Horsing Around for Halloween

Tomorrow my office is having its Halloween party during the day and Barry and I will be attending a Halloween-themed ballroom dance in the evening.  Late this afternoon I finally came to grips with the question of this year's costume.

I've reached the age where I'm reluctant to spend big money on looking ridiculous once a year.  Barry usually breaks out his tae kwon do gi for Halloween (he's a second-degree black belt), but I don't have anything similar in my closet.  I do have a small collection of accessories that I can wear with normal clothes - Minnie Mouse ears, linen poet's shirt, flapper beads and feather boa - but my friends are probably tired of seeing them.  After mentally running through my wardrobe, I decided that this would be the year of the cowgirl.  I have jeans, a suede vest, the aforementioned poet's shirt, a bandanna and a pair of brown leather boots that could pass for cowboy boots at a distance.  A few more accessories and I would be set - a hat, a toy gun, perhaps a hobbyhorse.  How hard could it be to find them?

Very hard.  Apparently, Woody and Jessie from Toy Story notwithstanding, cowpersons are now out of fashion, or perhaps (due to the guns) politically incorrect.  I searched several toy stores and a party store without finding a single cowboy/cowgirl hat.  The only hobbyhorses I saw were actually unicorns on sticks, in neon hues of pink and purple.  I located one reproduction Remington revolver with holster, in bright orange so no one could use it to hold up a bank.  At this point I realized that I should have decided on my costume some time prior to less than 24 hours before I needed to put it on.

I finally broke down and visited an actual western wear store.  There, as I expected, the adult hats were all too large for my small head and short hair, but they did have a modest selection of children's hats and even a teeny-tiny silver-colored revolver in a real leather holster.  I snatched them up, wincing at the price but determined not to appear yet again as Minnie Mouse.

The good news: my hat is a brown version of Jessie's hat.  I had one just like it except red when I was five, and it still looks great.  The bad news: I never did locate a hobbyhorse.  After I got home, I found just what I had wanted on Amazon.com.  This will teach me to think ahead; a little more planning and one of these noble steeds could have been mine.

"Cowboys are proof that cowgirls can take a joke." ~Anonymous