“Who’s Slash?”: Listeners – and Nancy – share stories of their memorable Gen X Halloweens past, from decidedly non-sexy costume strategies, to 7th graders on the cusp, to home bat invasions.

• The Perfect Cocktails for Your Perimenopause Party  by Wendi Aarons, Gloria Fallon, and Marilyn Naron

Happy Halloween, you grown up goths.

Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 107 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on October 19, 2021. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email [email protected] ***

Wendi Aarons 00:00

We learned our lesson that is probably not a great idea to dress like a ‘60s burnout named Touch Me Don’t Touch Me when we’re trying to get some action at a fraternity party.

00:11

Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one.

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

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[MUSIC]

Nancy 02.58

Hi there and welcome to this special Halloween Edition of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho, your host, the creator of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast and the author of the book, The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time. Midlife Halloween has its own kind of terror because what is scarier than waking up and seeing your own parents looking back at you from the mirror? It’s absolutely terrifying.

So I put out a call on social media and the blog for your GenX Halloween stories. My theory was that GenX never took itself too seriously and would have some fun with the prompt – as exemplified by the story Erin sent in:

She wrote,

My most unsexy costume was when I dressed as a porta-potty for my department’s Halloween group theme. We were a bunch of Austin City Limits Music Festival survivors. This contest was during the early 00s, so the fest wasn’t quite the well-oiled machine it is today. The costume consisted of many large boxes and a halved broom handle stuck in the middle that I could hold onto to carry that sucker while inside. There was also tons of blue paint and two eyeholes. My porta-potty addition didn’t secure the gold. We came in second place to the Beetlejuice folks. But heck, they deserved it.

As someone whose favorite all time Halloween costume was the mailbox my dad built me out of cardboard when I was in 5th grade, I totally respect the Porta Potty game Erin is playing here. By the way, the mailbox design was perfect for late October in Upstate NY because you could put your park on underneath it, and it included a curved top that repelled water in case it jumped above 32 degrees on Halloween night. Which wasn’t often.

Because – you guys know this – back then most of us weren’t so worried about being Sexy Nurse or Sexy Ladybug or Sexy PortaPotty. Here’s Susan Rietano Davey, the career reentry expert and one of the co-founders of Prepare to Launch U who I interviewed back in Episode 47:

Susan Rietano Davey 03:10

Hi Nancy – It’s Susan here in Connecticut, and I’m calling in with my Halloween story. When I was a freshman in high school about 40 years ago, I was desperate to become cool. And my dear friend Karen was much closer to that than I. So through her, we got an invitation to Ellen’s the Halloween party.

Now Ellen was a junior, and the coolest of cool, the top of the heap. And we were so excited to knock her socks off with great Halloween costumes. So we rummaged through Karen’s father’s closet – he was an Army veteran – and we found two perfectly intact army uniforms. So that’s what we dressed up as. And we pulled our hair back severely and we greased it down so it stay under the hats and we even painted bushy mustaches and bushy eyebrows on each other.

We showed up on Halloween night at Ellen’s house and we rang the doorbell. She answered it dressed as Scarlett O’Hara. And as we entered her foyer, we saw that all of Ellen’s cool, beautiful friends were dressed as Cinderella, or Snow White, or Charlie’s Angels, and there we were, as two infantry men.

Suffice it to say we did not advance our coolness that night. We were never invited back to Ellen’s future parties, but we cemented our friendship that night for sure. And it has lasted all these years later.

Nancy 04:30

Was there something in the water for people who would eventually grow up to become Midlife Mixtape listeners? Humor writer Wendi Aarons definitely got the non-sexy memo.

Wendi Aarons 04:38

Hi, this is Wendi Aarons and my favorite Halloween memory is from freshman year of college at University of Oregon.

My best friend Megan and I were looking for a costume to go to one of the fraternity parties. Those are the big bashes and we were so excited, because it was our first time being at what we thought was a real adult party. We talked and talked about what costume we should wear and finally landed on something that was very genius:  dressing up like one of the guys who got to Eugene, Oregon, sometime in the ‘70s by following the Grateful Dead, and never left. He just sat on a bench on campus and yelled  “Touch Me Don’t Touch Me.” So we thought it’d be a great idea to dress up like Touch Me Don’t Touch Me.

We went to Goodwill and just bought a whole bunch of random giant shirts and pants. And we dressed in those and then we dressed in everything that our dorm mates would give us. And basically we looked like that episode of Friends where Joey puts on all of Chandler’s clothes and walks around. We were like sumo wrestlers or something.

So we get to the fraternity party and quickly realized that we didn’t get the memo that everybody else did. All the other girls were Sexy Something – not to the extent they are now, where you have, like, a Sexy Tooth Cavity. But everybody was Sexy Kitten or Sexy Genie Dancer or Sexy what have you. And here we roll in, dressed in approximately 500 layers of clothing and sweating our little butts off. And then we actually stood there and were surprised that not even any of the horny fraternity guys would come up and talk to us; we were that repellent.

So the next year we took off a few more layers. We never quite got down to the sexy costume level. Bu...