Halloween brings out the best and worst

So tell me: Why was the skeleton afraid to cross the road?

I must have used this joke at least 30 times each year to get my precious, long-awaited candy. Nearly every person who opened their doors demanded a joke before allowing me a handful of sweets and, loving the sudden spotlight as a comedian, I happily obliged. With every doorbell, it was a broken record: Why was the skeleton afraid to cross the road?

It had no guts!

Halloween is a time for cavities, pumpkin carving and elaborate costumes, but, even more so than any of these things, it is a time for newfound confidence. There’s just something about hiding behind a mask, donning a disguise or fitting into spandex that restacks the nerves in one’s spine. Pretending that you are somebody else? Instant confidence-booster.

Halloween costumes represent a number of things. Sometimes, they’re simply original and witty ideas crafted into reality. Sometimes, they are created only to incite incredulous shock and subsequent giggles. I have found that the majority of the time, however, they are projections — images of personas that people either secretly identify with or wish they could identify with.

It all began when we were first introduced to the art of trick or treating. The true conceptualization of Halloween costumes can only begin with careful thought and deliberate choice. When we were younger, Halloween costumes were treated like prom dresses — even though you bought it off the shelf at a local store, you still expected it to be the only one of its kind that night. We were a collection of Disney princesses, Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

We wanted to be unique and yet, at the same time, we wanted to transform into the very role models that our entire generation loved and adored.

Kids will act differently on Halloween than they do without the masks and costumes. Case in point: I was probably the most timid little girl you would have ever met. Blame it on my acquisition of English as a second language or the fact that I entered the first day of my new elementary school with chicken pox scars and never managed to detach myself from embarrassing nicknames, but I was never the first to speak — and I certainly would never deliberately crack a joke with a stranger. But as the Yellow Power Ranger? Oh, I was no longer the scar-ridden little girl I saw in the mirror — I was powerful, vivacious and, if I could save the world with one karate chop, I could certainly deliver a cheesy punch line.

Now that we have grown older, little has changed. We still act differently on Halloween than on any other typical day: We raise our hems a few inches, bare our cleavage for the world to see and overindulge in candy that comes in red plastic cups. I have seen shy, hesitant girls dressed as Batman’s feline foe unabashedly shake their booty on the dance floor (Catwoman, after all, is a jungle cat filled with flexible prowess).

I have also seen really nice guys, overwhelmed by the flashing skirts surrounding them, lose all sense of chivalry and dignity. Some people may criticize Halloween as a night of slutty debauchery, but I disagree. It’s simply a night for people to unwind, unleash and let the disguises reveal hidden facets of their personality.

But there’s a catch I find in all of these costumed revelations. Sure, kids and college students break out of their shells on the night that ghosts and werewolves roam the streets — but is this confidence in any way tangible or durable? I repeatedly perfected a punch line to stranger after stranger but, at every house, could never bring myself to knock on the door itself.

I similarly see fellow students throw their inhibitions and self-consciousness to the winds — but, in order to do so, they crawl into costumes that are saturated with the very inhibitions and self-consciousness they hope to ignore.

So yes, Halloween is a night (and sometimes a morning after) of crazy adventures spotlighting other secret, hidden parts of your soul begging to make its mark on the world.

But, when it comes down to it, where are the guts? Bared proudly in a costume or hidden somewhere beneath that spandex, shielded and dismissed from view?

We’ve all heard it a thousand times, but tell it to me again: Why was the skeleton afraid to cross the road?

Tiffany Yang is a junior majoring in comparative literature.

Her column, “Alphabet Soup,” runs Wednesdays.