Happy two-days-after Halloween, Constant Reader.
The holiday – the most theatrical of holidays, the one most beloved by theater people – does come every year. Barring the end of life on earth (always an option in 2020), we’ll get to celebrate Halloween again. In six years, we’ll get to celebrate it on a Saturday again. In nineteen years – oh ye gods, cue the Beatles song off Sergeant Pepper, you know the one – Samhain will be blessed with a full moon once again. But having all three of them converge on the same day? That’s a once-in-a-lifetime event.
And we spent it all…like this. (gestures broadly at everything)
It’s not that it wasn’t productive. Well, it could have been a lot more productive for me, but I did get some more pages drafted. And it’s not like Halloween wasn’t celebrated. There were no trick-or-treaters at my door, but there were some down the street visiting my neighborhood’s local merchants, which gladdened my heart to no end. I managed to get in a few quick viewings of my vintage Universal Horror DVDs. And most importantly, a whole lot of my friends’ theater companies were able to put up various spooooky Halloween zoom events – readings of horror tales, Romeo and Juliet reimagined as Victorian horror, and the like. Some, like the Wisconsin Democrats benefit performance of Rocky Horror, were meant to support worthy causes; others were just intended to provide a ghoulish good time, and a semblance of normalcy in these awful times.
So we did have Halloween. But not the Halloween we could have had. Not the Halloween we ought to have had.
It’s fine to be upset about this. It may be trivial in comparison to everything else we’re dealing with, but all the things we’re dealing with are combined. They have common root causes, and their awfulness manifests in a hundred different ways each day. If the lack of jack-o-lanterns in your life, of all things, is the one that causes you to shed a tear and start sobbing, so be it. It’s okay to mourn the Halloween that should have been. Go ahead and be sad.
And tomorrow, if you haven’t already done so, go to your local polling place and do something about it.