November 1, 2005
The Past Is a Foreign Country Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:00 PM EST I live a block and a half from the route of the Greenwich Village Halloween parade, and over the years I've watched it grow up from an oddball neighborhood event to a commercial big deal. It neither begins nor ends in Greenwich Village now; it just passes through on the area's widest avenue, and swaths of paraders here and there through it honor corporate sponsors like Jet Blue. It maintains its mild eccentricities, though. Last night, watching it on TV (I'd rather get a bird's eye view in my living room than be buried in the crowd not far from my door), I saw people dressed as all sorts of pop figures from the past: Marie Antoinette, a surprisingly convincing self-portrait of Vincent Van Gogh with his ear bandaged, Grant Wood's American Gothic, the board game Twister, every major character in The Wizard of Oz (repeatedly). But the most surprising thing I saw, and really the most exotic of anything, amid all the superheroes and vampires and transvestites and TV characters, was also the most truly historical. It stuck out like nothing else the whole night, though I saw it only briefly, in the corner of the screen, and couldn't catch the whole context. Somebody was parading up Sixth Avenue holding up a sign that said REMEMBER THE MAINE.
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