Happy Halloweiner

Halloween, New York City, Greenwich Village. You'll have to see it to believe it. And you can see it. All of it. Any of it that you want, because Halloween is All Sluts Eve. Drag queens with no pants, straight women playing out the risque version of every fairytale, woodland or otherwise affiliated creature known to man (or she-man) come out of the brickwork and literally parade up Sixth Avenue.

I had to think though, while watching the exhibition, that it wasn't that far off from the everyday. It seems that each of us in NY, including me, is a bigger-than-life version of what we want to be or who we think we are. The village has its year-round parade of the out and proud, midtown has it's stilettos & Prada and the "starving artists" in Brooklyn want to starve just a little bit more than the artists in, say, Seattle. The 'greatest city on earth' seems to inspire us all to be greater or lesser, richer or poorer, straighter or gayer than the rest of the world. We all want to shroud ourselves in the label of what we want to be, regardless of where we came from or what's underneath. Each of us has something to prove, sometimes to our parents, our bosses, our siblings, but always, always to ourselves.

One of the float emcees last night, in sequins and headdress, screamed out "If you're not in costume, you don't belong in New York City!"

How true.


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