Hallowhat?

I'm not much of a Halloween person. I don't think I've dressed up for
the pagan holiday since probably high school (when we raided and
pillaged the rich neighborhood way up Shannon Road), but this year
Erika was excited about it being her first one, so she wanted to go
out in style. Sean had some "inside" scoop on some "underground"
warehouse parties deep in Brooklyn, so we settled on that as our
agenda for the evening.

Well, Erika and Roberta didn't get to Astoria until around 9:00
because they were out trying out wedding dresses that day. Erika found
her dream dress apparently and I gave her the stamp of approval to
purchase. Believe it or not, it is actually cheaper to buy dresses
here than in Peru (supposedly). The dress shop sales rep talked to me
and told me that they would do the alterations after the dress came in
in January, not mentioning the price. Assuming that the dress shop is
a complete rip-off of magnificent proportions, I asked how much the
alterations cost. Up to $350! Are you KIDDING me? Eff that, we'll take
it to a neighborhood tailor instead.

Anyway, rather than spending hundreds on a kick-ass costume, Erika and
I decided to go with the face makeup as our prop. Looking to remake
my face as the object of evil and scaring little children and adults
alike like I did at the Bronx zoo last weekend, I went with the dark
green Wicked Witch of the West look, complete with glue-on moles and
some crazy clothes, including home-made ass-less chaps...errr, jeans.
Erika got done up with some face-art and a cute little outfit with a
loose-tie while Roberta stayed true to her colors and dressed up as
the flag of Italy. Not bad for $20's worth of face paint.

So we headed out to Bushwick, Brooklyn for the party. It was like a
good hour's trip, with two train connections, just to get there. Then,
we had to walk for probably 20 minutes down towards the water to get
to the warehouse. Oh, the things we do to keep it real and go
underground! Finally we get there, and what do we see? Cops outside
the joint and like 50 people trying to get in, with more and more
arriving in taxis every minute. What a joke! The place was too full
for anyone to even get in and the cops were going to shut it down for
fire code violations, I suppose.

Soon thereafter, we met up with Sean and tried to check out another
party nearby that was also closed for fire code violations. At this
point, it was approaching 2:00am and it had been a waste of an
evening. It dawned on me that it may feel like you're going out to
some small spot in the middle of the countryside when you go to these
places but, really, you're still in NYC and the city is not lawless.

The most exciting part of the evening happened when we were waiting
for the subway to take us home. We some some cops tear off down the
platform to arrest some guy for some reason (probably drunk, probably
fighting). At that point, someone opened the gate to let a bunch of
freeloaders onto the platform without paying and a plainclothes cop
came running back and tried to pull someone out of the subway car we
were in, even grabbing his gun as if to threaten the guy. Really? For
not paying his $2 subway entrance? Eventually the cop left the subway
car, probably because he couldn't get the uniformed police down to
cover his 6 :o/ . Other than that, the best part of the evening is
that we paid $0 for the night, an extremely rare event on a Friday
night.

Saturday was a nice autumn day, so we made plans to meet up with
Melissa and Jonathon in Central Park to enjoy the weather and the
wonderful changing colors of fall. It was great, we parked it on a
nice little patch of unoccupied grass overlooking the castle and the
turtle pond, made sandwiches, ate cheese and junk food, and played
some frisbee. Who knew that frisbee can make you actually break a
sweat???

J. Riley, there's more where that came from! Check back later for
pictures and more tales.