Thursday, October 29th, 2009...9:17 am
#144: Don’t Go Hatin’ On Halloween
I was going to enumerate everything I hate about Halloween, but just picture scary teenagers pounding at the door with cheap grillz on, the kids crying because their trick-or-treating companions ditched them, and Mommy face down in a bag full of chocolate.
Instead, I want to focus, young-like, on what’s unambigously good about Halloween, and that to me is Day of the Dead art. One ever-renewing source for Halloweenish images is Daily Monster. And then you’ve got your health-conscious vegetable skulls, from the really entertaining site Skull-A-Day:
You’ve got your psychedelic skull with butterflies coming out of it, particularly appropriate symbolically for How Not To Act Old:
You’ve got your x-ray photo of skulls tongue-kissing.
I wanted to use something like this for the cover of How Not To Act Old, but my agent, my editor, my publisher, my husband, my friends, plus that guy who sells milk down at the corner store all talked me out of it. Too dark, they said. Too ghoulish.
Still, to me, nothing says How Not To Act Old more perfectly — or seems more appropriate for Halloween — than a skeleton kicking up its heels. Here, the version of the cover that might have been, by the divine Jamie Keenan.
LOVE that cover! Very funny stuff.
I like skulls making out. Not as a cover necessarily, just in general.
The butterflies have my vote!