San Francisco is My Home

02
Nov

The end of Halloween

Author: kris, Category: Events, Seen

To my great surprise, the city succeeded in shutting down the Castro Halloween party. In m.h.o., the thing that did it was the transportation issue: after 8 pm, no public transit stopped anywhere where you could easily walk to the Castro, and cars parked in the area were towed.

There were still a few people out, some of them dressed as widows and funeral attendants at the death of the Castro Halloween, but over all it was a pretty quiet night. I didn’t even see a lot of costumes out.

“It would be great if all the tourists who show up every year without costumes and take pictures DID show up tonight, but none of the costumed people did, so they’ve got nothing to photograph,” said my fella, peering out the window.

I tend to think the moral outrage making the rounds over the party shutdown is a little overblown. In two years or five years, the locals can start coming out of the woodwork in their thousand-hour hand-crafted costumes and with any luck the Mission will be the hot place for the tourists to go by then so the rest of us can party on the sly. Of course in five years I might have bought a house on the bleak peninsula and be busy creating and raising my own spawn, but I’m happy to think the neighborhood will go on partying without me.

Speaking of domestic bliss, my fella and I carved pumpkins with my folks the weekend before Halloween, and to close out my Halloween talk for the year I leave you with this image. This is my fella’s pumpkin, on an artistic level far surpassing everyone else’s pumpkins, which is causing my dad to tell the neighbors he is hoping I marry this guy so we can keep those pumpkin carving skills in the family.