Come Look at the Freaks

Hello, there. I don't think I've told you all yet how very much I love Halloween. It's my second favorite holiday - after Arbor Day, of course. I love absolutely every aspect of it: the costumes, the candy, the special rush you get from terrifying unsuspecting five-year-olds dressed up as Hannah Montana. Anyway, it's never officially Halloween until I visit a haunted house. The location du jour this year was a three-hundred-year old church that apparently is truly haunted. A few friends and I waited in line for two hours in the freezing cold while hearing people scream in terror from the graveyard across the street. In the time it took for our group to get to the front of the line, we amused ourselves. We practiced walking like Siamese twins, though I'm not sure what we'll ever need that for. We reminisced about the fabled sleepovers of yore where we would paint each other's faces and sing Cher songs. (As much as I hate to admit it, I did, in fact, go through a Cher phase. Trust me, though, that was very long ago.) I entertained and annoyed with my excessive giggling and near-bipolar hyperactivity. After a half hour on that damn line, a woman walked by with her son, who was wearing a costume that completely eliminated his head. So I, with my ever-ready wit and razor-sharp tongue, quipped, "That's not the way to get ahead in life!" Neither the woman nor her decapitated son thought it was funny. When finally it was our turn to go in, we all linked ourselves into a superhumanly close pretzel-like formation. There were four of us, and it was pretty much impossible to move without causing someone else severe physical pain. So we soldiered on into the graveyard. As we made our way up to the church, with people with nothing better to do dressed as ghosts drifting around us, a hideous swamp thing came out of the trees. Our little human pretzel was no more as we all screamed and jumped back from the thing that was coming at us with ridiculous slowness. I would like to say that I planted my fists on my hips and laughed bravely in the face of danger, but, unfortunately, friends, I have no such yarn to weave. No, the grim reality is that I was nearly in tears at this point, and my high-pitched, never-ending shriek was the loudest. We trekked on through the graveyard, through a pet cemetary, and up to the door of the church. By now I was shaking uncontrollably, and it didn't help that it was negative ten degrees out there. My friends and I chatted with a very bored-looking volunteer ghost, who, ironically, asked us how school was. That was awkward. So after this darling little exchange we stumbled down into the catacombs where we passed through a room where a surgeon was sawing off the leg of a kid with an unusual affinity for 1960's ethnic music, a courtroom with a judge that would put the one from Sweeney Todd to shame, a jail with a very lonely prisoner and her disembowled husband, and a torture chamber where we got the dubious honor of witnessing the torture and subsequent burning of a witch. Fun. I may point out that my dearest darlingest friends, who had promised to be my loyal defenders on this trek through hell, scattered like scared chickens as soon as we entered the graveyard, claiming that they were "in pain" and could I "please stop choking them?". Selfish, selfish, selfish. I was left to scream and clutch blindly at anything that seemed vaguely human. When it was over, I discovered, with a little jolt of further horror, that I had been clutching the arm of complete stranger.

Before I wrap this up, I feel compelled to point out that tonight marks the closing of Legally Blonde on Broadway. OMG you guys, I totez didn't see that coming. I, for one, am not at all sorry to see it go. I am also not sorry that this means Laura Bell Bundy, everyone's favorite little homewrecker, is out of a job. So Legally Blonde is soon to be gone. Ding dong, the witch is dead, though I suppose that the witch won't truly be dead until Wicked breathes its last sugar-coated breath. Unfortunately, I doubt any of us here will live to see that day.