10/31/2008: "Halloween on the Bus"

Hi All,

Just came back from covering a bus route. Elementary and jr. high kids, halloween, a substitute bus driver, a half-day Friday ... something was bound to give. Ten kids on a special needs bus with 5 seats (2 per seat is cool, though). My first pickup was 7 am. A fairly tame ghost boarded. Second stop, a young boy's body with an old man's face---courtesy the latex mask.

Things started getting a little wacky once the pair of princesses boarded. One of their dresses got ripped a little on a seatbelt---this was a real mind-melting disaster for princesses, apparently. Then another princess climbed aboard; "She's hyper today," her mother said sympathetically, "Good luck." It wasn't even 7:30; the streets and sky were dark. 3 princesses, a ghost, and Dorian Grey were joined by a skeleton, another skeleton, and a boy who hadn't dressed up at all and thus earned the round derision of his schoolmates. I felt poorly for him and suggested he was dressed up as "Average Joe" but the princess coalition blasted this idea out of the water. The third princess was terribly hyper, as her mother warned; she was singing, off-key, in a totally made up language:

"Bloo-bloo-bloo, ba-ba, doo-doot-doo!!"

I asked her royal highness to pipe down a bit. The Queen was not amused. The skeleton tried on the old man's mask for a lark.

"Ah, man," he said. "It STINKS in there."

Perhaps it does stink inside an old man's face, but this seemed an unneccesary fault to bring to bear. At some point near the end of the trip I looked up in the riot mirror and it was as if I'd stepped headlong into some opium addict's gnarly high: three princesses straining against their seatbelts, belting out nonsense lyrics; a skeleton and an old man swapping faces; a ghost standing silent sentinel in the furthest seat like something out of Shakespeare; Average Joe watching these proceedings from the cheap seats, as perplexed as I was.

My, what a weird ride. And I've got to do it all again, in reverse, in a few hours. After they've been eating candy and toffeed apples and, for all I know, Ziploc bags full of pure Colombian super-fine sugar, spooned into their mouths with soup ladles. The top of the damn bus is bound to explode up into the stratosphere.

All best, Craig.