Before the Charade Passes By
Downtown Institution Still Instills Civic Pride, Bad Taste and Booty





What: Village Halloween Parade
Location: Sixth Avenue, New York
Date: October 31, 2006
Cost: Free
Bohemian Factor: Finally! Off the Charts!
Geek Factor: This picture above should suffice.


Just like practicing Jews say "Next year in Jerusalem!" at the Passover seder, I have often found myself saying "Next year in San Francisco!" during the Halloween season. Having actually lived in the bay area during my undergrad days, I have long harbored a fantasy of the Castro's infamous All Hallow's Day revelry, the kind of ideal nourished only by one who repeatedly passed up the opportunity to go study for midterms instead. Alas.

After coming down with that particular malaise unique to New Yorkers whose morals take a nose -dive amid the perfect storm of winter weather, shlepping outside in the rain for laundry, ridiculous prices for bad produce, and taking those heavy groceries up five flights of a walk-up apartment, I was particularly vulnerable to that West Coast siren song.

Fortunately, the Village Halloween parade – and a temporary warm front – was a hearty reminder to me of the very specific camaraderie that seems permanently wedded to Sixth Avenue and Spring Street. The crowd of twenty people or so with matching sperm-shaped hats, the creative technophiles who take on such structural challenges as a gigantic cell phones, an iPod, and a box of dental floss ("Fight Plaque! Not Iraq!").

Most important, is the camaraderie that can only be forged through making catty comments with strangers about the tackiness of other marchers' choice of garb. ("Dear god. I'm seeing way to much of that man's butt cheeks!" pronounced the couple dressed as morgue undertakers next to us. That was all it took to cement the union of our two groups of marchers.)

Upon hearing about the terrible shooting that took place at this year's Castro party, it did, trigger some reflection regarding my self-pitying yearning for the left coast this time of year. There's no reason that such tragedy couldn't just as likely have taken place at New York's Village Halloween Parade, despite the vast amounts of security everywhere. But the news was all the more shocking because what the Village parade does instill, at the very least, is the illusion of civic unity born out of a shared embrace of all things loony, creative, and – occasionally - harmlessly tasteless…and if that doesn't feel like security against senseless violence, what can?