Today is Halloween. Four hundred thousand people will descend on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, beginning at around 5:30 or 6 pm. We live exactly four blocks from where all the merrymaking will take place, and traffic in front of our house promises to slow to a crawl by mid-afternoon. We’ll see all sorts of folks walking by as witches, warlocks, Draculas, Frankensteins, fairies, queens, princesses, babies, clowns, birds, devils, ghosts, and more. They will be green, red, blue, orange, yellow, purple, silver, gold, brown, black, magenta, and every shade in between. They will be laughing and drinking and filled with the Halloween spirit and some will even stop by to knock on our door for treats.

We won’t be home, of course, because we will also be headed down to the festivities. We usually leave our treats on the front porch next to a jack o’ lantern with a candle glowing inside.

I have to go up in just a minute and figure out some costume to throw together. Anything is better than nothing. The definition of dud is arriving at the big Weho Halloween fest in regular street clothes.

I am hoping I still have the orange wig from years past and that I can fit into my high school prom dress, which, believe it or not, is about the best Halloween costume ever. My mother seemed perfectly happy to send me off to prom in a dress with a purple turtleneck and a chiffon skirt with three horizontal rows of orange, yellow and lime green. Of course, I’ve lost the lime green belt somewhere along the way. I look as if I bought the dress specifically for Halloween. I guess I had a momentary lapse of sanity when I bought it. It didn’t help, though, that Mom was tired of shopping and deemed it “perfect!” Alas…who else still has their high school prom dress forty years later?

What happens down on Santa Monica? We just walk with the thousands of other revelers up and down the street, admiring the truly ingenious costumes that people didn’t just “throw on,” but rather spent days, weeks or months preparing. And those costumes are what makes it worth fighting the crowd to see.