Night of a Thousand Cliches

I love Halloween. I love the costumes and the lights and the gorey-bloody decorations (not so much the cutesy ones–I want bones and spiders and eyeballs and intestines). And I love Halloween parties. So every year we have a themed costume party: This year the theme was “Night of a Thousand Cliches.”

The trick to a good theme is that it has to have multiple interpretations. (Can you tell I was an English major?)  So “cliche” could mean a person who’s degenerated to the level of a cliche, it could mean a phrase that’s cliche, or, really, it could mean a costume that’s a cliche.

I was an evil stepmother (excellent black wig with dramatic white stripes–think Disney.) My husband was Stars Fell on Alabama. We had The Death of Print, a golden parachute, a brown noser, a pregnant pause (an actual pregnant woman, which adds bonus points), a right wing nut, a devil’s advocate, Lindsay Lohan, Elvis, cold as a witch’s tit, hung like a horse, cloak and dagger, blind as a bat, a knight in shining armor, a sexy cat, and a doctor. I’m definitely forgetting some. But, let me just say, our friends rock. They manage to rise to the costume challenge every year.

On a side note, and not to sound like an 80-year-old woman (see my post on Murder She Wrote and Matlock), but when did people stop RSVPing to invitations? It’s not a huge deal, and I completely understand if people say “maybe.” As in, we don’t know about a babysitter, but we’ll try to come. Fair enough. But it’s crazy to me how many people never reply one way or the other. By Saturday afternoon, with the party in a few hours, I had no idea whether we’d have a dozen people or 30 people. Any number in between there seemed equally likely. (We had somewhere around 20 to 25.) I would like to blame this lack of personal contact and responsibility on the Internet and Facebook, but I haven’t figured out how.

On the up side, two of our friends not only alway RSVP, but always follow up with a thank-you the day after the party. They are rock stars of thoughtfulness. That’s a habit that I think is getting rarer and rarer–Lord knows I forget to do it half the time–but it’s so incredibly charming.