Mommy Smells Like Peanut Butter Cups

This Halloween, The Roc came up with a few creative alternatives to traditional trick-or-treating:

1. Ring doorbell; when door opens, shout "Trick or Treat"; turn around and leave without getting any candy.

2. Ring doorbell; when door opens, shout "Thank you!"

3. Ring doorbell; when door opens, walk into the house.

4. Don't ring doorbell. Just stand there waiting patiently for some candy.

He also kept complaining about not being able to find the elevator. I finally realized he was talking about one of our friends' kids, who had dressed up as Darth Vader. The Force is not strong with this one.

Actually, I was a little surprised to see a Darth Vader costume. When my husband wore one a few years ago, no one under 30 had any idea who he was supposed to be. They thought he was some kind of vampire or samurai.

As for Mommy, I went as a geisha girl; oddly, I already had everything I needed for the costume, and I'll wear almost anything to get out of making a special trip to Target. But first I ran it by a friend of mine who is a professor of Asian-American studies at UCLA, and she assured me that the geisha girl is a pop culture icon and in no way a politically incorrect Halloween costume for a white girl like me. Indeed, it proved to be very popular with Caucasian men of a certain age, which lent the holiday a whole new kind of creepy.

But The Roc wasn't fooled. He knew all along it was Mommy. Which is great, really, because I didn't want to have to explain the whole high-class Japanese prostitute concept to him. I'm still working on explaining Darth Vader, and where all The Roc's peanut butter cups went.