"Everybody's Waiting for the Next Surprise"

I think Halloween is something you have to experience to understand. Friday night I was the guest native speaker at an English language "conversation club." The theme was Halloween, and we talked about Halloween traditions and symbols. Everyone spoke really good English, but it was still hard to convey the spirt of Halloween and the idea of scaring people and being scared for fun. People mostly know what Halloween is here, but they don't have the same kind of associations and symbols as we do. For instance, when the little kids saw us carrying pumpkins, they said, "Are those real pumpkins? Are you going to eat them?"

On Saturday we created an American Halloween party of epic proportions at School 165. We carved pumpkins with our Russian friends. (When we smelled burning pumpkin, we remembered to tell them to scoop out the insides.) We cut out bats and pumpkins and witches from wallpaper. Ben and I made an impressive spider web. We dressed up in various costumes, ranging from vampire to "person with a mouse on his shoulder" to President Medvedev.

When our guests arrived, our friend Ilsur made a speech to his "dorogiye druzya." We had a trick-or-treat trail for the little kids and showed the big people the Russian version of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Then the students at the school performed an English play, which involved rhyming couplets and impressive costumes, and we performed our play, a Russian version of Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin that barely held together until the arrival of our friend Diana and her pinata, which was meant to look like a pumpkin but ended up being a kind of ghoul in the Colombian national colors.

After that we took our guests out into the hall for games such as Spooky Musical Chairs (the kids ran around while I played "Danse Macabre" on the violin), Bobbing For Apples, Fortune Telling, Pin the Nose on the Witch, and Mummy-Making (wrapping up little kids in toilet paper.) Then there was the costume contest, and then the party fizzled out. Sam and I recited Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven." (Sam was the Raven.) We raised over $4,000 rubles for the orphanage. We smashed the pumpkins on the snow-covered Russian sidewalk. It was the best Halloween I've had in a long time.