Maybe I'm just getting old and prudish and uptight, but I find Halloween more and more bewildering with each passing year. It's a shame, really, as I used to genuinely enjoy the holiday, and everything that went with it. You may remember my screed of a couple of years back about how the overtly gruesome nature of newfangled Halloween decorations had really put me off (specifically an incident wherein I had to explain to my then-toddler why there was a painstakingly detailed, decomposing corpse in a shop window with rats and vermin feasting on its distended abdomen). I also decry how Halloween has been co-opted as an ersatz New Year's Eve, and another opportunity for grown adults to act like raging jackasses, but that's certainly not a new argument.
In any case, my new reason to be depressed about the eroding state of humanity this Halloween season came courtesy of the strenuously lamentable Halloween superstore that resides on Broadway & 11th Street. Currently on offer in their window display is the costume pictured below. In case you couldn't glean who the costume is supposed to represent, the shop has ham-fistedly bludgeoned the point home with an accompanying placard. Yes indeedy, that's the newly deceased Amy Winehouse, who passed away just this past July after a long and giddily-documented struggle with all stripes of substance abuse. And now she's immortalized as a shallow Halloween gag. Classy!
Some of you doubtlessly think I'm over-reacting or perhaps even wading into a pool of hypocrisy, given my fondness for the gratuitously blasphemous and/or pruriently shocking. Maybe I'm guilty of that, yes, but something about this I just find so profoundly sad ... and I wasn't even really a fan of Amy Winehouse. Yes, she lived her life on the edge and clearly had no qualms about showcasing her personal demons, but should that make her fair game to be reduced to a shlocky, unimaginative punch-line for some dim bulb seeking to be considered all clever and zeitgeisty at a Halloween party? Has it come to that? Hey, Steve Jobs just died of cancer -- are we going to see a bunch of wisenheimers dressed up like him too?
I mean, is this all supposed to be funny?
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