Glibbertysmidgeon

Last night I went with a group of friends down to the Halloween parade. The parade starts in the East Village and ends not far from the office, on Sixth Avenue.

Melissa, Sarah, and I dressed as Josie and the pussycats. In tiger striped dresses and black kitty ears, we carried our plastic instruments and batted our fake eyelashes while I tried not to smudge my gold body glitter on Kris. He was a doctor, spanking fresh in new scrubs and a white lab coat. Ben was a crazy pharmacist, but really he was just a cute guy in a lab coat with Sudafed glued to it. Later, he took that lab coat off and danced in a tailored black shirt with a purple silk tie and silver vinyl pants. His tiny purple sunglasses packed a lot of attitude. Elbert dressed as himself.

The streets were so crowded that I once got wedged between an astronaut walking South on Sixth Ave and a giant grape standing on the street corner watching the parade. Only the width of my arm could fit through the gap, and Kris pulled, trying to save enough space around himself for me to fit in. Eventually, the astronaut stepped back and I burst through, laughing.

Fellas, if you’ve ever thought of dressing as a woman for Halloween don’t do it in New York. You can be assured; there will be hundreds who will do it better than you. Besides the seven foot Wonder Woman, the man in the wedding dress with tall orange, Marge Simpsonlike hair, the nurse, the roller disco queen, and the bodybuilder with fake breasts AND fake muscles, there was every sort of woman. Housewives and whores, French maids, nuns, and Barbies, were all out walking with their Adam’s apples ahead of them. Postured in their Jackie Kennedy pillbox hats, two prim sixties chicks waved their parade waves in long white gloves, tilting their chins with more poise than any ‘real’ woman I know.

There were lots of other good things to see, too. People stopped to photograph the world trade center as it passed, each tower wearing a pair of white wings and a halo. I liked the two people dressed as trees. Between them was strung a wash line sporting giant “grannie panties” and a polka dotted bra.

My favorite dance club is near the end of the parade route. Sarah and Mel decided not to go dancing with us because of their uncomfortable boots. My boots were painful, too, but I danced anyway. Surrounded by vampires and slaves, rock stars and rare birds, I discovered that I was rather ordinary. Every girl in the club was dressed as a cat. Kris, on the other hand, created a ripple effect wherever he went. Was it the crisp white jacket glowing under those black lights? Was it that crisp blonde, freshly cut hair? I tend to think it was the way his blue scrubs exactly matched the shade of his laughing eyes. Whatever the cause, he was propositioned at every corner.

“Doctor, can you take my temperature?”

A dark haired man grabbed him by the arm, and said, with unsettling intensity, “I love you, doctor!”

Caught in that same magnetic current, I circled Kris like a firefly. We danced the way I love to dance. Sometimes we were close but not quite touching, separated by the thinnest layer of body heat, our eyes locked together. Sometimes we were wild, bumping hips and spinning around with my hair flying out. Sometimes I sang.

And then there were those times when we stopped. Just for a pulse, for one beat of the music we froze. So close I inhaled his breath, in my mind, a picture of a kiss. And then we were moving apart, beginning to dance again, gently resuming our separateness.

Late in the evening a peacock was giving away his feathers. With my ostentatious quill, I wrote my name in imaginary ink on an exposed sliver of collarbone framed by blue scrubs.

Today my feet are swollen. They hardly fit in my shoes. Stray bits of glitter sparkle in my clean hair. Kris arrived at work with a single, tiny square of gold near the corner of his mouth. He told me he found some of that gold pixie dust in his shoe.