Ghetto Fabulous

I am 28 years old and am supposed to be dressing up for Halloween ... twice. This makes me uncomfortable.

It is not as though I haven't had to do this before so much as it is the reality that I'm doing it again. I promised myself this year that I would treat myself by not forcing myself to endure a mask while waiting tables, nor would I spend any needless time or money on a costume. Everybody wins.

Plans to purchase a costume with some co-workers also forced to play dress-up this weekend didn't go off without its own little hitch. A seemingly easy pitch of going to Goodwill after a shift for some cheap but creative hand-me-downs quickly became a fiasco requiring the involvement of their boyfriend's companionship or hair needing to be done.

In the end, I stopped in the Goodwill a few days later and purchased a wig and a predominantly red flannel, like the type you'd imagine Paul Bunyan wore. The cashier looked at the prebagged wig with a picture of a man with a large, wide smile modeling the wig. It looked as though he might be retarded.

"You'd look good in a mullet," she told me. I wasn't quite sure how to respond to a comment like that.

The last time I dressed up for Halloween at work was while employed at the country club. There was a costume store on the other side of the river, and I once again purchased a prebagged item with the label "Shiek." When I drove to work on Halloween morning, the front page of the New York Times had a full-color image of Osama bin Laden from a recent video release and I spent the rest of the day having the strictly Spanish-speaking employees constantly giggling to themselves while repeating the "Osama" line aloud.

And it had been hard to take orders with my ZZ Top fake beard covering my mouth. It caused my the lenses of my rainbow-tinted hippie sunglasses to fog quite quickly. Not this year, though. Seeing as I had to abide by the dress-up code for this morning and Tuesday's day of recognizing a children's holiday, I simply donned a decade-old profession wrestling T-shirt, some tattered blue jeans, the flannel, wig, and a "Jim Beam Racing" ballcap. Voila: White Trash.

It wasn't the most imaginitive costume, to be sure. Nor the most extravagant. My boss opted to purchase an all-white jumpsuit a la Elvis Presley. He also had glasses with fake lamb chop sideburns attached when he wasn't busy loading up trays with food and shouting random employee names.

There were a few strange looks from customers of mine, but perhaps none more so than a curious lad in a highchair who leaned back and looked straight up at me in some upside-down perspective while I scribbled down his parents' breakfast order.

"Denver skillet ... scrambled ... cheddar ..."

While jotting down that his father did not in fact want onions in his selection, out of the corner of my eye I saw the child raise its hand in the air and proceed with the beginning stages of an innocent, playful slap at my genitals. I took a step backward and avoided any contact while the parents apologized for their son's curious manner. But I just waved it off, knowing that to a child being sat down in a restaurant, a Halloween costume and the daily uniform aren't all that different. Both are forms of costumes to kids, which kind of makes me wonder when I go back to the white dress shirt for a day tomorrow if I'll get sick of wearing that costume too.

It smells like syrup. Everything smells like syrup. And I don't even like syrup.