From Wide-eyed to Dystopian

Our family LOVES Halloween….well the three of us do and Jay plays along!

We agree on a theme, create our own home-made costumes, and as a family of introverts, we privately act out our roles before the traditional Halloween trick-or-treating festivities. Halloween in SoCal is amazing. You can wear your costume without a puffy parka or moon boots. Every home is elaborately decorated. The neighbors hold block parties. And some homes have walk-through themes for amazing photos, gatherings with friends, and a rest stop from chasing the kids to the next house. While that part of Halloween would be different this year, we were not going to let Halloween get “cancelled.” We could still have our family fun and create different Halloween festivities with friends. Nonetheless, this year’s theme was fittingly a sharp contrast with years prior. In the past our themes have been generally happy and cute: Metamorphosis, The Tortoise & The Hare, Mary Poppins, The Lion King, Creatures from the La Brea Tarpits, Rebel Women, The Greatest Showman, Greek Gods & Goddesses....The kids haven’t reached the morbid or gory phase of Halloween ideas (yet). But this year brought a mixture of costume magic juxtaposed with dystopian doom and gloom.

“Are you, are you, coming to the tree?”

To say 2020 has been dystopian is an understatement. We started the year hearing about the corona virus, watching other countries shut down and then ultimately, like a set of dominoes, shutting down ourselves on March 14, 2020. On the positive side we saw images of the smoggy skies clearing and empty highways. We caught up on some self-care, read, cooked, baked, made cloth masks, worked on our yard, played boardgames, tiled our floor with a gazillion puzzles, played ping-pong, praised our 2018 Peloton purchase, had zoom family reunions, college reunions, law school reunions, watched Hamilton on repeat, went to the beach, and went for family bike rides. We drove to Joshua Tree to spend an hour gazing at the Milky Way and drove right back singing our favorite songs until 1 a.m. We watched Instagram live concerts from the living rooms of John Legend, the Indigo Girls, and Coldplay trying to bring music and joy to their fans virtually.

“Strange things did happen here, no stranger would it be...”

Then, in May, the music stopped when we started watching armed protests with confederate flags in our home state of Michigan over a Governor’s effort to curb the virus. We saw posts from friends on Instagram protesting masks and YouTube videos of “Karen’s” spitting on essential workers.

“Where dead man called out, for his love to flee...”

We watched the horrific 8-minute death of George Floyd and all the protests that followed. We zoomed with a friend and learned that her family who was returning a casserole dish to a neighbor were followed by a vigilante father and his two sons with baseball bats, who thought this black family of four might be burglarizing the neighborhood, only to realize that the “burglars” were their own neighbors and classmates.

Amongst all of this July, we had to make hard decisions about “how” the kids should return to school.

They started in August, finding it hard to wake up but easy to roll out of bed and “be there.”

“Wear a necklace of hope side by side with me...”

In September, Xander made a hopeful return to school for two days a week, wearing a mask, creating his desk space with clear dividers and adapting to an underwhelming, but still valuable recess/snack break. Every drop-off for me felt like the first day of pre-school.

September ended with the mourning and ill-timed passing of my quiet hero, Ruth Bader Ginsberg. And then the already stressful political dystopia that has been our life since 2016 became even more anxiety provoking than it already was.

“If we met, at midnight, in the hanging tree...”

And then on October 26, for the first time in a long time, all four of us were in different locations. I had just dropped Xander off at school, but we had to close our eyes and avoid walking under trees because of dusty and gusty winds; Annika was at home in virtual school; and Jay in the operating room in Anaheim. That’s when Annika texted me that the elegant silver dollar eucalyptus tree in our front yard had been completely uprooted from the windstorm; and an emergency alert on my phone went off because the City of Irvine started evacuating homes from a brush fire, and the sky went completely grey. By the time Jay got home, we triple masked, packed the van with computers, memorabilia, important documents, and clothing, and drove to my parent’s house in San Diego.

Fortunately, the evacuation only lasted three days and we are home, safe and sound. But, seriously...no more disasters...please?

The real inspiration

But the global dystopia wasn’t the true inspiration for our Halloween theme however fitting it may be. During pandemic one of our preferred family bike rides was peaceful, but also a bit spooky. Before pandemic, we used to turn right from the trail behind our house and end up at Whole Foods for breakfast. Turning right takes you through a newly manicured resort-style-living apartment complex with swerving trails through mustard flowers and sidewalks paved with columns of palm trees. Turning left however takes you on the San Diego Creek Trail, a paved trail that takes you under dark echoing underpasses to a traffic-free path that feels...underground. It feels like District 12 landed in the middle of Irvine. Between both sides of the path is a zone of rubble, weeds and sand.

The trail and the times were reminding me of the trilogy so I started learning “The Hanging Tree” on the harp. Soon the kids added The Hunger Games trilogy to their reading marathon this summer and LOVED them! They literally finished the entire series in less than a week. We ended the summer watching the movies and....what better theme and costumes for our at-home, dystopian, 2020 Halloween than this? And what better photo location than the trail that inspired it all?

Annika’s uncut, gorgeous, thick hair was perfect for the Katniss role. I had a bunch of clothing in my closet that could easily be transformed into Katniss “before the games” and “after the games.” Jay already had an overgrown pandemic beard that would have been perfect for Snow, but we just couldn’t get it to be pure white. So we made a last minute adjustment and transformed him into Cinna, the costume designer. I still had the purple wig from our stint as The Greatest Showman to become Effie Trinkett before the revolution, and plenty of drab greys to be Effie during the revolution. Xander, who still refuses to be a “mere human” for Halloween was the only one who hadn’t chosen a costume. I didn’t have enough bandwidth to turn him into a mockingjay bird and he refused to be anything evil or bad, like a mutt. Finally, he decided he should be the actual book, which was appropriate since he had read over 70 books since March 14 and then he still dressed up as Beetee a.k.a. Volts, the inventor, too. He really wanted to make something and enjoyed re-creating the book cover and ultimately did his own face paint as well!

Getting into the many roles of the characters throughout the trilogy was the most fun for Annika and I. The eyelashes and hairstyles....need I say more?

Forcing Jay to participate is usually a worthy challenge, but I think he is starting to get into now too! And getting Xander to add a little bit of human to his overall look (and book) turned out with him applying his own face paint!

Let the Games Begin

The booK and Beetee the Inventor (with a little bit of Cinna around the eyes).

The book that started the obsession, and an effort to mimic the makeup of the original costume maker Cinna….but it was way too hard to turn this cutie into rugged Lenny Kravitz. He needed more than a little eyeliner and earrings; he needed a five o’clock shadow. But he pulled off Beetee pretty well instead!

Cinna the costume designer

Jay smoldered like Cinna or any fabulous male from the capital quite well. We even managed to pull his hair back into a ponytail!

Effie Trinkett always hoping the odds will be in your favor

And last, but not least, the face of the rebellion: Katniss Everdeen -

The mockingjay

The celebration

Instead of trick or treating, we decorated and carved pumpkins in the morning. Took photos in the afternoon. Annika’s friend hosted a backyard movie night featuring, quite randomly, The Hunger Games, and we ended the night attending a cookie and candy exchange party at Xander’s friends house. Despite the dystopia we had a wonderful and perhaps the most memorable Halloween of our lifetime and the kids were still able to celebrate with their closest friends and tons of sugar.

And I am going into November with my RBG “necklace of hope, side by side with you” to the polls, drop boxes, and volunteering on the hotlines. I am nervous but I am also “fired up, and ready to go!” Here’s to the hope that the pendulum swings back from dystopia to decency and dignity. May the odds be ever in our favor…in favor of history.

Homebound Halloween 2020: "May the odds be ever in your favor..."