vip in the city

Trinity trick-or-treating

At Trinity Church Wall Street for the Halloween celebration of “Ghouls, Games and Graves.” From 4PM onwards, the North Churchyard — the oldest surviving churchyard in the city, with stones dating to the early 18th century — hosted a series of family-friendly events. Adorably costumed kids (and their guardians) were out in full force this mild late afternoon for treats, games, crafts, and face-painting. The “ghost” of Alexander Hamilton (buried here at Trinity; Aaron Burr is safely entombed across the river in Princeton Cemetery) roamed among the guests telling stories of New York’s past.

Had I stayed on past dark, I could have attended Trinity Church’s screening of the 1922 silent vampire classic Nosferatu — the earliest surviving screen adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Adding to the spooky ambiance, in place of dialogue, the film was to be accompanied by Cameron Carpenter on the church’s state-of-the-art electronic organ, which was installed in 2003 to replace the Aeolian-Skinner damaged on September 11, 2001. (The controversial “virtual pipe organ” uses digital samples of actual pipe organ timbres, sent through speakers hidden behind dummy pipes.)

Watch Carpenter perform his own arrangement of John Williams’s Raiders of the Lost Ark  theme on the Trinity organ.

Tags: Cameron Carpenter, costumes, Halloween, kids, organ, Trinity Church

Ricky’s Halloween

Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.
— Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), Mean Girls

Ricky’s NYC beauty shop–36 locations and growing!–carries an impressive line of cosmetics and hair care products, but they are perhaps best known as one of the city’s prime sources for body glitter, temporary tattoos, wigs, and uh… let’s just say “novelties.” The days leading up to Halloween are the chain’s busiest, and tonight on the way home from my weekly CSA pick-up, I passed the Upper West Side store to find it packed with last minute costume shoppers scouring the aisles to a pounding dance music soundtrack.

If Ricky’s is the “paramount venue to discover your inner drag queen,” then judging from the store and window displays around town, October 31 is apparently the paramount day for every girl to discover her inner vixen. When did Halloween costumes become so aggressively sexy?

Increasingly, what passes for women’s “costumes” seem to fit the mold of headgear + exposed undergarments and/or skimpy skirt. (And it’s not just the case for big girls either. “Major Flirt Child“? “French Maid Child“?! So. Wrong.) A cat becomes a sexy cat. A devil becomes a red, hot devil. Goldilocks is naughty Goldilocks. And Wonder Woman… well, I guess that one’s pretty much the same, but you get the idea.

At least Wonder Woman gets to wear a cape sometimes.

Tags: costumes, Halloween, Ricky's, women's issues