My Best-Ever Halloween Costumes

As Halloween approaches, I am reminded of the various costumes I've created throughout my adult life. Winnie the Poo, Raggedy Ann (my then husband was Andy), a 10 lb. sack of potatoes. The bag of potatoes was creative enough to win me an office costume prize. Then there was the Crayola Crayon.

My girlfriend Chris and I went on a Mets Fan Appreciation cruise in 1986 right after they won the world series. There were just two players -- Lenny Dykstra, my idol, and Bobby Ojeda, along with former Met Tommy Agee, managers Bill Robinson (may he rest in peace) and Mel Stottlemyer, and radio announcer Gary Thorne.

Weeks before the cruise, Chris had been saying, 'you know, they have masquerade contests on these cruises', and I must have said a dozen times, 'no way, I'm not doing it, if you have your heart set on that, then I won't go at all.' But then our first day on the ship, we met these two guys who gave us an idea for a costume. We loved the idea and were going to make four of them, to thank the guys for the idea. They disappeared and we never saw them again so it ended up being just the two of us. But the idea was brilliant.

We were Crayola Crayons. Working with really basic tools such as garbage bags, crepe paper, a black Sharpie and a butter knife because they were all out of scissors, we turned ourselves in two red and yellow crayola crayons, then found ourselves a piece of cardboard and designed it to look like a box of 64. Not only did we enter the masquerade contest, we won! It's a great memory. We won some great prizes, too. A bottle of champaigne, which we promptly opened with two guys we met, a beautiful dish with the ship's logo, a few other things.

But one of my all-time favorites is 'super editor'. A few years ago, one of my friends from work had a Halloween party at which the theme was superheros. You could make up your own, as long as you fit the theme. I was stumped. I didn't want to be any of the conventional superheros. They were too, well, conventional. So finally I said, self, who are you? What would represent you? And I said back, well, I'm an editor, so how about super editor?

I wore a red shirt with black leggings and a red cone on my head to represent the point of the editor's infamous red pen. On my tee shirt was the proofreader's mark for deletion a line with a curly cue in the middle. The caption over the symbol said, 'I delete crime'. Then I created a staff with the curly cue on it and I would aim at bad guys at the party and say, "I delete you!" I walked around all night doing that. It was so much fun!

Please check out my novel, In Fashion's Web on Amazon.