Mark Twain II, the sequel
I was Mark Twain for Halloween back in 1980 or so…which is almost 30 years and a lot of natural gray hair ago. It was, by most accounts, disastrous.
A current girlfriend of a friend of an ex-roommate’s previous husband knew a hairdresser who would turn my hair an moustache white. Those were days when Halloween was celebrated at bars by people who are 30 years younger than me.
I didn’t have contact lenses so I was stumbling around, squinting at people. Didn’t much matter….everybody looked acceptable after enough Budweiser and I went home somewhere with somebody. Possibly alone, but I doubt it. No glasses, except the 37 full of beer, driving, getting there alive…those don’t all mix exactly.
That doesn’t matter either. What does matter is that I went to bed with the makeup on and in the way excess alcohol has, forgot that I had it on. Excess beer will also wake you up in the middle of the night for a bathroom break.
Well, I wandered in there and flipped the light on and still without glasses, saw myself in the unexpected white hair. It is not an experience I would recommend for the faint of heart.
Last week’s experience was scarier.
I dressed up at school because this is the sort of thing that makes school more fun for the kids. Only about one out of ten of the teachers dressed for the occasion and mainly the rest of them sneered and made fun of the ones who did dress. In other words, they punished them for trying to make the experience fun.
It is the same basic malformed gene that makes people who stand along the sidelines at the sock hop make fun of the people who dance.
About half of the kids didn’t dress either…and, just like the adults, they made fun of the ones who did. It is this suppression of good times that characterizes your average adult in these below average times for creativity.
Of course it burned me up. I was particularly upset that teachers would simply smile when some little tater in a T-shirt pointed at the Lady Bug or the Glitter Girl or Dracula or Cleopatra in the hallway and giggled and said “that is stupid…you look funny!” I usually stopped the class and addressed this kind of behavior with the line “no, they don’t look funny, they look cute…YOU look funny because you came to a costume party dressed as a kid who doesn’t have sense enough to enjoy being one!”
The line was really meant for the teachers who were giving me the same treatment in the hallway. (I would like to mention that so far, I have not used the term “loser” or mentioned that there is nothing on this planet funnier than the sight of some of these specimens in shorts or blue jeans. Let’s keep this dignified.)
Okay, so far, this is just aggravating. Now for the scary part.
The sneering, insulting snort of the day was “who are you supposed to be?”
White hair swept back, white moustache, white suit, white tie…that ought to have been hint enough in a situation in which characters are supposed to have a literary connection. But I was carrying a copy of Mark Twain’s collected short stories, headlined MARK TWAIN in letters 3 inches high.
And these teachers had no clue.
Now let’s draw a finer point line. These are people who easily recognized characters from Star Wars and called them by name. They even knew one of the little boys was dressed as a contestant on Dancing With the Stars. Several who dressed, were done up as Harry Potter characters in costumes FROM THE MOVIES. I asked how these characters were described in the books and got blank stares from a couple and the line “who has time to read?” from another.
And then she turned to me and said “who are you supposed to be?”
It would have been a really bad day except that I went to a “restaurant” with some colleagues after work and had a couple of brews. As I walked toward the booth, I noticed a couple of biker types, hair as white as mine, empty bottles strewn across the bar.
One of them called out: “How ya doin’ Mark?” And another threw in “What’s Huck Finn been up to?”
At least there are still SOME people out there who remember books and aren’t afraid to have a good time when one is available.
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