Zombie Night

Yesterday, working the door at my school’s trick or treat event, I greeted some 2,000 of my fellow citizens while dressed as the bride of Frankenstein. Attendance estimates ran indeed as high as my white-and-black-striped beehive wig. But even if overestimated by half, the figure’s enough for bafflement. Barely does the entire county boast 20,000 souls. Apparently, from transformers to T-Rexes, from Hannah Montana to Hanna-Barbera, we all love our Halloween. Picture it: a small town and a dark October night (given, a year when the World Series involves two other teams) where a community event can actually draw the community.

I came home bushed. The librarians built a spooky maze through the stacks. The chemistry teacher, a former monk, wore a cowled robe as he passed, purple smoke brewing in a test-tube. Students in 70’s platforms or 80s rocker skirts, dressed as nerds, Geishas, cowboys, or news anchors helped direct traffic. One of my co-workers had lit upon the trick of inserting a balloon into the top of my sagging wig, but still, I’d left exhausted by all that hair. How were there so many people in this town? Who were they? Most had no idea who I was, but they’d smiled at me as I bent to smile at their children, my black lipstick cracking.

I’ll to add it to my list of things to do when new in a town: go out in a disguise. It’s nice to be where no one is very sure of every name; where all of us are in zombie make-up.

Luckily, back home, there was a frozen pizza in the fridge (no energy tonight for quinoa, not to mention squash curry or pumpkin gnocchi—most recent, grasping attempts to retain foodie-status so hard cultivated as Portlanders).

Luckily, too, an episode of 30 Rock, T. already in place on the couch.

Two months ago, T. and I forswore cable, snobbing it up for the guy from Mediacom, whom we weren’t averse to letting assume more noble pastimes on our part. Or, so we’d assumed. Instead, he’d looked around our barren rental, its piles of flimsy boxes of flimsy books, and, as if reading right through to our barren souls, said, “Oh, you’ll want cable soon.”

“We’re going to try it first and see,” T. squeaked in response, already suspecting he would indeed come to wish we’d sprung for cable. I’d have been more scared, too, but was busy sweating out a previous prediction, delivered moments earlier by our Mediacom oracle as he’d run a cable to my second floor office: it could take “a few hours” for our Internet to activate. What was I supposed to do for two hours offline? Learn to knit? (But how!)

The big secret—don’t tell the cable guy—most nights do find T. and the cat and I flopped on our beleaguered, well-traveled couch griping about Jay Leno, and his show that now dominates one-third of our channel options. How can that idiot be so popular? How can any majorly-produced, “mainstream” program derive so much humor from seventh-grade homophobia, with so little remark? How does any respectable actor agree to appear on this circus of dog tricks and fake tans?

But, on Thursday nights we get 30 Rock.

I began peeling the layers of my Wal-Mart Halloween-aisle nail polish. This season’s first few episodes have taken up my material, invoking the divide of urban and rural, blue and red, the coasts and the heartland. At the end of the season opener, fictional New York network executive Jack (Alec Baldwin) leans in to glare at the home audience while reciting, “Give the people what they want,” as the show cuts directly to, yes, Jay Leno’s. What else does America want? Country, answers the blond star Jenna, donning white boots and vamping to the Monday Night Football theme.

In tonight’s episode, Jack and Liz (Tina Fey) drive south, leaving their urban island for a rural outpost in search of a new cast member to whom “the people” will respond. “There is no ‘real’ America,” Liz insists, directly countering a distinction drawn by Sarah Palin (as well as recalling Fey’s impersonation). Jack—the Republican, a romantic cynic, nostalgic for the good old days of the good old boys—maintains there is more heart in the heartland, and that it can be brought back to Manhattan for profit. Before they leave, his aide attaches a fake (lesser) label over the real label on the underside of his tie, effecting Jack’s “country” disguise.

The joke of the episode turns on Liz’s assertion coming true: the rural inhabitants of Stone Mountain are just as mean-spirited, foul-mouthed, and clubbish as the New Yorkers. “We’re all the same. We’re all Americans,” Liz taunts Jack.

Beyond the gore-splattered surgical masks tonight, I didn’t see much that was, truly, evidence of the one all-encompassing ugly American. An overheard exchange confusing a student dressed as a Geisha (yes, a Japanese figure) with “the real Chinese students,” referring to actual Asian International students, not Chinese (and who were dressed as monsters, and naughty nurses), would have stopped the heart of my Study-Abroad-Administrator sister. But I fear this is a mistake made often in New York too.

It’s always the lesson: it’s too easy to lump black and white—or, red and blue. This small town in Illiana is not interchangeable with any other; it’s not like the one where T. grew up, 200 miles away, and it’s not like the one I’m from, 300 miles further. One “heartland” town isn’t the same as any other, just as Seattle is not Houston, Boston not San Diego.

Tonight, hundreds of fellow citizens came out to a cornfield for free candy, for a family event with neighbors. This is in a community with a major chocolate brand as a major factory employer, with so many acres of that corn grown for snack chips. Less than a mile from the school, a state prison houses a population nearly one-third of the town's, and at night its tower lights glow over the corn like a moon. The clown shoes, bloody butcher aprons, and Disney princesses only fit amidst this weirdness.

I am told that when we give away groceries for holiday meals later in the year, the lines will stretch out the door.

But even as the categories, urban and rural, feint and dance from the claimed corners of their distinctions—in wealth, opportunity, power, values—they dissolve.

One of my students was giving away carved pumpkins—these from the garden, where two weeks ago I’d been on the team rescuing the last produce from the frost. A green, un-ripened pumpkin can be cut early and brought indoors to keep turning as long as its “intake” stem is put into a vat of water.

“I didn’t think you’d be in to that sort of thing,” he commented as I loaded my car with my prize.

A pumpkin? A community garden? Wearing a beehive wig (lilting to the left now) and black nail polish?

“Small children?” I joked as trick-or-treaters came and went. “Only once a year.”

The pumpkins he’d carved were beautiful, each with a panel cut away, flipped around, carved with a ghoul’s face, and re-inserted deep within the pumpkin. I’d never seen the trick before. He’d researched it online.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, embarrassed. Then, “it’s cool. Never mind.”

And we laughed. And went home, probably, to eat our same candy giveaways in front of the same TV shows.

Unless he has cable.