Trick or Treat: A Halloween Fiend’s Guide

In your younger days, Halloween means an opportunity to stay out late, torture your younger siblings and faint-of-heart friends with scary movies and consume enough refined sugar to keep the dental profession lucrative for decades to come. Ah, but college seems to have a way of making Halloween lose its luster. What with dumpster-diving raccoons, drunk freshman girls and Berkeley’s notably high population of crazy people, walking through your neighborhood late at night involves more actual fear than thrill. A scary movie marathon seems less enticing when afterwards you’ll be faced with a long walk home through the backwoods of Clark Kerr or past the sketchy post office on Durant.

Berkeley students have developed some methods for putting a few of the thrills back into All Hallows’ Eve, but even these wear thin after a couple of years. Dragging your fresh-out-of-suburbia roommate to the Castro is good for a little fun, but the joys of watching her freak out will probably be lessened when you discover you’ve gotten separated from half your floor, your costume’s ripped in three places and that guy standing behind you on MUNI just puked. Of course, there’s always drinking, but while drinking in college fulfills many functions, after a few semesters, novelty is really not one of them.

“Fine, Ariel,” your jaded voices intone, “but what the hell do you suggest we do instead?” Well, I’ve got a prescription unlikely to end in you getting ralphed on while using public transportation. As someone who’s East Bay born and bred, I’m here to clue you in to the fact that Berkeley is home to the trick-or-treating Mecca, the Holy Grail of childhood sugar-fix fantasies, if I may mix my religious metaphors. It’s a little place called Russell Street, situated near Claremont Avenue and the Oakland-Berkeley border.

To say this street’s residents go all-out for Halloween is putting it mildly. The neighborhood is known for its painstakingly decorated, ginormous houses and the candy bars to match. These people do Halloween right by even the most stringent of standards, and you, yes you, can get in on the fun, collecting the kind of blood-sugar-spiking goodness you only dreamed of in elementary school. All this return to childhood requires is, well, a little return to childhood.

Let’s start with your costume. I know, I know, the whole point of being female and in college on Halloween is to wear a slutty costume. But every Halloween can’t be Halloween in the OC. A short skirt and fairy wings scream “too old for trick-or-treating!” So does anything genuinely witty, or, alas for me, any character from a Tarantino movie. So it’s time to revert to the old standbys: Star Wars characters, ghosts, Indiana Jones, fairy princesses (non-slutty), and storybook characters (ditto). And sorry, best leave your exceptionally tall, tattooed, pierced, or facial-haired friends at home. Now, I’m not going to say you can’t drink before you go, but pretend it’s high school and you have to feign sobriety in public. You’re more likely to score sugar and less likely to score angry looks from some little kid’s mom. You might even restore the thrill of breaking the rules for a night. Sober or otherwise, that’s really the point.

Adulthood may give us fewer rules to follow, but it also gives us fewer rules to break. As anyone who’s ever been under 18 knows, anything’s better if you’re not supposed to do it. So throw on a juvenile disguise, raise the pitch of your voice, grab a pillowcase, and pull a fast one on the candy-distributing powers that be. No, it may not be as good as childhood, but that king-size candy bar will have the sweet taste of thwarted authority.

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