Ahhhhhh Halloween. Every year Teara and I begged Lol to let us wear our Wonder Woman and Batgirl Underoos as costumes. Every year she said “No.”

“What if we wore them OVER our clothes?”

“No.”

“Pleassssseeeee????!!!!”

“No.”

Instead she’d take us to Toys ‘R’ Us and we’d pick out our boxed superhero costumes.

You know, the ones with the plastic masks. Wonder Woman was no longer the beautiful Lynda Carter. Now she was Lynda Carter’s wax museum statue that had been through a horrendous fire.

Those deformed masks were the worst.

The manufacturers couldn’t mess up their masterpieces with bigger breathing holes now could they? Instead they provided us with the teeniest, tiniest pinholes that had you sounding like Darth Vader even if your costume was Holly Hobby.

But who needed to breathe anyway?

I mean, those masks were only made from plastic that most likely contained formaldehyde, asbestos, and carcinogens from the second-hand smoke of the guy working the molding machine.

I picture him with a Lucky Strike dangling from his mouth saying, “Bigger breathing holes? Toughen up ya wussies. You want to be Wonder Woman? Well act like a damn superhero and quit yer cryin’!”

And God forbid you tried making the holes bigger yourself. You should’ve just saved yourself the trouble and stabbed yourself in the eye with a knife. Now you were going to have permanent eye damage due to the plastic shards scraping your corneas. Frostbite from wearing nothing but Underoos sounds like the safer choice to me.

It wasn’t always that bad though. Sometimes Lol made our costumes. My favorite was Snoopy. I’d even wear it when it wasn’t Halloween because I loved it so much.

Then Lol and Pa would bring us trick or treating and when the frigid Long Island air had us raising the white flag, we’d return to our warm home and Lol would make us hot cocoa. We’d wipe our cold, runny noses while counting our candy and checking for razor blades.

This lasted until we were old enough to go around without our parents. We exchanged costumes for shaving cream and that was a whole other realm of fun.

Do teens even do the shaving cream thing anymore? Probably not. Everything is so boring now. I say we bring back plastic asbestos costumes and teach kids how to melt the tips of the shaving cream cans so it sprays further. Let’s even throw some razor blades into the candy to spice things up a bit! (I kid, I kid.)

But at the risk of sounding like Napoleon’s Uncle Rico… mannn, things were way better when I was a kid.