More Halloween Practice


Today Rhiannon and I went online after school to play dressup. Thirty years ago kids would play with their Barbies or make their own paper dolls and dress them up as only five-year-olds can (or 36-year-old men). Heck, this was true thirty days ago with Rhiannon. Until she discovered, somehow, that you have an almost infinite range of online dressup games. The site we go to has opened up a special Halloween section. And within that section is possibly the coolest Flash game I have ever seen. You can carve your own pumpkin with your mouse. And it looks real. It even sounds real. And thankfully the site was cool enough to spend a lot of time in it without Rhiannon getting bored or asking where the dresses were. As if pumpkins ever wear dresses. Well, maybe they do. In Pumpkinland. Which I think is next to Albania. Anyhoo, you can carve your own pumpkin here.

Rhiannon has been using my PC for years, but mostly for writing. William Burroughs helped pioneer the quasi-metaphysical field of "cut-ups", a kind of mash-up of art and letters which ultimately gave birth to Magnetic Poetry. With Rhiannon, she goes subatomic with her typing, and mixes things up at the letter level, going beyond words and completely destroying everything you think you know about modern orthography. The point to this segueway is to illustrate that she is not too handy with the mouse. She knows it's a pointer. But she is still a little mystified by the click-and-drag phenomenon.

With the pumpkin carving, she finally got the hang of making holes in the pumpkin, or slashing it. I can only imagine a clan of miniature pumpkins watching in horror on the other side of the screen as Rhiannon slashed indiscriminately into the thick skin, right into the pulp, with dramatic hacks, creating horrible voids that looked neither human nor monster. She's kind of Japanese that way, in that the horror she created transcends convention into the unknown and aggressive that is truly freaky. After taking a few stabs at pumpkins (pun intended), she came up with the above result, declaring mission accomplished.

Here's my best attempt:


It looks like me after taking yet another I.T. call from the office.

After pumpkins, we explored some other dress-up sites, including this one in which you can dress up a zombie or a mummy or a werewolf. It's called, erm, Pimp My Zombie. As soon as the splashpage came up, Rhiannon screamed.

"NO DAD NO! NOT THIS ONE! IT'S TOO SCARY!!!"

I wanted to tell her that what she did to those pumpkins makes me want to be a VERY good dad to here for the rest of our days and to recommend, say working as a publisher instead of as a surgeon.

We left the screen and ended up somehow dressing goth girls in 1920's outfits replete with wings and hobnail boots, floorlength dresses, and tiny hats with flowers on them. This calmed her down and I'm sure is giving her ideas. All kinds of ideas. Which is good actually. As long as she doesn't dye her beautiful, blond hair. Unless of course it's for Halloween.

Rhiannon. Eerily cute.

Andrew (Papa)