I admit I’m pretty stressed. I’m not concerned about midterms or keeping up with my schedule…. I admit I’m pretty stressed. I’m not concerned about midterms or keeping up with my schedule. Instead, I’m worried I will have to produce a visual testimony to my capacity for cleverness, by which all my peers will judge my sense of humor and possibly label me for life.

I need a Halloween costume.

Halloween offers a great opportunity to slip out of our regular ways. We can put on a new personality, pretend to be the person we’ve always wanted to be, or just wear the clothing styles we love but are normally too ashamed to admit it.

At the same time, a bad Halloween costume will be a mark of shame. Everyone you meet that night can instantly judge you, and a bad costume can quickly become an irrevocable mark of shame.

You’d better choose wisely.

I’m not a big Halloween fan, perhaps because I have a long history of failed Halloween costumes.

When I was really young, my older brother decided to be Orko, the red-robed wizard of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.” My mom put in many hours working on the costume and I guess I was caught up in the excitement because I wanted a costume, too.

Worn out and tired, my mom got creative with me. Giving me one of my father’s undershirts that came down to my feet and an old straw hat, she told me I was Orko, too.

Fortunately, 2-year-olds don’t have a great sense of absurdity. I was delighted to be like my big brother and I made out very well in the candy department. I’ve never been above enjoying the benefits of pity.

Several years later I wanted to be a witch, but, unfortunately, my costume supply was limited to a floppy black hat. No problem for Mom, though. She pulled out an old print dress left over from her flower child days and instructed me to carry a small “happy birthday” balloon attached to a stick, which I received a few weeks earlier.

I guess my 6-year-old sense of reality improved slightly from my “Orko” days, because I raised the point that, aside from the black hat, I more resembled a homeless flower lady than a witch. Always the sharp one, my mom explained that I was Glenda, the good witch from the North.

I got a lot of pity candy on that one, too.

I shouldn’t make it sound like all of my Halloween experiences sucked. Mom made awesome dinosaur costumes for my brother and me one year. I was proud enough to keep wearing it on occasion all the way through middle school, though I never understood why I didn’t seem to attract many boys back then.

The final blow to Halloween came my freshman year of high school. Sense of absurdity firmly established, I convinced several friends that we should be communist philosophers and dictators. To the assembly of Karl Marx, Josef Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, we added democratic bastion Winston Churchill and a Klingon for good measure.

For once, my pity ploy backfired. Most adults gave us befuddled looks through their screen doors, and several actually told us we didn’t deserve candy. At one point during the evening, after hearing our list of characters, a confused teen-ager shook her head and responded, “I’m sorry I don’t know those names. I’m not from around here.”

Maybe I would have grown out of Halloween at the same age anyway, but my final experience has kept me away from Halloween costumes ever since. This year, I’m ready to suck it up and enter the costumed crowd once again. I’m scared and completely uninspired, but I have faith that the perfect idea will come to me.

If not, I can always go as Orko.

Columnist J. Elizabeth Strohm is terrified of resorting to her mom for costume ideas. E-mail her at [email protected].