Spooky Halloween Stories
First, I assure you: I do not greet the trick-or-treating children with offers to tell them about the Byzantine Empire. Well, at least, not anymore. My neighbors were upset when their children destroyed all the family photos. I had intended my discussion on iconoclasm to be anecdotal, not a manual. Seven-year olds may have missed that distinction. And we no longer are on speaking terms with the Kalmans. Little Beaumont was correctly practicing the Byzantine method of disinheriting a relative, but he really shouldn’t have tried cutting off his sister’s nose. (And perhaps I shouldn’t have quipped that she would have needed the nose job anyway.)
Yet, we are not the worst house in the neighborhood! Who is our competion?
There is the lady who has been trying to give out the same bag of Windmill cookies since 1973.
Then, there is the 50 year-old yenta who comes to the door dressed like a parody of a teenager. That is the way she normally looks. But what is especially terrifying is her perfume: I believe that it called “Gardenia in a Drum”. The scent comes off on you. After a visit to her house, the children have to be bathed in tomato juice.
Finally, we know someone who gives as treats her son’s business cards. All the more horrifying is that the name of his business is misspelled. So much for his Stanford education. However, since he is in finance, there is no reason for his grammar to be better than his ethics.
Of course, you think that I am joking. Cue the Bernard Herrmann music played by a Theremin! Two of these anecdotes are appallingly true, and one is just slightly exaggerated; only my Byzantine tales are apocryphal (although the little Kalman girl will need the nose job).
p.s. Let’s not forget the historic significance of this day: https://finermanworks.com/your_rda_of_irony/2009/10/31/queer-eye-for-the-straight-cathedral-2/
If the Byzantine stories of terror and mayhem came with a nice little triangle of baklava, I don’t see what anyone has to complain about. Beats the dickens out of another mini-box of ten year old Whoppers, any day! For that matter, the whoppers the Byzantine Church came up with to explain the finer points of dogma and doctrine are even older and much more stale!
Bob,
Unfortunately, the Moskovitz twins (Percival and Osbert) used their M&Ms as mosaics to do a portrait of the Emperor Justinian on the family dog.
Eugene