Unleashing My Minions

Day one of Halloween is in the books. When it comes to doing the holiday right, we’re getting better, by which I mean lazier. Saturday was our first time trying on our costumes as a group and our first public appearance with them. With just days to go until trick-or-treating, it was a little late in the game to be field testing our outfits. Even with expedited shipping, if something didn’t fit right, there wasn’t time to replace it. The only way to avoid that risk would have been to plan ahead, which definitely wasn’t in my wheelhouse. Consequently, I don’t know what a wheelhouse is or why putting intangible skills in that physical space implies a level of aptitude. Maybe the workers who ran the water wheel goofed off all day, which gave them time to develop other talents when they should have been working. That also might explain why water wheel workers had such a high rate of accidents. Perhaps what “within my wheelhouse” actually means is that something is likely to make you lose an arm or leg in a catastrophic water wheel control room accident. I could have skipped this entire paragraph by taking literally two seconds to Google the phrase, yet here I am spreading speculative misinformation on the internet instead. If that doesn’t sum up my role in the world as a comedy writer, I don’t know what does. Anyway, we are talking about Halloween or something.

Trick-or-treating doesn’t kick off until October 31st, which is Tuesday. The weekday placement of such an important holiday is a tragedy every bit as great as losing a limb at the water wheel. (That’s my last wheelhouse reference. I swear.) That made Saturday Halloween Eve Eve Eve. I think I got the right number of eves in there. Tuesday might be the official occasion, but the serious partying kicked off over the weekend. Naturally, we headed to the nursing home. You might think college kids go the hardest at Halloween, but they just wear revealing costumes and throw up in some bushes. That’s like a roller coaster ride at Disney World. It might seem dangerous and exciting while you’re going through it, but when it’s over, you realize you were safely on the rails the whole time.

Nursing home parties are on the opposite end of the spectrum. Everyone is fully clothed and no one is drinking, but someone could drop dead at literally any moment. You don’t need a blood alcohol level of 1.0 to have fun when even walking from your bed to the toilet carries the risk of a fatal accident. My wife’s grandpa recently moved into a nursing home not far from our house. The Halloween party there is kind of a big deal. What grandparent doesn’t want to show off their grandkids in cute costumes? It’s the ultimate old person flex. We did our part to increase Lola’s grandpa’s street cred. We loaded up in our van in full Halloween costumes for our short trip to his new home. The kids were minions, I was Gru, and my wife was the lady spy in a trench coat from one of the movies. I don’t know which film, but my kids have them all memorized, mainly because most of the dialogue is just one of the minions shouting, “Banana!” That definitely didn’t get old on the car ride there. The kids’ costumes were basically pajama onesies printed to look like Twinkies dressed in goggles and overalls. The sizing information on Amazon was less than helpful. Instead of small, medium and large, everything was just size human. My kids are humans—allegedly—so I figured the costumes would mostly fit. They were a little big for our younger kids, but they all came with the right number of arm and leg holes. That’s because none of our children have lost a limb in a water wheel accident. (Okay, that’s seriously my last wheelhouse mention. It’s not my fault these references are flowing like water over an unnamed circular wooden device.) After a few modifications with safety pins, we were good to go. Jeff Bezos had come through again. He might represent every evil that capitalism has inflicted upon the world, but he sure does make costume shopping quick and easy—or at least he did before he tried to poison me.

Unlike the minions, which are little yellow monster things, Gru is just a guy. He wears a black coat and a scarf. I already owned one of those things. I bought some black duct tape to cover over the logos on my jacket and I was halfway there. I just needed a gray and black neck warmer. Fortunately, Amazon had those, too. The one I picked came with a bald cap and giant nose. When I tried them on ten seconds before we needed to head to the nursing home Halloween party, I looked awful. That’s just how my face appears normally and had nothing to do with the costume. I didn’t bear any resemblance to Gru, though. Thanks to the cheap, badly stretched bald cap and oddly oversized nose, I looked more like a thirtysomething Pinocchio who was about to rob a bank. Still, I intended to wear both accessories because I paid for them. The sunk cost fallacy isn’t a fallacy; it’s a way of life. Lola put a stop to that. Her lady spy costume consisted of a teal dress and trench coat, both of which she successfully thrifted. The two pieces combined to make her look exactly like the character she was supposed to be. Even incognito as an undercover agent, she didn’t want to be seen in public with the bald cap fake nose version of me. I was limited to just the scarf and black coat. I tossed the bald cap and nose in the van just in case she changed her mind on the way to the nursing home. Two hours later, when we left the nursing home, the entire vehicle was filled with an awful chemical smell. The rubber bald cap was actually just a bunch of poisons mixed together and poured into a mold. Lola might have saved my life by not letting me wear it. Regardless, I still would have put it on if she looked away. That cost wasn’t getting any less sunk.

The main purpose of family pictures is to show that, while the children are getting taller than Lola, I continue to tower over them all.

The nursing home party was every bit as wild as I anticipated. It had a campfire for making s’mores, a bunch of games for kids, and hot apple cider with the option to mix in fireball whiskey if you were having an extra hard time dealing with your elderly relatives. My brother-in-law, Jerry, met us there with his wife Alice and their kid. He was wearing an inflatable panda costume that made him take up a huge amount of space while also cutting off his peripheral vision. His bumbling movements were a delight to all as long as you weren’t an octogenarian in danger of breaking a hip. He nearly demolished every old person there completely by accident. He was one false move away from having a CNA pop his costume for the public good. Meanwhile, my kids ran around claiming candy and cheating at all the games, which didn’t have anyone to run them and operated under the honor system. It was too much to expect them to be honest. Gru and his minions are a criminal enterprise. Of course my kids were going to get those precious plastic spider rings by any means necessary.

At some point, Jerry acquired part of his daughter's Mandalorian costume to become a double threat to the elderly.

Our next stop was our suburb’s trunk-or-treat event. There’s usually lots of candy to be had, but there’s also thousands of people to fight through. If you get there late, your odds of getting that last Tootsie Roll or about as good as your chances of landing tickets to see Taylor Swift. The only way to acquire them now is to rob someone who has them. We arrived the exact minute the trunk-or-treat started and made quick progress through the first two dozen cars. Then everybody else got there. The biggest problem with every holiday is other people. My kids reacted with an unexpected level of emotional maturity. I asked them if we could just leave. Shockingly, they agreed. As recently as last year, they would have made us stay an extra hour if it meant getting one more sucker. This year, they were instantly ready to throw in the towel. Their lack of grit is truly admirable. I’m rubbing off on them.

Then again, perhaps they were just doing cold, hard candy math. We detoured to another trunk-or-treat at our church a few blocks away that had a smaller crowd. The kids quickly got more candy than they would have gathered in two hours at the city’s event. The girls also had Tuesday’s massive candy hall to look forward to. In previous years, only my oldest two daughters stayed with me the whole time for official trick-or-treating. This time, my nine-year-old, Lucy, also wants to stick it out to the end. Given all that, they were willing to cut their losses now for maximum gain later. Halloween is all about resource optimization in the pursuit of candy profits. Supreme capitalist Bezos remained an inspiration to my children, one attempted poisoning of their father not withstanding.

On the walk back from the church’s trunk-or-treat, I ordered pizza. Starbursts go great with a side of cheese and pepperoni. I had to keep the energy high because our Halloween Eve Eve Eve festivities were just getting started. We still had thirty pumpkins to carve. I happened to be at Walmart earlier that day when the store dropped the price per pumpkin from nearly four dollars down to one. The store figured that, three days from Halloween, no sane person would want pumpkins since there wasn’t time left to carve them. Challenge accepted. I bought three cart-loads of pumpkins and strategically positioned them on my front porch, where they waited until after dinner. As soon as my kids had finished their highly nutritious pizza and candy dinner, I brought in the gourds. I gutted the pumpkins while the girls carved faces. I even recruited some reinforcements. Jerry, his daughter, and the family who lives next door to him parked at our house for the same trunk-or-treat event we abandoned earlier. Unlike us, they stuck it out to the end. As they walked back to their cars, I instead invited them inside to help us carve pumpkins. Jerry mistakenly thought I was kindly including him in our family crafts time rather than drafting him and his crew for unskilled assembly line labor. Together, we gutted thirty pumpkins and carved twenty. I left the last ten for Sunday. The cashier at Walmart had asked how I would possibly have time to carve all the pumpkins before Halloween. She failed to understand that enlisting everyone I come in contact with was very much in my house that has a round device that may or may not crush people’s hands if they’re not paying attention. This year is shaping up to be another successful Halloween and we haven’t even gotten to the big night yet. When we do, all approaching trick-or-treaters will be blinded by a wall of pumpkins filled with LEDs. I want passersby to have to wear sunglasses for their own protection.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James