I remember Halloween of 1993 very well –
It was a Saturday, and Saturday Halloween’s are hard to come by. Halloween 1993 was the day several of my music boxes, high up on a bedroom shelf, all started playing by themselves in the middle of the night. Halloween 1993 was the morning my husband woke up from a horrible dream in which he was being violently attacked, and yelled his self-defense shriek at full volume – and then the remaining four members of the household woke up screaming with him.
So far, it was the perfect scary Halloween.
Because it was on a Saturday, we’d told the kids they could have a Halloween party, so we invited about 20 other kids, who I think mostly all showed up. It was the year I’d made my kids’ Halloween costumes. It had taken hours and hours of hard work – my 10-year-old was a fifties girl with a poodle skirt, my 6-year-old was a Coke can, and my 4-year-old was a 7-Up can. (The soda cans stayed on their bodies for about 5 minutes). My mother and sister dressed as bugs and came to assist with the face-painting and games.
All in all, I think it had been a successful party. But I remember the one thing I was very scared of that night – after the party, I was so worried that somehow the wrong kid would be allowed to leave with the wrong adult, and then a parent would arrive to collect their child and he wouldn’t be there. (I think this paranoia came from inviting many kids that I didn’t already know). What a strange thing to remember about a fun party!
That was our day on October 31, 1993.
Other things that happened on October 31, 1993 were:
- The wonderful child actor River Phoenix died from a drug overdose early that morning. (If you’ve never seen him in the movie Stand By Me, based on the novel The Body by Stephen King, it’s worth the watch).
- The New York Times bestseller list included books such as The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, The Pelican Brief by John Grisham, and The General’s Daughter by Nelson DeMille.
- 25 people were killed during a Ghana-Ivory Coast soccer game
