by Michael Frissore

Created on: October 08, 2009

If you're an adult trying to decide what to dress up as for Halloween this year, I think I can be a tremendous help to you. What you can do is grab your car keys, get into your automobile and drive to the nearest mental institution. Because dressing up is for children.

I don't dress up because I'm an adult. And I also do not costume well. Admittedly, I look like a complete fool in anything other than a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. So costumes have always been a disaster for me.

I was but a mere boy of 10 or 11 when my mother, God love her, attempted to dress me up as one of the members of Satan's favorite band, Kiss. I was to be Paul Stanley. The Star Child.

A costume should be all or nothing, and that was Mother's mistake. I was trying to look like Paul Stanley, but only ended up looking like a drag queen. And not a very stylish one. Picture a bushy haired Italian boy in Kiss makeup (Mother was always fantastic at Kiss makeup) wearing old lady jewelry and a horrific blouse over a Tampa Bay Buccaneers sweatshirt. Our neighbors should have called Child Protective Services instead of humoring me and giving me candy that would only turn me into the fat adult I would become.

As if this humiliating costume wasn't enough, on my trick or treating route I ran into my grade school tormentors, who, despite my ugly get-up, recognized me and began calling me Fonzie just as they did at school. Mind you, the character Fonzie was cool and got lots of girls. If you ask me I was anything but Fonzie. But that's another story.

The following year wasn't much better. I chose to dress up as my hero, pro wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper. Again, my mother, who meant well, made me a Hot Rod T-shirt, the kind Piper always wore on television and in the wrestling magazines I collected. But it looked nothing like the shirt Roddy wore. It was just a Fruit of the Loom undershirt with the words Hot Rod scribbled in yellow Magic Marker. And, of course, it was freezing out in New England in the fall so I had to wear a gray sweatshirt underneath, which was even less cool.

Then came the kilt. Where does an American family in the 80s get a kilt? But we did have an afghan that had relatively the same pattern that a kilt does. So my mom wrapped that thing around my waist. Over, of course, the pair of navy blue sweatpants I wore so as not to catch my death of cold. Oh, Rowdy Roddy Piper I was not. I looked ridiculous.

These experiences scarred me so that I went twenty years before I dressed up on Halloween again. I hate Halloween parties, but I went to this one dressed as a ninja.

Sounds cool, right? Well, first of all - I was a ninja with glasses. That's right. Sensei Four Eyes. We wouldn't want a near-sighted ninja running around bumping into things.

Secondly, what ninja has my pudgy little pot belly? I was a disgrace. I looked like the Great Kabuki at age 50, to use a wrestling reference that absolutely no one reading this will get.

There was a 10-year-old boy also in a ninja costume who looked 100 times cooler than I did. The kid was jealous of my plastic throwing star. I gave it to him after I cut myself on it twice.

So costumes stink. Halloween stinks. Go to the store and buy some candy.

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