Much ado about bees

I don’t know how it worked in your house but here, during the run up to Halloween, we discussed something in the neighborhood of one million costumes.

In the early weeks, it started with things like, “I want to be a griffon.”

OK, fine. I’m pretty sure either Dana or I can make that, we decided.

Then a few hours later Emmeline switched to a dragon.

The next morning, it was robot. Then mermaid. Then hamburger.

“Do you mean like Mayor McCheese?” I asked, but the child only cocked her head quizzically to the side.

“Who’s Mayor McCheese?”

Though exasperating, I took pity on her indecision, having grown up wearing so many masks myself that I could have staged my very own version of Much Ado About Nothing. But isn’t that the magic of Halloween? People think they’re costumes, but I’m pretty sure any psychology 101 student would consider them portals, outward manifestations of both the freakishness and possibility within.

One of my favorite dress up games as a child involved little in the way of costumes but relied heavily on props.

I remember dashing around the suburbs with my mom’s pilfered makeup compact, pretending it was the Omni from Voyagers. If you’re not familiar with the afternoon television program, it basically involved time travel and the Omni — a gold-colored flip-open device — was the preferred method. Whenever I could get my hands on a compact, I tucked it into belt just like the main character, Phineas Bogg.

One afternoon, while trying to warp myself to pre-revolutionary France, a friend stopped me out on the front lawn and pointed a finger at Avon’s latest transforming blush.

“What are you doing with that?” he asked.

“Oh you know,” I shrugged, “Time travel.”

Then I flipped open the mirror, squeezed my eyes tight and disappeared into a cosmic wormhole. With style. And no visible signs of aging.

When I opened my eyes and saw my friend walking away, I assumed real time travelers didn’t have to listen to anyone laughing all the way home.

There were moments I so firmly believed I could travel through time if I could only find the right concealer that I’d often stomp home broken-hearted, tossing the compact on the living room coffee table.

“This one’s broken,” I’d announce, “And it does nothing at all for shine.”

Despite the continued and profound disappointment of remaining dimensionally inert no matter what help I enlisted from the likes of L’Oreal or Max Factor, I kept up the charade for years, toying with the idea of slipping on a new self now and then and taking endless, joyful, dangerous entertainment in the new adventures.

So when Emmeline went through a million Halloween costume ideas, I felt her pain. She didn’t choose her burden, agreeing to bear my genes within, and so I gave her a wide berth to reach a decision. But when she finally settled on dragon after spotting an adorable costume in a neighborhood prop shop, Dana raced over to order it before the child changed her mind again.

But of course the store didn’t have a dragon in her size and notified us that no one made an outfit like that for kids her size. At 3 and a half, she was trapped in the middle ground between infant plushy wear and child-sized quasi-erotica.

“Oh that’s OK,” she told us, unfazed, “I wanted to be a bee anyway. A queen bee.”

Dana stitched together a few yards of black and yellow fabric before making an adorable bubble dress, while I was put in charge of accessories: leggings, a scepter, crown and wings. A friend loaned us the perfect hat.

When the outfit was ready, we went to Golden Gate Park to romp through the meadows and fields of wild flowers. Watching her flit around, buzzing the flowers in search of her new people and calling regal commands to the wind, I couldn’t help but smile. Even with a costume on, it was as if I was getting a better look at her than I ever had before, and it made me wonder if she was beginning to feel the slim weight of endless possibility in the palm of her hand.