Because it is the Monday after another eventful Halloween weekend, I figure this has the potential to have the lowest or the highest readership of the year. It could be a slow day because daylight saving time just ended and some people may be too overwhelmed by that extra hour of sleep to pick up a copy of the paper. Or today will break records because enough people will still be throwing up and are now using Daily Cardinals to keep the floor dry. To those of you reading this because of the latter, I'll try to keep it down.
With all of the hoopla and anticipation surrounding Halloween, you would think there was something more to it. I tell people I'm from Madison, and if they have their finger on the pulse of college life, they ask about Halloween. When I explain it to them, they stare at me with a look of awe and amazement. \That's it? You just get wasted and walk around in a costume? You could do that for any holiday!"" Traditionally I laugh it off. But recently I have been giving it some more careful consideration.
Why aren't we picking random holidays to get drunk and go out in costume? With all the observed and unobserved holidays in this country, we could be dressed up 300 days out of the year. For instance, Oct. 16 was Boss' Day. What better way to celebrate your manager than skipping work, dressing up, getting drunk and ragging on him or her all weekend?
Even a holiday with less personal attacks would be fun. A great one is Arbor Day, the celebration of trees. We can all go out, decked in our Arbor Day best. Some of us can masquerade as birches or oaks, and our East Coast friends can dress up as that one tree that grows in Brooklyn. We can head to State Street to raucously parade about, ogling over attractive people in sugar maple costumes, telling all of our friends, ""I'm gonna tap that."" And because it's so new and different, our Arbor Day festivities would be the most heralded in the country and Madison would become the new hotspot for young, hip and urban Sierra Clubbers.
But the downfall of these new celebration-worthy holidays is that the costumes would be a bitch. It's a lot harder to dress up like your supervisor or a weeping willow than it is to slap on some lingerie and animal ears. I think the extra effort involved might drive the slacker base that we need for a good drunken weekend away. Without them, the weekend's events would consist of costumed geeks like myself. And a party with people just like me would involve an excess of Scrabble round robins, and an ice cream social.
Maybe UW isn't ready for a year's worth of Halloweens. Judging from the girls I saw throwing up on my street corner, some people can't even handle one. Plus, with Mifflin in the spring and Halloween in the fall, I guess we have the year pretty much covered. But just in case anyone is looking for a rip-roarin', tree-plantin', helluva time, I'll be on State Street April 22, rain or shine. If you can't find me, I'll be the one decked out as a redwood.
Erin Canty's column runs every Monday in the Daily Cardinal. She can be reached at erincanty8285@hotmail.com.
