Crazy Stable

Why do I love Brooklyn? Well, there are all the reasons in "Why Brooklyn?" linked at the right, but then there's stuff like this...a 400-million-year-old boulder unearthed during construction in Fort Greene that has been promptly dressed up as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.  Thanks to Razor Apple, a cool site with all sorts of street chronicles around town.

The CrazyStable will wear its usual costume, "Haunted House," which is going to be a little less effective this year, now that the front windows are not busted and painted-over like something out of a Stephen King horror movie. We don't usually get many trick-or-treaters; I'm never sure whether it's our odd location on the periphery of the historic district (whose residents, I'm told, are swamped with eager candy-zombies), or whether only the brave set foot on our ragged front porch. The schoolchildren have long assured me that "a witch" lives inside the house; true, (blush), but I suspect this is based more on observed cats in the fenestration than on an assessment of my Crone Factor. One year I hauled a bug-eyed little girl out from under the porch; she was, she told me excitedly, looking for "da ghost."  We had a teachable-moment chat about superstitions, and now I check down there myself every so often.

Our first Hallowe'en in the CrazyStable, when we were living without a functioning kitchen or bath...or lights...I booked. Left town. Skedaddled, and left Spouse to fumble his way to the front door with a flashlight to hand out candy. Me, I was on a junket to a sun-baked  ravine near the Rio Grande, where some poor PR schmo for Gaviscon antacids had shipped a bunch of journalists to the Terlingua Chili Cook-Off.  I got cowboy boots and a hop aboard a private jet, tasted my first huevos rancheros, and sampled the incredible hospitality of beer-powered Texan chili competitors. I also met up with an amazing phenomenon, the Chili Team, a form of performance art done in front of bubbling cauldrons of brick-red spicy meat; a typical entry was a bunch of very overweight guys in chain mail singing "Wooly Bully." (This year's entrants sound as if the intervening 2 decades have only fueled creativity in the chili-performance world;  team titles include "Toad Chokin' Chili,"  "Psycho Chick," "Lurch's Cafe," and "Our Lady of Pain Medical Center."  If I ever move out of Brooklyn, remind me to move to Texas; I'll bet they dress up a mean boulder.)

Spouse was very good about being left alone in the gloomy manse, and reported no unearthly phenomenona. (The house is indeed devoid of paranormal activity, my mother assured us the following year when she moved in; and she was a finely tuned "receiver" with a long history of ghost whispering, so she ought to have known.) No trick-or-treaters, either--possibly because the electricians had forgotten to wire us up a doorbell.

This situation was soon rectified, however; in Texas, I bought a ranch dinner gong (an iron triangle and an iron stick with a rawhide hanging loop, the kind you call the hands in with, BWANGA-BWANGA-BWANGA-BWANGGGGG).  It was very effective, at least for those visitors with the nerve to use it with gusto; it served as our doorbell for at least a year.