Like most people (I assume), I like to think of myself as young despite the fact that I (1) turned 30 some months ago, (2) have forehead wrinkles that look, charitably, like someone stuck their fingernail in a pan of rising focaccia, and (3) am asleep before 10pm on most nights, save the occasional weekend. I do know that 30 is objectively not old at all, nor does being quote-unquote old have to dictate anything whatsoever about your life, but when I recently found myself sneaking out of a Reneé Rapp concert early in order to get to sleep by a decent hour – while the Greek Theatre was still full of her cheering, mostly adolescent fans – I was forced to admit it: I may, in fact, officially be washed, as the kids say. (They say that, right?)
Maybe that’s why I approached Halloween – a day I’m not usually all that wild about – with such a fervour this year. In past years, I’ve thrown myself into Christmas decorating, perhaps the greatest sign of all that I’m approaching “white woman of a certain age with a stack of scented candles under her bathroom sink” age, but as Halloweekend (a phrase I have definitely not used since I was binge drinking vanilla vodka in college) approached, I resolved to answer one big question: could I still have a twenties-style Halloween night (or a couple of them in a row) in my thirties?
I commenced my party schedule Friday night at a bit of a disadvantage, given that I’d gone out for a so-called chill dinner with a friend the night before that quickly turned into us tossing back espresso martinis at the bar across the street until the wee hours. (This, TBH, is how I party now as a 30-year-old; it comes on suddenly and with no warning, like wildfire, and I spend the next two to five days feeling absolutely wrecked as a result.) I slept right through my friends’ Halloween party, despite the fact that I’d already planned my costume – sexy grape – and ended up listening to my partner and friend group have fun through the phone while I sheepishly explained that I was simply too tired to drive to Los Feliz. (I felt bad bailing, but the great thing about having a friend group mostly made up of queers in their early-to-late thirties is that they will always encourage you to “practice self-care”, even if they’re annoyed at you about it.)
After this less than auspicious start, my hopes were even higher for my engagement on Saturday night: an invite-only house party held by some very rich Swedish guy who one of my friends happens to DJ for and managed to wrangle me into a month ago. My partner sensibly declined the invite, but I knew from prior experience that the vibe would be Kendall Roy’s birthday party to the extreme, with an open bar, a live DJ, a full-on candy room, and a ton of weird special effects and “alien visitations” of the sort you can only expect in Los Angeles, a city teeming with people willing to dress up in weird costumes for money and work the room at parties.
As you might imagine from the alien thing, the party’s theme was (loosely) space, leading me to commit my first middle-aged faux pas of the night: I defiantly threw on the purple dress I’d planned to wear the night before to be a grape, borrowed a green wig from a friend, and rebranded myself as a sexy eggplant. It wasn’t quite the Regina George-approved slutty costume of my Halloweens past – God help me, I think I was a sexy nurse my first year of college, which simply consisted of the most flammable costume I could find at Ricky’s – but it was vaguely horny, in a lo-fi sort of way.
I won’t bore you too much with the details of the party, but let’s just say Marlowe Granados’s Happy Hour it was not; everyone was 24 (ugh), vaguely in the music industry (cool, sure, but I don’t know anything about it or anyone who works in it, so I had nothing to talk about), and dressed in the kind of leather-and-lace ensembles that only a 20-something could pull off. Sometime around 4am, I found myself smoking my once-a-decade cigarette on an outdoor banquette between two beautiful women dressed as lamps, complete with fully functioning light bulbs. As I sat in their glow, I realised that not only had I aged out of making an actual effort on Halloween costumes but that the next time I make said effort may be when I (gasp) have kids. This brought on the kind of mini existential crisis that really only happens when you’re alone at a party at 4am and surrounded by extremely attractive strangers, and I wish I could say I went home and got my life together, but reader, come on. The drinks were free. I drank them.
The next day, I found myself in a predictable position: lying prone on the couch at my partner’s house while they clucked at me and brought me glasses of water they insisted I drink in full, groaning and promising forces unseen that I would never again try to have a twenty-something Halloween in my thirties. I may not be ready to put a small child in a pumpkin costume and document it all on Instagram just yet, but there has to be a middle ground between that and total citrus-vodka-cocktail-induced LA debauchery, right? Maybe, I don’t know, popping a weed gummy and watching a scary movie? Whatever it is, I’m determined to find it next year – or, at least, to secure myself a higher-quality wig if I do go out, because as it is, I’m still finding long green strands on everything I own.
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