I don't know just when this happened, but Halloween has been taken over by adults.
Having declared it too unsafe and/or pagan for kids, adults have snatched the holiday away like taking candy from a ... yeah.
Exactly.
If you're unconvinced, go into any department store and look at the costumes. You'll see some for the small fry, sure, but there's also a rack of large sizes, and they're not just for big kids. These are "adult-themed" costumes and the big trend, pun intended, is the "fat suit."
On Halloween, for somewhere between $45 and $50, you can be somebody fat! You can be a fat gangster, a fat Dracula, a fat slob, a fat biker chick or (and this is what really hurts) a fat sex kitten named "Baby Doll Betty" wearing a sheer nightie trimmed in feathers over a big padded, lumpy body.
My questions: 1) Why on earth would I want to masquerade in a "fat suit" when I have spent years trying to escape from the one attached to the bottom of my neck and 2) What if NOBODY NOTICES? Talk about your Halloween horror!
This fat stuff started with that Austin Powers movie and its "Fat Bastard" character whose huge Scottish Highlander costume debuted a few Halloweens ago. Fat Bastard isn't just another padded body, though; he's a deluxe costume that comes with an inflatable suit and inflating "device" that looks like another potential horror to me. What if you inflate your body and somebody sticks a pin in you? Will you thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip around the ceiling until you run out of air and then fall behind the desk in a shroud of deflated, rubbery plastic? Or will you just slowly lose pressure throughout the day?
Didn't Halloween seem a lot more wholesome when it was little kids dressing up like Fairy Princesses and Power Rangers and even witches, ghosts and goblins? Now you've got adults, many of them wearing multiple fat suits, bumping around in each others' personal spaces while pretending to be triple-X-sized versions of Batman, Britney Spears or a Playboy bunny. With a growing percentage of Americans becoming obese every year, I'm not so sure it's funny.
Then again, we Americans have a great sense of humor and a delightful habit of poking fun at ourselves. Maybe this is just a new twist.
We've had skeletons at Halloween for years; the fat suit may be just its opposite.
I don't know about you, but I won't be celebrating the holiday in a "sizable" way this year. I'll just be wearing my old wash-and-wear fat suit with some kind of modest covering.
I just hope when I get to work no one says, "Nice costume. I see you went for the big look. Is it hot in there?"
Reach Betty Werth at bwestrope@hotmail.com
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