upstairs. I heard Colleen yell out to everybody as they were leaving, “That’s my Dad!”
That was the best.
The main magic show went off nicely, although I changed the patter for one of my tricks (I was experimenting), and that flopped. After the trick, a couple of kids in the audience said, “Where’s the story? Where’s the story about the kids?” They knew the trick well, and they wanted to hear my old patter about it. Curse my so-called improvements!
Halloween this year was on Sunday, which made the city of Canyon, twenty miles south of us, declare that Halloween would be on Saturday. They did this because Sunday is a school night, but since they’ve never before tried to officially change Halloween from any other school night to a Saturday, methinks it has something to do with having little devils, princesses, and Richard Nixons run around on a church night. This is my suspicion.
This year, unfortunately, I was confined to the sofa for Halloween night, since my stomach had rebelled against me in a weird and queasy fashion. I could barely make it to the front door to dole out peanut butter cups. Suzanne took the kids around the neighborhood (Alex as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, Megan as Jasmine from Aladdin, and Colleen as an Animal Control Officer - she was inspired by a recent trip to Wildcat Bluff Nature Center) while I watched The Simpsons, and when she finally brought the kids back home, their bags bulging, they wanted nothing to do with me. It was all about the candy.
This is an actual Alex quote about his Halloween adventures: “Candy! Candy! Candy! Candy! Candy! Bloo blab lalba boob labla blaboo booboo blaaaablaa!” Then he ran around the house, flexing his mighty Ninja Turtle costume muscles.
The inevitable sugar crash came an hour later, and all three kids curled up in bed and sank into candy comas.
It was quiet then. We waited another few minutes for any straggling trick-or-treaters, but none came. This was the time of night between the cute kids in costumes and the onslaught of not-so-cute teens in jeans begging for candy, a group that I didn’t want to face. So I checked one last time for any small shadows heading out way, and when I saw none, I blew out the candles in the pumpkins and turned off the porch light.
Then our house, like all the others, retreated into darkness, taking with it another year of magic tricks, pixie sticks, and secret identities.