My Halloween costume

By Todd Stadler · Saturday, November 1, 2008 9:23am

They say as you get older, you get wiser. Well, I don't know about that — as I write this at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning, I am snacking on a Hershey's Miniatures chocolate bar. And not even the Special Dark kind!

But I do know this: as you get older, you get lamer. And by that, I mean: the only people I know who dress up and go out and have fun for Halloween anymore are my friends' kids. Time was, we adults would all put on costumes and go to a great party. Well the times, they have a-changed.

However, don't think that this is going to be a costume-less blog entry! No! Because, for whatever reason, it is acceptable (at least where I work) to wear a Halloween costume to the office. (Perhaps especially when Halloween is on a Friday, which we all know to be the most casual of the weekdays.) But I'll get to that in a second.

Now, the last time I actually put some serious effort into making a Halloween costume was four years ago. Which, as you other old people will remember, was an election year — as I recall, it was John Kerry versus ... hmm ... the other guy, whoever.

Anyhow, during the debates that year, there was a lot of talk about Canadian medicine. Kerry had a health care plan that had something to do with importing drugs from the Great White North, which would save us all money. The other guy ... um, his opponent ... didn't like Kerry's plan, and tended to make scary pronouncements about how:

When a drug comes in from Canada, I want to make sure it cures you and doesn't kill you ... and what my worry is that, you know, it looks like it's from Canada, and it might be from a third world.

Well! Halloween costumes are traditionally supposed to be scary, and what could be scarier than something that could kill you? And/or is from "a third world"? (I believe Mars is the second world.)

It also helped that I had recently taken a trip to SCRAP, the School and Community Reuse Action Project (for the acronym's sake, I'm glad that schools are involved), where I'd cheaply obtained a rather large amount of foam pieces that, I'd decided, bore a resemblance to pills of some sort.

So I found a t-shirt the color of a prescription medicine bottle, trimmed the sleeves off, painted on a white label, and hacked a piece of foam I found in the basement into something resembling a childproof lid. (For the record, this is exactly why we store all sorts of seemingly useless crap in our basement: you never know when you'll need it for a Halloween costume, I always say.)

The design on the label was really the only way I had to convey that the medicine I was portraying was Canadian (or Canadien, if you will, and if you love freedom, you won't), so it had to be in both French and English. And pretty much had to have a red maple leaf somewhere on it. After playing around with Google Translate, I came up with a label that read (for those of you who can't see it in the photo below):

CanaDrogue
123 Fake St. Ottowa
Dr. Pierre Bûcheron 815-366-4211
100 Sildenafil citrate 50mg
TAKE ONE TABLET DAILY
UNE MEILLURE SANTE ICI 10/31/04 Refills: 07

And yes, I was, in fact, a bottle of Canadian Viagra. Four years later, I'm not sure why I thought that was funny. Or why I offered a French phrase that, no doubt awkwardly, translates as "a better health here" as the alternate language rendition of "take one tablet daily". I do know why I used a doctor's last name that translates to "lumberjack" in English — because it's funny! Dr. Pierre Lumberjack! Ha!

Fig. A: Ironically, when I Googled to find the correct area code for Ottowa (yes, my costume research is that thorough), I accidentally found the one for Ottowa, Illinois, which my friend from Joliet pointed out to me, to my embarrassment. Thanks, Aaron.

Anyhow, fast forward four years to this week, and some people at work were discussing wearing costumes for Halloween. Feeling lazy, I trumped down to the basement, where, as you know, I store nearly everything, including old Halloween costumes! Since I hadn't worn it to work, I figured it qualified as newish, so I wore it yesterday, figuring it's my election-year Halloween costume.

However, as Canadian medicine has not so much been a hot debate topic this year, I decided to tell people I was "socialized medicine", which certainly taps into the scary (or at least fear-mongering) topic du jour. Sometimes the creativity required for a costume isn't in making it so much as in justifying it after the fact, I say.

I realize it would have been more timely to have posted this blog entry yesterday, on Halloween, but don't think of it as being a day late. Think of it, rather, as being four years late!