![Picture](/uploads/4/3/5/0/43506379/407964.jpg?300)
Fall can offer all the spiced Lattes and cute clothes it wants, but to me, it will always be the Monday of seasons.
Sure, it tries to lure you into liking it – much like that over-eager office manager shoving a huge box of Krispy Kreams at your face, glazed and rainbow-sprinkled, trying to make you forget the beginning of your workweek and your forlornness over the too-soon-vanished weekend. Fall takes normal foods and drinks and saturates them to a full drench with nutmegs and vanillas, cloves and cinnamons, to super-size your sensory response to everything fall and to distract you from the goodbyes to summer. Orange everywhere. Pumpkin this. Pumpkin that.
And then for the coup de grâce, it will try to make you think it is OK to have a full night of make-believe and dress-up madness – masking itself and you with abandon – and granting a free pass to binge-eat candy and chocolates, as if saying, “Yes, I am here to stay for a while, and I will manipulate you into acting completely opposite to your nature.” If you are a human, you will have an illogical urge to be a cat or a pirate for a night. If you are a dog, you might end up being costumed up as Elvis. And most normal persons with normal eating habits may find themselves somehow justifying that 33 M&M’s and a dozen Twix bars are not that wrong to eat.
It is the epitome of disguised. Sketchy behavior. Fall, what are you trying to hide?
August.
Late August, I hate you just a little bit. As soon as I form the thought, I can almost hear Jimmy at my ear saying, “Umm, ‘Hate’ is a very strong word…” a tradition from back in the day when trying his hardest to instill vocabulary diplomacy in front of our young daughter. To lighten things up, if I let the H-word slip, I would teasingly reply, “A strong word?… then that is exactly what I meant!” But if we are going to go ‘day-of-the-week-metaphor’ deep, late August is the Sunday night of the year. Things are ending; things are turning.
Another reason for late August discontent: my birthday is the third week of July and even if I successfully hold a tiny bit of denial about aging for a few days or weeks, by the end of August my daughter’s birthday slams through and all I need is to do my annual arithmetic: add 30 years to her age, and then the inescapable turning older is sealed. There is also the nostalgia for the cuddly little girl that my daughter once was and that each late August keeps plucking farther from my reach. August subsequently yields to September with its busy flurry of academic things and returns to school, and soon fall is in full effect. I realize, as a byproduct, that I am allergic to Back To School commercials. Nails on a chalkboard (full school-themed cliché intended).
But mostly, I joke in my dismissiveness. Being dismissive is an easy hobby, because you don’t have to craft real reasons or honest, coherent viewpoints to back yourself up, as you do when you are appreciative or impressed. Being impressed is so often misconstrued as a sign of weakness.
So the truth, outside of my little Fall Is Monday Shtick, is that I am also truly appreciative of fall. One word: rain. All right, one more word: Halloween.
Let’s revisit Halloween beyond the superficial candy binge carte blanche. Halloween has a wonderful but also oddest of odd place in my memory as a young girl. Exhibit A: in Lima, when knocking at a door, the children don’t yelp out “Trick-or-Treat!” Groupings of Peruvian children go knocking door-to-door in their neighborhoods and shout “Halloween! Halloween!” It's tradition. You have to picture this in full Spanish pronunciation – the lingering, exaggerated ‘ween’ somewhat sounding like the old rhyme about This Little Piggy….and the “weeee” all the way home. Picture that. Told you: odd.
My first few years of Halloween! Halloween! were great. The first time I remember my mom dressing me up, I got to wear a red flamenco dancer outfit with a grown up necklace with hundreds of small red beads on multiple strands of delicate gold chain that she let me borrow. Not true gaudy – just fabulous. I must have been about 5 years old. The dress, with its tiered, ample ruffles at the bottom, was the fanciest thing I had ever worn.
Some years were not so miraculous, and we would forget to plan ahead to a costume. My mom had an easy standby for these scramble-on-the-afternoon-of-Halloween emergencies. One year she had sewed a Cinderella outfit, and my older sister had worn it a couple of times. The thing about it was – and this really hits home now as I try to explain it – that it was a before-Cinderella outfit, not ball gown Cinderella. I laugh now thinking of why any kid would want to dress up as an oppressed servant, but that was the getup that my mom had crafted. It was a simple, slip-on dress – no buttons or zippers – that was supposed to be of a potato-sack fashion humbleness. She had found a drab, putty-colored cotton and sparsely placed different remnant fabric appliqués, in rhombus and square shapes signifying patches on Cinderella’s overworn and many-times-ripped work garb. I remember that the bottom hem was frayed on purpose to bring the point of Cinderella’s plight even more to Life, but that the zigzag cuts my mom had made read more like the hem of Wilma’s dress on the Flintstones. To finish the look for either of us girls that needed to wear the standby costume, my mom would lightly burn the end of a wine cork and with the black ashes, she would smudge our cheeks and forehead in a couple spots. Because nothing affirms before-Cinderelladom like good, old fashioned soot.
My Lima Halloween days peaked at the gypsy costume when I was 11. It was all purple and lavender loveliness, and I had visions of being the most famous of all gypsies of my early worldview, Esmeralda. However by then – and I hate to succumb to this way of thinking – I was too tall. It was a really tedious Halloween. At many doors answered, 2 out of 5 probably, some parent would ask, “How old are you?” Standing in a circle of my peers all about half a foot shorter than me, I would feel my cheeks burn in embarrassment. And then the rude ones would just say, “Aren’t you getting too old to do this?”
Nowadays, I don’t even flinch when 17-year-olds in our neighborhood come through, not even dressed up, and with an open backpack strapped in front of their chests as their barely-trying receptacle for their candy peddling. I figure, if you are young enough not to care who you are offending by not putting on a costume while begging door-to-door for sweets, maybe you are young enough to do this Trick-or-Treat thing. Or maybe I am confusing young and immature. Here, have more candy. Less candy leftovers for me.
When my daughter was born, I had different Halloween dreams, manifested in different dreamy and lovely Halloween ways. By mid-October, I would pour over my sketchbook, in a quick brainstorm yielding a concept. Then after a little mental picturing of the pattern on the width of fabric, I would have a sense for how much I needed and be off to wonderful Poppy Fabrics in downtown San Francisco and then, when we moved to the East Bay, the great one that used to be on Broadway Avenue. I inherited this full bravado, no-pattern-needed sewing ways from my mom, much in the way that there are no measuring-cup or teaspoon-fraction compliances to our cooking.
It is OK to say that one of the finest, and certainly most fun achievements is to have made this handful of outrageous costumes for my daughter. It was magic. There was the first year with the Leopardo costume, that was basically a showy onesie with these really fun to make stuffed ears and a curvy tail into which I had put heavy gauge wire for structure, to keep its perkiness as she waddled down the street. Then came the Dinosaurio/Dragon outfit – the ambiguity of its title because no paleontologist would ever sign off on my accuracy at achieving any one species. I made it out of an emerald velveteen and crafted a spine of gold triangular scales starting at the top of the head and flowing down the back to the end of its long trailing tail, in a quilted fabric that was heavy and lined enough for the scales to stand up firm. I remember people answering their doors and adoring her, but when she would walk away down their stoop stairs they would see the massive tail with the gold scales and let out the gasps and oohs and aahs of amazement.
When she was able to articulate wants and I was no longer in executive-decision-mode choosing for her, came Rainbow Butterfly Fairy Princess. That was the first year that I felt like she was my client, giving me a commission. It seemed like a tall order because she kept adding descriptors. Again, I sketched and shopped for beautiful translucent fabrics – rainbow chiffon and pale blue, iridescent organza. I also dropped a visit at the hardware store to make sure that the wing formwork was steady and would not budge to the inevitable young-child-bumping-on-wall-corners wear. Making the dress was easy; constructing the generous butterfly wings was serious fun. After a session with all sorts of glitter glue, I had adorned her wings in ovals and circles for the grand effect.
In the weaning years of my costume design, came the Sirenita and then the I Dream Of Jeannie costume. It was the perfect sendoff because I made sure that in its execution, it was perfect. Hot pink with gold sequin trim, I made the trademark Jeannie hat with the veil from scratch. The grown ups understood and appreciated, while kids her age did not know who she was supposed to be. But it was fine because she knew who she was supposed to be.
It is amazing to think that fabric, trimmings and a little hardware can transform into magic. Each time I made these costumes for her, I tried my best. And that is the key. Trying your best makes things special. That is where the magic is engendered.
Nowadays, a wonderful young woman, she does not need me for most things and most certainly not for Halloween things.
It is fine for things to end if you lived them well – to your best ability. You can’t have flow unless you have ebb. I can accuse fall of being summer’s demise, or I can just see it in its standalone glory.
And the fact is that October, November and December did not over-spice and over-candy and over-market themselves; humans did that. This is a season that is actually a little quiet after all the rah-rah of summer, but which got a whole lot of trimmings and hardware and glitter plopped onto it.
Maybe summer is not dead if it gets fall as its big, extravagant Celebration of Life. Put a sparkly boa on if you like, as long as it makes you feel magic.
Harvest Moon - by Neil Young
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMA-_ElvKsk
Strange Magic - by Electric Light Orchestra
www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7I4ek0R3Vk
Sure, it tries to lure you into liking it – much like that over-eager office manager shoving a huge box of Krispy Kreams at your face, glazed and rainbow-sprinkled, trying to make you forget the beginning of your workweek and your forlornness over the too-soon-vanished weekend. Fall takes normal foods and drinks and saturates them to a full drench with nutmegs and vanillas, cloves and cinnamons, to super-size your sensory response to everything fall and to distract you from the goodbyes to summer. Orange everywhere. Pumpkin this. Pumpkin that.
And then for the coup de grâce, it will try to make you think it is OK to have a full night of make-believe and dress-up madness – masking itself and you with abandon – and granting a free pass to binge-eat candy and chocolates, as if saying, “Yes, I am here to stay for a while, and I will manipulate you into acting completely opposite to your nature.” If you are a human, you will have an illogical urge to be a cat or a pirate for a night. If you are a dog, you might end up being costumed up as Elvis. And most normal persons with normal eating habits may find themselves somehow justifying that 33 M&M’s and a dozen Twix bars are not that wrong to eat.
It is the epitome of disguised. Sketchy behavior. Fall, what are you trying to hide?
August.
Late August, I hate you just a little bit. As soon as I form the thought, I can almost hear Jimmy at my ear saying, “Umm, ‘Hate’ is a very strong word…” a tradition from back in the day when trying his hardest to instill vocabulary diplomacy in front of our young daughter. To lighten things up, if I let the H-word slip, I would teasingly reply, “A strong word?… then that is exactly what I meant!” But if we are going to go ‘day-of-the-week-metaphor’ deep, late August is the Sunday night of the year. Things are ending; things are turning.
Another reason for late August discontent: my birthday is the third week of July and even if I successfully hold a tiny bit of denial about aging for a few days or weeks, by the end of August my daughter’s birthday slams through and all I need is to do my annual arithmetic: add 30 years to her age, and then the inescapable turning older is sealed. There is also the nostalgia for the cuddly little girl that my daughter once was and that each late August keeps plucking farther from my reach. August subsequently yields to September with its busy flurry of academic things and returns to school, and soon fall is in full effect. I realize, as a byproduct, that I am allergic to Back To School commercials. Nails on a chalkboard (full school-themed cliché intended).
But mostly, I joke in my dismissiveness. Being dismissive is an easy hobby, because you don’t have to craft real reasons or honest, coherent viewpoints to back yourself up, as you do when you are appreciative or impressed. Being impressed is so often misconstrued as a sign of weakness.
So the truth, outside of my little Fall Is Monday Shtick, is that I am also truly appreciative of fall. One word: rain. All right, one more word: Halloween.
Let’s revisit Halloween beyond the superficial candy binge carte blanche. Halloween has a wonderful but also oddest of odd place in my memory as a young girl. Exhibit A: in Lima, when knocking at a door, the children don’t yelp out “Trick-or-Treat!” Groupings of Peruvian children go knocking door-to-door in their neighborhoods and shout “Halloween! Halloween!” It's tradition. You have to picture this in full Spanish pronunciation – the lingering, exaggerated ‘ween’ somewhat sounding like the old rhyme about This Little Piggy….and the “weeee” all the way home. Picture that. Told you: odd.
My first few years of Halloween! Halloween! were great. The first time I remember my mom dressing me up, I got to wear a red flamenco dancer outfit with a grown up necklace with hundreds of small red beads on multiple strands of delicate gold chain that she let me borrow. Not true gaudy – just fabulous. I must have been about 5 years old. The dress, with its tiered, ample ruffles at the bottom, was the fanciest thing I had ever worn.
Some years were not so miraculous, and we would forget to plan ahead to a costume. My mom had an easy standby for these scramble-on-the-afternoon-of-Halloween emergencies. One year she had sewed a Cinderella outfit, and my older sister had worn it a couple of times. The thing about it was – and this really hits home now as I try to explain it – that it was a before-Cinderella outfit, not ball gown Cinderella. I laugh now thinking of why any kid would want to dress up as an oppressed servant, but that was the getup that my mom had crafted. It was a simple, slip-on dress – no buttons or zippers – that was supposed to be of a potato-sack fashion humbleness. She had found a drab, putty-colored cotton and sparsely placed different remnant fabric appliqués, in rhombus and square shapes signifying patches on Cinderella’s overworn and many-times-ripped work garb. I remember that the bottom hem was frayed on purpose to bring the point of Cinderella’s plight even more to Life, but that the zigzag cuts my mom had made read more like the hem of Wilma’s dress on the Flintstones. To finish the look for either of us girls that needed to wear the standby costume, my mom would lightly burn the end of a wine cork and with the black ashes, she would smudge our cheeks and forehead in a couple spots. Because nothing affirms before-Cinderelladom like good, old fashioned soot.
My Lima Halloween days peaked at the gypsy costume when I was 11. It was all purple and lavender loveliness, and I had visions of being the most famous of all gypsies of my early worldview, Esmeralda. However by then – and I hate to succumb to this way of thinking – I was too tall. It was a really tedious Halloween. At many doors answered, 2 out of 5 probably, some parent would ask, “How old are you?” Standing in a circle of my peers all about half a foot shorter than me, I would feel my cheeks burn in embarrassment. And then the rude ones would just say, “Aren’t you getting too old to do this?”
Nowadays, I don’t even flinch when 17-year-olds in our neighborhood come through, not even dressed up, and with an open backpack strapped in front of their chests as their barely-trying receptacle for their candy peddling. I figure, if you are young enough not to care who you are offending by not putting on a costume while begging door-to-door for sweets, maybe you are young enough to do this Trick-or-Treat thing. Or maybe I am confusing young and immature. Here, have more candy. Less candy leftovers for me.
When my daughter was born, I had different Halloween dreams, manifested in different dreamy and lovely Halloween ways. By mid-October, I would pour over my sketchbook, in a quick brainstorm yielding a concept. Then after a little mental picturing of the pattern on the width of fabric, I would have a sense for how much I needed and be off to wonderful Poppy Fabrics in downtown San Francisco and then, when we moved to the East Bay, the great one that used to be on Broadway Avenue. I inherited this full bravado, no-pattern-needed sewing ways from my mom, much in the way that there are no measuring-cup or teaspoon-fraction compliances to our cooking.
It is OK to say that one of the finest, and certainly most fun achievements is to have made this handful of outrageous costumes for my daughter. It was magic. There was the first year with the Leopardo costume, that was basically a showy onesie with these really fun to make stuffed ears and a curvy tail into which I had put heavy gauge wire for structure, to keep its perkiness as she waddled down the street. Then came the Dinosaurio/Dragon outfit – the ambiguity of its title because no paleontologist would ever sign off on my accuracy at achieving any one species. I made it out of an emerald velveteen and crafted a spine of gold triangular scales starting at the top of the head and flowing down the back to the end of its long trailing tail, in a quilted fabric that was heavy and lined enough for the scales to stand up firm. I remember people answering their doors and adoring her, but when she would walk away down their stoop stairs they would see the massive tail with the gold scales and let out the gasps and oohs and aahs of amazement.
When she was able to articulate wants and I was no longer in executive-decision-mode choosing for her, came Rainbow Butterfly Fairy Princess. That was the first year that I felt like she was my client, giving me a commission. It seemed like a tall order because she kept adding descriptors. Again, I sketched and shopped for beautiful translucent fabrics – rainbow chiffon and pale blue, iridescent organza. I also dropped a visit at the hardware store to make sure that the wing formwork was steady and would not budge to the inevitable young-child-bumping-on-wall-corners wear. Making the dress was easy; constructing the generous butterfly wings was serious fun. After a session with all sorts of glitter glue, I had adorned her wings in ovals and circles for the grand effect.
In the weaning years of my costume design, came the Sirenita and then the I Dream Of Jeannie costume. It was the perfect sendoff because I made sure that in its execution, it was perfect. Hot pink with gold sequin trim, I made the trademark Jeannie hat with the veil from scratch. The grown ups understood and appreciated, while kids her age did not know who she was supposed to be. But it was fine because she knew who she was supposed to be.
It is amazing to think that fabric, trimmings and a little hardware can transform into magic. Each time I made these costumes for her, I tried my best. And that is the key. Trying your best makes things special. That is where the magic is engendered.
Nowadays, a wonderful young woman, she does not need me for most things and most certainly not for Halloween things.
It is fine for things to end if you lived them well – to your best ability. You can’t have flow unless you have ebb. I can accuse fall of being summer’s demise, or I can just see it in its standalone glory.
And the fact is that October, November and December did not over-spice and over-candy and over-market themselves; humans did that. This is a season that is actually a little quiet after all the rah-rah of summer, but which got a whole lot of trimmings and hardware and glitter plopped onto it.
Maybe summer is not dead if it gets fall as its big, extravagant Celebration of Life. Put a sparkly boa on if you like, as long as it makes you feel magic.
Harvest Moon - by Neil Young
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMA-_ElvKsk
Strange Magic - by Electric Light Orchestra
www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7I4ek0R3Vk