Pumpkins, not melons!

So it went a little something like this.

A bright muse named Basegirl says to me, "Can you explain something to me? Maybe this makes me old, but I do not understand when Halloween went from 'semi-holiday where people dress up as superheroes and dead presidents' to 'day which makes it okay for women to wear lingerie in public and act like drunken sluts.' I'm old, aren't I?"

I would editorialize my response but it just reads better on its own, without pulling any punches.

-> It's not an old thing. It's a slutification of America thing.

It started on college campuses at a dozen-thousand Halloween themed frat house parties. Drunk blond linebacker mattresses decided that it would be easier to fill the void in the lives cough(legs)cough by being a "cat" or "little devil" or "pirate wench" or "slutty nurse" or"overbearing father's disappointment and overall regret."

And now that the whole country subsists on a strict diet of violence and white middle-class jail-bait ass, every 30something suburban office girl, who's got Dilbert clippings up on the walls of her cubicle and lives on the Oprah book club, decides that Halloween is her chance to break free from her mundane life of crying herself to sleep, thinking about how lucky Angelina Jolie is to have touched just a hair on brad Pitt, by cutting loose and dressing up in somethingthat's cut two sizes too small for her chunky monkey indiscretions and sticking her tongue in the 23 year-old mail-room clerk's mouth during the company sponsored Halloween happy hour at the local Shenanigans familybar and grill.

<- Of course, that was just a quick gut type reaction to the question. I could be wrong.