You're Dressed as What?

I tried to dress as Laurie Strode, Jamie Lee Curtis’ character from Halloween, one year and no one got it. I put on clogs and knee socks, a long, dumpy denim skirt, did my hair in the flattened-out feathered style with a barrette on one side, wore a button-down shirt, and carried some books. To be particularly clever, I had included an abnormal psychology book, because I thought it hinted that Laurie herself would have been interested in the deviant mind—and that it added some foreshadowing to my ensemble. I put on the final touch—some subtle yet frosted lipstick—and I imagined the other girls, in their boring, store-bought costumes, coming up to me: “You’re that girl from Halloween! What a great idea!”

I was in college and it was an all-girl party in our all-girl dorm, which meant we were spared the sexy witch, sexy devil, and sexy nurse costumes. Our RA was Raggedy Ann, and one girl was a police officer. There were scary costumes: warty witches and mummies, and Frankenstein’s Monster with a Bride of Frankenstein, with impressively high hair and voltage wires in her head. Since it was a Catholic college, and nuns lived in our dorm, I was most curious to see whether or not anyone would dress as a nun, or whether the actual nuns would dress as something other than nuns. No, and no. We played music (probably something by Bon Jovi), drank non-alcoholic punch, and lay in wait for the real party, at the boy’s college, later that night.

All night people tried to guess my costume: A hippie? A psychology professor? A preppie? A guidance counselor? An ex-nun? Someone from the 70s? (OK, getting closer…) A nerd? And, my personal favorite, from later on at the boys’ party: “An ugly girl?” Did these people not watch horror movies? Did they not see my hair, and the title of the book in my hand? The knee socks….the CLOGS, for goodness’ sake! I tried to think of what I could have done to have made it all clearer, and drew a blank.

People at the party had no shortage of ideas: hatchet in the head? Gunshot wound? Carry a wanted poster of Michael Myers, warning of his escape from the institution? A shirt with “Laurie Strode” on it, or a shirt with the name of the film on it? Bring with you a guy dressed like Michael Myers and have him follow you around all night? And, probably the same guy who guessed “ugly girl,” had this to offer: “Who’s Laurie Strode?” These suggestions were not only stupid but insulting. First, Laurie was not shot, nor did she get a hatchet in the head. And to have to resort to a shirt with her name on it….It just didn’t seem fair. Anyone could just dress up as Michael Myers and everyone would get it immediately, but here I was trying to be the actual main character of the film: dorky, awkward, ultimately brave survivor Laurie, and I kept having to explain it, over and over.

Why did I connect so much with Laurie? Well, all of the above, but Jamie Lee Curtis does such a good job making Laurie a complex girl in a genre that usually doesn’t allow for much female complexity. For one, she’s a high school girl who lives in home that seems to contain no adults, and her world is adult-free, save for cops, psychiatrists, and male psychopaths (check out the scene where she comes home and sits on her bed after seeing the van—there’s something so creepy about her isolation, when it’s just her and the breeze coming through her filmy curtains.) There are no adult women in this film. Laurie is a babysitter, the grownup, and although she tries to fit in with her pot-smoking, boy-crazy friends, she is too serious and too responsible to be young, though she is naïve about men. Unlike her friend Annie, there is no way Laurie is going to do laundry in her underwear or get drunk and have sex with her boyfriend in a stranger’s bed. Laurie’s both mom and little girl, and somehow just can’t enter that adolescent world. Annie ends up leaving the child she’s babysitting with Laurie, but we all know how that worked out.

At that party, watching the drinking and flirting around me, I started to feel like Laurie Strode—too old, but also too young to be a part of it all. And, I’ll admit it, still indignant that no one understood my costume. A guy in a gorilla suit showed up and we tried to guess who it was. One of my friends threw up outside the townhouse and then sat in it, leaving a red stain on the butt of her white angel costume, which actually made her costume more interesting: menstruating angel. The clogs started to hurt my feet, so I took them off, and I ended up losing my abnormal psychology book. The next year I dressed as a porcelain doll, in a black velvet bathrobe with lace at the collar and a red ribbon, white makeup and ribbons in my hair. When no one got that one, either, though, it didn’t matter quite as much.


*This post is dedicated to my good friend Chris Breu--enjoy Halloween :)