Hey, Y'all!: My Favorite Halloween

The best Halloween I've ever experienced was when I was 25 years old. I was in my second year working at Cornell and I was renting a huge and spectacular old house with one of my best friends, Kitty. You should know that Kitty's name is actually Jen. She and I were the 2 staff stage managers at Cornell at the time. Yes, it got confusing, what with both of us being named Jen and being right at the five-foot-tall mark. We didn't even have the convenience of going by a middle name, as we were both blessed with MARIE. Anywho, those who know her best call her Kitty. And Kitty LOVES Halloween. Like, she lives for it. The previous year, early in our friendship, we decided to dress up as each other, which was a big hit with our students and co-workers. This particular year, however, we had a house. Chez Jen, we called it. It was situated in a fantastic neighborhood just blocks from campus. We had 4 bedrooms, a beautiful fireplace, a game room and a sunporch. Needless to say, we had room to decorate and decorate BIG.

Having a Halloween party was a no-brainer. We knew we wanted to do something, but we didn't know how big we should go. WARNING: When 2 short people named Jen with a knack for creative organization are set loose in a Friendly's restaurant to brainstorm, crazy things happen.

What started out as a simple costume party with slice-and-bake pumpkin cookies turned into an all-out Halloween extravagganza, complete with theatrical lighting. Let me set the scene for you:

*Our house, like everything else in Ithaca, NY, was situated on a high hill. There were steps leading up to it, which we lined with luminary bags. The bushes in our yard were draped with cobwebs.

*We carved 2 pumpkins (ok, maybe 3) with intricate deatils and set them along the front porch.

*When you entered our house, we had a Halloween muic mix playing the likes of "Monster Mash," "Purple People Eater" and spooky sound effects.

*On the ceiling of our living room was a huge spiderweb, thanks to our friend Ford and some borrowed theatrical lights and a gobo. A GOBO (new theatre vocabulary word) is a metal plate that slips into a lighting instrument so that when it lights up, it throws a pattern. Kitty rigged up an enormous spider, made out of black garbage bags, in the corner. The dining room had a scary forest on the ceiling.

*Our snack table included cookies and cupcakes, a cauldron of green punch, complete with floating eyeball-shaped ice cubes and dry ice to make it smoke, a loaf of pumpkin bread in the shape of a skeleton and some other things I can't remember because that was like 7 years ago.

Now, as you can imagine, the neighborhood kids who came to trick-or-treat went insane when we opened the door. One little girl went and got her friends and brought them over. Parents were in awe. We felt like rockstars.

Kitty and I made the executive decision, based on a big sale at Disney.com, to have 2 costumes that year: one for work, one for our party. At work, we were Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Fitting through doorways was interesting, as the costumes were practically lined with hula hoops and our shoes were about 50 sizes to big for our tiny size 4 feet. For our house party, we were witches. We had crushed velvet dresses and big pointy hats. We did some fun theatrical makeup and wore fishnets with a spider pattern. Kitty also kept with her tradition of wearing her Dorothy costume to do her show that evening.

The rule at Chez Jen was this : If you come to one of our theme parties (and there were many), you must dress up. If you fail to follow this rule, we reserve the right to dress you up ourselves. Imagine our student Kevaughn's surprise when I took him upstairs and put him in a brown wig and one of my dresses and called him Jen Nelson. (Imagine MY surprise when he looked better in the dress than I ever did!)

Kevaughn as me and Tim as...well, we're still not completely sure WHAT he was, but his makeup's cool!

The party and the decorations were fantastic that year, but nothing compared to seeing how happy it made Kitty to be able to throw an all-out Halloween bash. Working together to pull off this super-fun night is and always will be one of my favorite memories of our time at Chez Jen, right up there with the time we stayed in our pajamas for two days and pulled our dining room table into the living room so we could watch Coal Miner's Daughter while playing Crazy 8's. But that? Is another entry altogether.