A fun game to play on Halloween in New York City: “Halloween or Crazy?”
Gameplay is simple. See that guy wearing a top hat and pretending to smoke a pipe? Is that because it’s Halloween, or because he’s crazy? How about the man wearing a hat covered in feathers and walking around with fistfulls of still more feathers? Halloween… or crazy?
Answers (I think): Guy 1—Halloween. Guy 2—Crazy.
Hours of entertainment guaranteed. Happy Halloween!
The other night, my friend Jason threw a pumpkin carving party. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not really a Halloween person. Even when I was a kid, I never really liked it. Still don’t. But I sure do love being crafty, so pumpkin carving has always been the shining star of an otherwise lackluster holiday for me.
What better way to honor Jason at his own party, I thought, than to carve a pumpkin of Jason?
So Deb and I went to the Union Square farmer’s market, and she bought a hefty pumpkin ($4! What a steal!)
(A brief digression: while at Union Square, we went to the infamous 14th St. Trader Joe’s. We did some shopping, and it’s as good as any Trader Joe’s, and decently priced. But then we caught a view of the line, which wrapped the entire way around the store, weaving in and out of aisles. Trader Joe’s is good, but it’s not that good. I’ll just keep grocery shopping in the projects. It’s cheaper and there are shorter lines.)
Here’s the pumpkin (with a nice shot of my living room ceiling in the background):
And here’s Jason:
…a little bit of sketching:
And the plan starts coming together!
So, with stencil and pumpkin in hand, we headed to the party. There was newspaper laid out on the ground, Jason’s famous Witch’s Brüe simmering on the stove, and everyone was carving away. Deb took over the making of some pumpkin seeds, and they sure were delicious.
After a few hours of carving (and a little bit of an emergency involving a nose falling off), the Jason-o’-Lantern was complete:
I won first prize.
Happy Halloween!