On Gender Reassignment and Halloween
/Sometimes the subjects of these blogs fit into a neat little headline. Like last week’s for instance. One comic was about filling your car up at gas stations and another about trains, so the title “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” came naturally (even though there wasn’t anything about planes). But, sometimes the two comics have absolutely nothing in common and so I am forced to go with the more prosaic, “On Gender Reassignment and Halloween.” If you readers have any suggestions for a more pithy title, send them in.
Let’s start with Halloween, even though the comic is only remotely about Halloween. I live in Tarrytown, NY, and right across the street is North Tarrytown, which has been renamed Sleepy Hollow. If there was ever a place that went absolutely nuts for Halloween, this is it. Washington Irving, who wrote the Legend of Sleepy Hollow (the one with the headless horseman) has the next town over named for him, Irvington. They have haunted hayrides with high school students dressed up as ghosts and witches who pop out from behind trees and scare the bejesus out of the little kids on the hayride. I have a couple questions here. 1) why is that considered fun and 2) what does bejesus mean? Anyway, suffice it to say that this corner of Westchester County takes its Halloween seriously. Having said that, my wife and I moved to an apartment building 6 years ago with mostly empty nesters so there’s almost no trick or treating involved, and no need to dress up like a haunted figure to answer the door, because no kids are showing up in the first place. But this comic was really about crass commercialism. There are stores (remember stores, they were those buildings with signs in front before Amazon took over?) that cater to one holiday season at a time. There are Christmas stores, Summer stores (patio furniture and beach chairs, etc.) and Halloween stores. But the funny thing is these places run out of costumes or Christmas trees or decorations or deck chairs long before the season they are meant to serve. I mean, who even thinks about Halloween decorations in September? Apparently a lot of people, because when (if you are like us) you finally get around to shopping for Halloween, everything is gone and the store is loaded with Christmas decorations. In October! John and I had a discussion about the clerk at the store, whether he should say we ran out of Halloween stuff after Labor Day or should we say after Columbus Day. Columbus Day won because it was more believable.
Then there was the comic we called Gender Bender. Now everytime we broach a controversial subject we tread carefully, not wanting to offend anybody. But let’s face it, that’s pretty damn impossible. When we were putting this one together, we focused not on the gender reassignment surgery, but rather on Marv’s uncomfortable reaction to it. Our guess is that would be pretty typical amongst people in our particular age group. But who are we to judge? In this case, it turned on the lie everybody says when they run into someone they haven’t seen in many decades…”You haven’t changed a bit.” Doesn’t matter if they put on an extra 100 pounds, had hair plugs, silicone boobs, lap-band surgery or even if they changed sexes, we all say the same thing. But face it, everybody changes. Except for John and me who still have all our hair, which miraculously hasn’t turned grey, all our height and all our physical strength. We haven’t changed a bit. Except for, well…everything.
That’s all folks for this week. Have a great weekend and we will see you next week with two new ones.
Andy and John