Back in my prime, I celebrated ALL the drinking holidays such as Fourth of July, St. Patrick’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, Tuesday. As I got older I realized that I rarely have fun on the big nights. The clubs and streets are crowded and the people seem to think it’s a license to be particularly annoying. The worst holiday of all is New Year’s Eve, when establishments prey upon people’s high hopes for starting the new year with a bang in order to charge five times their usual prices. It’s almost always a disappointment. I’ve found that the best times are usually the ones that sort of happen by accident when good friends and too much alcohol happen to converge. The kind that end with a fall from a high speed shopping cart into a ditch (I should probably be embarrassed to admit that was just a few years ago. Road comics + crappy town + Jaeger shots= carting under the influence). So a while back I gave up on celebrating the party holidays- all except Halloween. You practically have to go out of your way to not enjoy Halloween. I mean, how can you be bored when having a conversation with Austin Powers and Sponge Bob No Pants?

For me, the great fun in Halloween is in creating a costume. Sure, they’re not designed as well as the ones I could buy but at least I always know nobody will be wearing the exact same costume. When choosing a character I usually try to work with what I’ve already got, such as my height and a fabulous pair of 4″ stilettos I couldn’t wear any other day of the year to be the Statue of Liberty. That was back when I was 5’10″ but now that I’ve shrunk 3/4″, I’d probably have to be France’s smaller version of it. As hard as it may be to believe, I actually sewed the dress and crown myself. Sewing is the only old-fashioned domestic duty I’m capable of. I can’t do a decent ironing job to save my life but I can sew.

I estimate that 60% of all female costumes include the word “slutty” in them: slutty nurse, slutty maid, slutty Little Red Riding Hood. On the night when we get to live out our fantasies in public we all just want to be big whores. I’ve done it myself with my slutty Mona Lisa working Sunset Boulevard. FYI, a half-smile does not a good hooker make.

Of the 40% of costumes that don’t include the word “slutty,” about half don’t do so because the outfit is inherently slutty looking: cheerleader, belly dancer, Paris Hilton. I’ve gone this route several times. Here’s one in which I dressed as a hula dancer in just a bikini top and grass skirt.

Another time I straightened my hair and used a temporary black dye job to be Elvira. Unfortunately my curly hair fell victim to Hawaii’s humidity and the look didn’t quite work. These are my two scariest Halloween pictures due to the fact that apparently I hadn’t been properly introduced to a pair of tweezers.

The next year I used the dye again to be Wonder Woman only this time, it never washed out. I rather liked myself with black hair, though one time a cab driver picked me up and when I entered he was snickering. I asked why and he said that because I was dressed all in black and I was bent over petting my black cat, I looked like a witch. Since it wasn’t Halloween, I’m pretty sure that cost him part of his tip.

That leaves about 20% of all female costumes that aren’t slutty. Those are the ones women wear to their workplace or they’re the ones designed to win costume contests. I’ve done both. One year I was waitressing at the Cat and Fiddle- a large, popular English restaurant/pub- and we had to dress according to the theme, which was “Goblins, fairies and creatures of the forest.” Pretty lame. I dressed as a fairy- namely our English chef John who was a major flamer. I walked around all night speaking with a British accent, hitting on all the lads, calling the other waitresses “saucy cows” and sipping wine- just like John. I think it was shortly thereafter that I got fired.

The costume I won a contest with was a cavewoman riding a dinosaur. The weirdest thing about this costume is that I happened to have the inflatable dinosaur lying around the house, though I have no idea why. Impulse buy perhaps. It was a fun costume but it was a bitch to move around in and I had to sit sideways.

Unfortunately, this year I didn’t plan ahead and had to recycle my Mona Lisa (a slightly more conservative version of it) but I just decided what I’m going to do next year: I’m going to use my freckles to be Lindsay Lohan’s future “E! True Hollywood Story.” I’ll design a box to look like a tv set that I’ll put around my face. Then I’ll have different sheets of paper over it depicting various events in her life, from her start as a fresh-faced young star through to her later career as a Hooter’s waitress who can’t even get a spot on “The Surreal Life.” That’s what I’ll be if I get my act together early enough to make the costume. Otherwise I’ll probably be a slutty Statue of Liberty.