Holidays, retrospect: Halloween 1978
Self-tutoring about people and events from the past: the tutor mentions Halloween 1978.
In Fall 1978, I was in grade three and lived on a military base. The fall was a fantastic time there – it was on PEI. The base had enough trees so autumn colours could develop, but mainly it was just houses and open yards and fields. The breeze could run in long breaths across the landscape. As I recall, the grass was yet green at Halloween: one could still go out with a shirt and jean jacket on, that time of year.
That year, in my class, we each made a Halloween face by gluing a paper plate, upside-down, onto some back-up paper (to contain the mess), then painting the face on the paper plate (which was bottom-side-up). I wasn’t great at crafts; I think I made a witch that actually turned out okay. Some other kids did black cats, ghosts, vampires, etc.
Notably, another philosophy of Halloween materialized in a way I, for the first time, understood: a lot of the kids, particularly the girls, made faces of a person they wanted to be, rather than something scary. Towards the end of the class, with all the faces laid out across the floor to dry, I noticed many had blonde “hair” (which was yarn that the teacher had provided as an option).
One girl pointed the face she’d made to me; it was one that had the blonde hair. “Olivia Newton-John,” she commented. Many of the other girls, I realized, had also made Olivia Newton-John faces. Each was different, yet they were similar enough that once I knew what one represented, I could tell the others did as well. As the faces dried in the final minutes of class, I understood that I was looking at a collage of Olivia Newton John faces, staring back up at me from the floor.
Grease came out in June 1978; over the summer most of the kids in the class had seen it. My parents didn’t typically go to movies, so I hadn’t, and therefore didn’t know who Olivia Newton-John was. Yet, it was powerful to me, how many of the girls had made Olivia Newton-John faces. I couldn’t put it into words – I was only 8 years old – but I wondered if those girls lived in a bigger world, somehow, than I did. After all, this character I didn’t know was obviously very important to them. Unbeknownst to me as well was the Grease title track, with its message “We start believin now that we can be who we are….”
Source:
Jack of Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane, Campbell River, BC.
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