I hate dressing up for Halloween. My feelings are grounded in two experiences that deemed Halloween costumes a definite no-no for me early on.

You see, Erin and I decided in junior high to dress up as a lamp and light socket. I have no idea from where this idea came but it ended in an interesting visual experience, nonetheless.

We put me in box, stuck a lampshade and a twice-gathered sheet on Erin and connected us with a spray painted dryer vent that looked like a cord. Erin, being as lively as she always was pulled on a pair of striped socks and her pink Converse All Stars. Thinking we were a shoo-in for first place, we stepped out of my grandma’s car in front of the junior high only to hear someone say, “Oh look, a robot and a potato!”

Now, imagine junior high; the cliques, the gossip, the desperation to be cool…and imagine us having to separate (as we had different classes) and each of us having to finish out the day, one as a potato with striped socks and lampshade on its head, the other as a robot with a long silver umbilical cord.

We never had dates again, not until high school. And even then our dates were nerds.

Several years later, after people had forgotten about the potato/robot thing, and whilst working as the blue light special girl at Kmart (that is another story I’m afraid), my coworker convinced me to participate in the Halloween festivities, reminding me how everyone else would be dressed up– that ‘do it for the team’ philosophy. Having few resources for purchasing a costume, I borrowed the only costume my mother had in her closet, which just so happened to be a chicken. Yes, you heard me right, a chicken.

On some instinctive level I must have known, but somehow ignored the fact that pretending to be chicken was preposterous. Nonetheless, I slid on that white felt body costume with randomly attached feathers, yellow elastic chicken feet, and a head cover with an orange beak that doubled as shade from the non existent Wyoming sun. In other words, I was exposing my face…a dangerous thing when dressed like a chicken in Wyoming. It’s an absolute wonder that some cowboy didn’t attempt to run over me with a lifted Ford pickup truck. Or worse yet, shoot me!

Oh wait…

I walked into Kmart that day and not only did no one else dress for the occasion, the first words I heard spoken were, “Is that an egg?” And because the women who work at Kmart are typically very bitter, especially toward younger folks who may actually make it out of Kmart (and perhaps even out of the trailer park eventually), I listened to them giggle and make fun of me for the entire day. When the mother of a friend of mine told me I had balls, I knew I was in serious trouble.

Pushing around a blue light as if desperately trying to attract attention to myself, “Hey look I am chicken—cluck, cluck”, I watched the snow move in and pile upon cars and parking lots and wondered if I would be stuck in a discount store dressed as a chicken for the remainder of my pathetic life. When the clock struck five I was all too relieved to walk out of the Kmart door and into the open space where no one (hopefully) would recognize me.

I almost made it.

But the weather had caused icy conditions, especially on bridges where the arch was known to freeze due the absence of ground below. This is where my chicken story gets really, really ugly….because my Hyundai Excel (yes my life sucked all the way around) got stuck in transit.

I was forced to stand in a chicken suit, yellow panty hose and all, on an overpass begging for help until a nice man with a loud laugh (do you blame him, really?) towed me to the other side. I often wonder how many times he has retold that story around shots of whiskey at the local bar.

I will forever be remembered as the hitchhiking chicken, you know the one that pushed the blue light around at Kmart. What was her name and why exactly did she cross the road anyway?