Ep 107 Listeners’ Halloween Stories

Midlife Mixtape

“Who’s Slash?”: Listeners – and Nancy – share stories of their memorable Gen X Halloweens past, from decidedly non-sexy costume strategies, to 7^th graders on the cusp, to home bat invasions.

• The Perfect Cocktails for Your Perimenopause Party by Wendi Aarons, Gloria Fallon, and Marilyn Naron
• Portrait of a Deputy Public Defender (or how I became a punk rock lawyer) by Juanita E. Mantz, Esq

Happy Halloween, you grown up goths.

Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 107 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on October 19, 2021. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email [e-mail] ***

Wendi Aarons 00:00

We learned our lesson that is probably not a great idea to dress like a ‘60s burnout named Touch Me Don’t Touch Me when we’re trying to get some action at a fraternity party.

00:11

Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one.

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

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[MUSIC]

Nancy 02.58

Hi there and welcome to this special Halloween Edition of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho, your host, the creator of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast and the author of the book, The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time. Midlife Halloween has its own kind of terror because what is scarier than waking up and seeing your own parents looking back at you from the mirror? It’s absolutely terrifying.

So I put out a call on social media and the blog for your GenX Halloween stories. My theory was that GenX never took itself too seriously and would have some fun with the prompt – as exemplified by the story Erin sent in:

She wrote,

My most unsexy costume was when I dressed as a porta-potty for my department’s Halloween group theme. We were a bunch of Austin City Limits Music Festival survivors. This contest was during the early 00s, so the fest wasn’t quite the well-oiled machine it is today. The costume consisted of many large boxes and a halved broom handle stuck in the middle that I could hold onto to carry that sucker while inside. There was also tons of blue paint and two eyeholes. My porta-potty addition didn’t secure the gold. We came in second place to the Beetlejuice folks. But heck, they deserved it.

As someone whose favorite all time Halloween costume was the mailbox my dad built me out of cardboard when I was in 5^th grade, I totally respect the Porta Potty game Erin is playing here. By the way, the mailbox design was perfect for late October in Upstate NY because you could put your park on underneath it, and it included a curved top that repelled water in case it jumped above 32 degrees on Halloween night. Which wasn’t often.

Because – you guys know this – back then most of us weren’t so worried about being Sexy Nurse or Sexy Ladybug or Sexy PortaPotty. Here’s Susan Rietano Davey, the career reentry expert and one of the co-founders of Prepare to Launch U who I interviewed back in Episode 47:

Susan Rietano Davey 03:10

Hi Nancy – It’s Susan here in Connecticut, and I’m calling in with my Halloween story. When I was a freshman in high school about 40 years ago, I was desperate to become cool. And my dear friend Karen was much closer to that than I. So through her, we got an invitation to Ellen’s the Halloween party.

Now Ellen was a junior, and the coolest of cool, the top of the heap. And we were so excited to knock her socks off with great Halloween costumes. So we rummaged through Karen’s father’s closet – he was an Army veteran – and we found two perfectly intact army uniforms. So that’s what we dressed up as. And we pulled our hair back severely and we greased it down so it stay under the hats and we even painted bushy mustaches and bushy eyebrows on each other.

We showed up on Halloween night at Ellen’s house and we rang the doorbell. She answered it dressed as Scarlett O’Hara. And as we entered her foyer, we saw that all of Ellen’s cool, beautiful friends were dressed as Cinderella, or Snow White, or Charlie’s Angels, and there we were, as two infantry men.

Suffice it to say we did not advance our coolness that night. We were never invited back to Ellen’s future parties, but we cemented our friendship that night for sure. And it has lasted all these years later.

Nancy 04:30

Was there something in the water for people who would eventually grow up to become Midlife Mixtape listeners? Humor writer Wendi Aarons definitely got the non-sexy memo.

Wendi Aarons 04:38

Hi, this is Wendi Aarons and my favorite Halloween memory is from freshman year of college at University of Oregon.

My best friend Megan and I were looking for a costume to go to one of the fraternity parties. Those are the big bashes and we were so excited, because it was our first time being at what we thought was a real adult party. We talked and talked about what costume we should wear and finally landed on something that was very genius: dressing up like one of the guys who got to Eugene, Oregon, sometime in the ‘70s by following the Grateful Dead, and never left. He just sat on a bench on campus and yelled “Touch Me Don’t Touch Me.” So we thought it’d be a great idea to dress up like Touch Me Don’t Touch Me.

We went to Goodwill and just bought a whole bunch of random giant shirts and pants. And we dressed in those and then we dressed in everything that our dorm mates would give us. And basically we looked like that episode of Friends where Joey puts on all of Chandler’s clothes and walks around. We were like sumo wrestlers or something.

So we get to the fraternity party and quickly realized that we didn’t get the memo that everybody else did. All the other girls were Sexy Something – not to the extent they are now, where you have, like, a Sexy Tooth Cavity. But everybody was Sexy Kitten or Sexy Genie Dancer or Sexy what have you. And here we roll in, dressed in approximately 500 layers of clothing and sweating our little butts off. And then we actually stood there and were surprised that not even any of the horny fraternity guys would come up and talk to us; we were that repellent.

So the next year we took off a few more layers. We never quite got down to the sexy costume level. But we learned our lesson that is probably not a great idea to dress like a ‘60s burnout named Touch Me Don’t Touch Me when we’re trying to get some action at a fraternity party.

Nancy 06:52

By the way, did you see Wendi’s latest essay in McSweeney’s called The Perfect Cocktails for Your Perimenopause Party? I’ll put that link in the show notes, right after I mix myself up a “Chin Hair of the Dog.”

But of course the exception that proves the rule – we’ve got Carrie from San Francisco who remembers, “When we first moved to Noe Valley” – that’s a neighborhood in San Francisco for those who don’t live near me – Carrie says, “When we first moved to Noe Valley, I dressed up as a goth French maid and dressed up my husband as Captain Jack Morgan and we went around bars and offered to buy anyone a shot of Captain Jack if they let me draw the red lipstick mustache on them.” She says it was the Wet and Wild .99 cent brand that doesn’t wash off. She says, “Had Instagram existed then I might have racked up some serious advertising influencer points. We bought a lot of shots that night.”

Carrie’s always been a bit of a trendsetter. Her story reminds me of the time in college, I thought I was going dressed as a woman from the Renaissance period. And then everyone thought I was the St. Pauli Girl, so I just went with that.

[MUSIC]

Nancy 07:52

I just loved this sweet story from Ann Imig.

Ann Imig 07:54

It was Halloween, probably 1987, maybe ‘86. We’re in seventh grade and at our first/boy girl Halloween party. And as you can imagine, we were going insane with our hormones and our volume and our activity in a uniquely Middle School pitch. And as a result, my best friend at the time, Megan, went flying into the plate glass window by the doorway, in an attempt to avoid some boy chasing her.

So this starts out as a minor tragedy because she did need to go to the ER – she was okay.

But as a result, on Trick or Treat night, the next night, she had her hand in a splint and couldn’t do much and it was raining. And it ended up just to be the two of us trick or treating. And as much as I was so sad for her injury, I was secretly really pleased to have Megan all to myself, because she was very popular and normally would have wanted to be where the action was. But as a result, we just pulled some old clothing out of my parents closet and went as Sue Ellen and JR, I think? and trick or treated. I still remember this corny little song we made up along the way, just being totally goofy, and back to our little girl selves. Thanks, Nancy.

Nancy 09:09

And then, as I’m putting this episode together, record scratch: Facebook and Instagram went down.

You know, to be candid, my first reaction was please please please let them stay down and may Twitter be felled by the same outage. Because even though there are aspects of social media that I adore, like seeing all your cute pandemic pets and watching kids who I’ve never met hit milestones like fifth grade graduation, and then high school graduation and more, I do think social media networks have contributed to the great coarsening of American culture and maybe we’d all be a bit better off if we took a long break from it.

But my second reaction was shared by creatives of all types: oh shizzle. How am I going to let my readers/listeners/followers know when there’s something new they may want to check out? I know a LOT of listeners find out about new episodes when I post about them on FB and IG. That’s great but…what if those go away? How do we stay in touch?

Back in the olden days I had a blog – and technically I still have it, at MidlifeMixtape.com. I used to write essays aka blog posts twice a week, religiously, back in 2011 when I first started it. And people who subscribed to the blog got an email from me whenever there was a new post. Now they only get a notice twice a month that a new podcast episode is available, along with all the juicy show notes I’m always referring to in the episodes themselves.

Anyway ALL that writing I’ve is still at MidlifeMixtape.com, buried under years of other writing, and then writing and podcast episodes on top of that.

So it occurred to me that I might go over to the blog and excavate a few of my OWN stories from the blog archive about Halloween, and fall, and other Halloween-adjacent topics, and share them with you.

Like this one from 2011. All you need to know here is that our dog at the time was a hunting dog, a German Shorthaired pointer named Achilles.

This one is called My Office is Not Your Belfry.

In the middle of a bright, sunny weekday earlier this month, a bat flew into my small home office. The thoughts that followed riffled past like so many index cards in a library file cabinet, I thought I might just share the journey.

Thought 1: That’s a really big moth…batbaTbAT BAT! BAT! Ohmygod that’s a BAT! BAT! BAT! IT JUST HIT ME IN THE BACK! IT JUST DID IT AGAIN! AGGGGH!

(Note: the bat never once touched me, being fully engaged with battering itself against my “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster. It was the zipper of my jacket flapping against my back as I tore out of my office towards the upstairs at a pace that would have left Usain Bolt eating my dust.)

Thought 2: Where is my dog and why isn’t he addressing this? He’s a hunting dog, fer chrissakes, he chases rolling clods of dirt and he’s going to ignore a bat? Where is Achilles?

My adrenaline-fueled sprint enabled me to reach the living room upstairs and catch Achilles unawares where he was napping on the good couch in the living room. Allow me to translate his response: “Oh, uh, hey lady. I’m probably not supposed to be on the couch, right? I love you. Hi! I love you.”

Thought 3: Of course my husband is out of town. He’s ALWAYS out of town when there’s an Urban Wildlife Interface Incident. The redtailed hawk immolating itself on the power line behind the house and starting a brush fire; the time that two rat traps were sprung simultaneously in the spooky back storage area; the time a herd of turkeys walked regally through the front yard and caused Achilles, on the other side of the living room window, to suffer a permanent mental breakdown.

What was the movie on your flight to St. Louis, dear? Sorry about the message I left on your cell phone while you were watching it.

Thought 4: Who else’s husband can I borrow? I thought of all the dads in the ‘hood with home offices and remembered that two of the three now have to work in their corporate location due to work pressure – Thanks For Nothing, Recession! [Remember I wrote this in 2011. Little did we know, right?] The third was probably traveling and, let’s be frank, would have been more horrified by the bat than I was.

Thought 5: If I don’t take care of this, we will never set foot on the lower floor again. Besides my home office, we have our laundry room, second bathroom, and our one TV down there. Clearly I was going to have to address this before the girls came home from school, or we’d never wear clean clothes, have a moment’s peace in the bathroom, or watch Glee again. [Again, it’s a 2011 post.]

Thought 6: I am not scared of bats. It’s true; of all the pests, bats are the least frightening to me. They eat bugs and have built-in senses to avoid flying into me. At camp, I love watching them swoop in the twilight, and the bats are definitely the most bad-ass creatures at the Oakland Zoo. Frankly, I’m more scared of birds. I can do this.

Thought 7: Rabies. Must protect myself. I went to the garage for a pair of gardening gloves. Because nothing says business to a bat like a pair of floral elbow length gloves tipped with geranium dirt.

Thus prepared, I crept back down to the office and peered behind the door I’d hastily slammed behind me during my retreat. There, clinging upside down to the curtain of a closed window, was a 3-inch-long brown bat, smaller than the palm of my hand.

In order to free it, I had to somehow maneuver around the bat to remove the window screen and open the window behind it. At first I held my breath, waiting for it to fly at me in another panic. But it was so still, it looked like part of the pattern on the curtain. The window screen stuck and I had to tug at it with increasing vigor. The bat still didn’t move. When my elbow shot out and hit the curtain, and the bat continued to remain still, I felt bolder. I even shook the curtain a bit, covering my face with my gardening glove just in case. Nothing. That’s when I realized it was a Teenager Bat whose mother probably has to use an airhorn to get it moving in the morning.

With that, I stood RIGHT NEXT TO the bat, my face just inches away from it, and gave the screen a pop. Then, wielding the screen in a shield-like manner I learned from watching Game of Thrones, I gave the curtain a big push and popped the bat, entirely unharmed, through the open window and watched it flit off into the trees.

Thought 8: I am She-Ra, protector of my home and of small innocent creatures. Bow down.

Thought 9: Some days this blog just writes itself.

By the way we never figured out how that bat got into this office. It could happen again. But this time I’m ready.

Here’s another one that was sitting under a sheen of dust, called Domestic Horrors:

With Halloween only days away, perhaps it was fitting that I woke my husband up from a dead sleep last night with shrieks of horror. “It’s ok, it’s ok,” he whispered at me, “you’re just having a bad dream.” He patted me on the back twice and fell immediately back to sleep, satisfied he’d scared off whatever monsters had woken his wife up in the middle of the night.

He was too sleepy to notice that I had recovered and was actually now lying in bed laughing at myself. The nightmare?

I dreamed I was in my own kitchen, cleaning off the dinner table after a meal. My arms were laden with dirty dishes from wrist to shoulder, and the hot water was running in the sink, the microwave was beeping, and I was trying to open the dishwasher with my foot. Sitting in their respective seats at our kitchen table, my youngest daughter had her nose buried in a National Geographic Kids magazine, my older daughter concentrated on a book, and my husband was playing long distance Scrabble with his sister on the iPad.

“Hello? A little help here?” I said in the dream, the dishes clinking precariously in my arms. “Hello? Anyone notice that I need some help cleaning up?” They just kept reading as I hopped on one foot, kicking at the dishwasher door with the other. Finally, desperate to get them to put down their reading and notice me, I screamed like a B list actress, waking myself and my husband up in the process.

Forget some masked maniac at Camp WannaPeePee chasing me down with a silver butcher knife as I try to run uphill through maple syrup without shoes. I’ve become much more constricted in my fears. Evidently having to clean my actual kitchen by myself while my actual family relaxes in front of me is the real nightmare.

With this in mind I thought I’d revisit some beloved slasher movie killers and decide what I’d probably nag them about, you know, apart from the homicides.

• Jason Voorhees, Friday the 13th: I swear to God, Jason, if I find your ski mask on the floor in the front hall again, I am THROWING IT OUT. Do you hear me? It’s your trademark? Well, if that were true I doubt you’d be so careless as to throw it on the floor where the dog will step on it.

• Freddy Krueger, Nightmare on Elm Street: Those were brand new sheets, Frederick Allen Krueger. They still had the creases in them. If you were going to suck Johnny Depp down into a bed and expel him in liquid format, couldn’t you have just waited until the old blue sheets were on the bed? THINK next time, please.

• Chucky, Child’s Play: Hammers, baseball bats, axes, air pumps. What do they have in common? These are all outdoor toys, young man. Take them back to the garage or yard where you found them, please.

• Michael Myers, Halloween: Do you think it’s easy to get reliable babysitters who can drive and don’t have such active social lives that they are busy every Saturday night? And now I bet Laurie will warn her friends not to work for us either. Pat yourself on the back there, buddy, because now your parents will never get a date night again. And guess who’s going to suffer for that?

• Ghostface, Scream: That’s what you’re wearing out to dinner? Again with the black tatters? What’s wrong with the jeans and button down shirt you just had me buy you at the Gap? Oh no, it’s fine. But I’ll remember this next time you tell me you need something new.

Here’s an essay, and an embarrassing story, I’d totally forgotten about called Financial Priorities. This one is a little unique because this is the only essay I ever wrote at the request from my husband:

I married a banker. We met at business school, and on paper I have the same base knowledge of subjects like finance and accounting that he does. But the truth is, the second he Put a Ring on It, I heaved a great sigh of relief and thought, “I’ll never have to calculate a tip again.” I pay all the bills, because I’m good at organizing and deadlines. But when he comes home from work and says, “We need to refinance the mortgage because the interest rate dropped and if I calculate the closing costs against the annual savings we’ll net it out within three years,” I hear, “We need to money talk blahblahblah” and then I nod and smile and say, “That sounds like a good idea.”

It’s worked for 22 years. He handles the big picture, I pay the bills, and even if I couldn’t tell you just how the whole house of cards is put together, financially speaking, we do ok.

So when he came home a few months back and said, “We need to think about paying for college soon, and I think we should get a home equity line of credit now because they’re making a special employee offer that expires at the end of the month,” I said, “Sounds like a good idea.” I had to gather a lot of financial documents in pursuit of this endeavor, and I happily went along getting things copied and digging out tax statements. But – and I can tell you this, because we’re friends – I didn’t really know what a home equity line of credit was. It seemed like a lot of work to Google it.

Finally, the night before we were supposed to sign all the documents, my husband kindly said to me, “Do you understand what we’re doing? It’s like a giant credit card, against the value of the house. We can borrow from the line of credit and then we pay it back. Just like you do with the credit card every month. Only with much bigger stakes.”

LIGHTBULB. Got it! I’m back on board here. This is Serious Money, the apex of all our parenting hopes and dreams, enabling us to pay for our children’s secondary education. We’ll use the line of credit for college tuition payments when those big sums are due, then, as my husband says in his sexy, bankerly way, “We’ll cashflow it.” Got it.

In a completely unrelated matter, the debit card I use for our regular checking account expired while I was back east last weekend. As is her wont, my mom pressed a $20 on me when I left, so I had money to pay for airport coffee and donuts. But boy, was I relieved to walk into my house from the airport and see an envelope from the bank where my husband works. It held not one but two new debit cards. And these were fancy, gold with a big key embossed on the front.

“Must be because he just had his five year anniversary there,” I thought, shredding my old debit card with the kitchen scissors before tossing it into the garbage and tucking my fancy gold card into my wallet. Then I headed out on a few errands, which included buying myself lunch. I was starved after all the time I’d spent on the plane that day.

That evening I pointed out the remaining gold card on the kitchen table to my husband. “There’s your new debit card!” I said. He looked at me strangely.

“Did you read the letter that came with these?” he asked. Well, duh. NO. That’s his job.

“These are the cards we use to pay for things from the Home Equity account. Did you notice these don’t look like your old debit card?”

And that is the story of how I used our children’s college fund to buy myself a turkey sandwich.

[MUSIC]

Nancy 20:58

And let me just add – Happy 29^th Anniversary this week, Andrew, we’ve made it 7 more years and I have managed to not spend the home equity loan on a pack of gum or toilet paper! Not even during the pandemic! Yay me!

In summary – I’m so grateful that you listen to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, but if you ever want to check out more of my older writing on all the tracks that make up our lives in the middle stage, from career to parenting to relationships to good old-fashioned nostalgia, Midlife Mixtape.com is the place to find it.

Head over to MidlifeMixtape.com and subscribe – there’s a box right at the top right hand side of the page where you can drop your email address in. For now, you’ll probably only get two emails each month: each time there’s a new podcast episode to hear. In the months to come I may be mixing things up a bit, because I do want to get more writing in my life again.

And because we are who we are #GenX, listeners, I made you a mixtape. I will send everyone who signs up at MidlifeMixtape.com by the end of October a mixtape – 2021 style, so it’s actually a Spotify playlist – but I will send you something to play your way into the late fall.

And I want to leave you with one last listener Halloween story. This one is meant to remind you that even now at midlife, you can be creating some choice Gen X memories, or as listener Matt proves, at least you can be educating the next generation.

Matt 22:11

Hey Nancy, Matt Fogelson here. This is my sad Halloween story.

So I was at a Halloween party several years ago dressed, as I always am, as Slash of Guns N’ Roses. My wife goes is Axl so, you know, makes a nice pair. So I’m at this party standing around a buffet table dressed as Slash and you know, got the full wig going with the top hat bobby pinned to it and the tuxedo shirt and vest, you know, dressed to the nines.

And there’s this sullen teenager type milling around. not wearing a costume because he’s way too cool for costumes. Costumes are for lame people like me. And he’s got earbuds in, and I don’t know what inspired me, but I decided I’d ask him what he’s listening to. And I kid you not: he says, “I’m listening to this band called Guns N’ Roses.” As if there’s no way I could’ve ever heard of that band.

I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. You know who I’m dressed?” And he says, “No.” I say, “Slash.” He says, “Who’s Slash?”

I suppress the urge to dunk his head in the bobbing for apples bin and drown the kid and I say, “Slash is the lead guitarist for the band that you’re listening to.” He’s like, “Oh, cool.”

So anyway, it’s a very sad story that he has no idea – with the demise of albums and even CDs – what any of these artists look like; it’s kind of a sad thing.

The even worse coda to this story is that I then go out on East Capitol street, living in DC at the time. And some guy comes up to me and says, “Hey, love your Howard Stern costume.” Ugh. The final indignity.

Nancy 23:52

Big thanks to everyone who shared your GenX Halloween stories. I hope something wonderful happens to all of you today and that your favorite Halloween candy is on clearance this weekend. Happy Halloween!

[“Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

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