Dressing Up
The Collective Magic of Wearing Our Dreams
I don’t remember my first Halloween. During the fall of 1980, my parents and I were living in New York. I was three, so it’s hard to imagine we didn’t get caught up in the Halloween spirit. There’s no photographic evidence of it, however, even though my mom was tenacious in documenting our lives in photo albums. Without images to go by, I have no story to tell about that Halloween, so my first memories of dressing up feature a different holiday in a different country.
Venezuelans don’t take carnival to the legendary lengths Brazilians do, but when I was a kid, we used to dress up and gleefully join parades at school and around our neighborhood. In the photo below, you can see my first-grade class before we embarked on our carnival parade. In this record of 1980s childhood dreams and infatuations, we have two Zorros, a cowboy, a Musketeer, a few dolls and princesses, and two Gypsies (decades before we realized the designation and outfit were derogatory). I am the serious blue cat between Wonder Woman (worn by Sofía, one of my best friends to this day) and Superman.
I’m grateful to our teacher Leddy (in the back, dressed as Strawberry Shortcake) for uploading this photo to Facebook and painstakingly tagging her former students’ accounts. Like my mom, she too kept track of the past and gifted us this portrayal of our young selves gathered together, showcasing the identities we each wanted to inhabit. Individual costumes are compelling, but I’m more interested in their collective meaning. Our dressing-up rituals send us out into the world. We trick-or-treat, we walk in parades, we find the right outfit for our friends’ theme parties. Dressing up is about being a piece in the ever-shifting puzzle we create as a crowd, a way to connect to those around us and to the characters and ideas we embody with our costumes. It’s my favorite kind of statement—creative, public, profound.
I spent five happy years as an undergrad at Ohio University, a place still known for its Halloween celebration. Halloween at OU involved thousands of college students. It resembled my first-grade carnival parade, except it was at night and the dressed-up crowds ranged between tipsy and drunk. I spent weeks working on my costumes, which needed to be free since I was an impoverished college student. I’d wear the dresses I inherited from my ancestors and craft something to drive the concept home. Freshman year, I was a flapper, compliments of my mom’s beaded red dress. Sophomore year, I wore my grandmother’s white dress and fashioned myself a halo and wings made of cardboard and toilet paper.
Neither costume was a masterpiece, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to walk down Court Street and add to the inebriated symphony of sexy, weird, and funny. The magic of the night came from belonging—perfectly—to our completely mismatched gathering. I don’t think I ever loved the student collective I belonged to as much as I did on those nights. I smiled, giggled, gawked at, and congratulated. And I got plenty of love back from those I passed. My toilet-paper wings worked, and I flew high for days—if not weeks—to come.
Once I became a mother, Halloween allowed me to connect with my boys in a fun, exuberant way while they engaged in the most iconic of American childhood rituals. There’s always Christmas morning (for those who celebrate it), but that’s between you and those closest to you. For Halloween, whole neighborhoods open their doors and hand out candy. As it was at OU, every costume is celebrated and worthy of Skittles and M&Ms. Unlike my college days, I can now afford to buy costumes, and I spent years trying to coordinate with one or both of my boys. The family costume might seem cheesy, but to me it’s a celebration of our love for a particular set of characters, a way to claim our own personalities within a fictional universe.
As the boys grew up, they wanted to claim their own identities without being tied to me and each other. Yes, we watch the same shows and movies, but we don’t have to saunter down our neighborhood as a pop-culture unit. Anyway, we’ve never been a full unit on Halloween. My husband Nate does not share my infatuation with costumes, preferring to wear jeans and tee-shirts no matter what the world around him is up to. Our Halloween quartet often included my friend Cait instead. She, who is my beloved and indefatigable thrifting partner, gets a kick out of the dressing-up game, and she plays it beautifully. We got to thrift and dress up this past weekend when she came to visit, and I filmed our stories about what we each wore and why. I take after my mother when it comes to documenting our family’s passions. I, too, love photos, but I also film our lives and our thoughts about what we’re living through. The whys and the hows of our big moments are fun to explore, and it doesn’t get much bigger than our collective dressing-up adventures:
Maybe Cait will be back next fall. Maybe Nate will come out of costume retirement. Either way, I’ll be wearing something marvelous, and the boys hopefully will too. We’ll be united whether we match or not.
How Miss Venezuela and the Virgin Mary Ruled My Childhood
I had a wonderful time speaking to Paola Calahorrano’s “Mapping the Female Body” Spanish undergraduate class at the University of Pittsburgh. It was delightful to explore how deeply my ideas of womanhood were shaped by beauty queens and the Virgin Mary in my “Mapping the Female Body: Ups and Downs of a Venezuelan Upbringing” presentation. The students spoke beautiful Spanish, and it was a joy to answer their questions and learn from their insight.
Stories that Transfixed Me (and May Transfix You)
Your Turn
Do you like dressing up? Do you prefer individual or group costumes? What are your favorite Halloween and Carnival memories? Are you dressing up this year? What are you going to be?
This post was edited by Nathaniel Bowler. I’m grateful for his help as always, and for you, my dear readers!
Thank you, Alexandra, for this post.
Sorry it took me a while to reply, I read the post when I received the email.
To be honest, I got very emotional when I saw the photo; it took me right back to those school memories (costumes, playground, route 1 school bus, the egg throwing during Carnival, the end-of-year performances, the auditorium, concerts....)
I’m going to show the photo to my daughters to see what they say.
My costume was borrowed, but I remember it perfectly.
That photo holds so much meaning and friendship :-). I stand down in the middle. UN BESO!
I, too, prefer to make Halloween costumes out of things I already own. One of my favorites was when I dressed up as Veronica from "Heathers" for Halloween at work. I also loved "Real Americans" and I liked "Goodbye, Vitamin" a lot, too.