When I was in grad school, one Halloween...

I figured it'd be sporting to wear a costume to the school-sanctioned bash (okay, it was more a halfhearted poke than a bash, but anyway), but I didn't have any good ideas, and it was getting late. Friend and I were poking around in a shop for ideas.

I can't remember which of us spotted the axe first. It was silver, it was cardboard, and it was cheap. And, it was very very big. I hefted it. Friend said, "Perfect. An angry lesbian with an axe."

So, I showed up in streetwear, carrying my axe. I stood in the corner and tried to glower with appropriate menace.

"Death to the patriarchal hegemony!," I thought at them all.

After about ten minutes it dawned on me that this was pretty much what I'd been doing in class all day anyway. So I took it out on the dance floor. (It's difficult to dance and glower at the same time, with or without a giant cardboard axe).

About twenty minutes after that, the party wound down and ground (ha ha) to a halt. For a drama school, we were kind of short on theatrical flair, collectively, I thought. A dour old coldbed of Calvinism is a funny place to host a drama school, really, or Halloween, for that matter. The trappings were there, more or less, but the magic had been frowned into submission. At any rate, at one-thirty in the morning, the bars were all shut, and the witching hour had come and gone.

So I finished my Rolling Rock and went home, dragging my axe behind me.