Nightmare on Franklin Street

Nobody cares about Halloween when they’re older, right? Starting around age 14, aren’t you too mature for such frivolous, nonsensical conceits? Doesn’t dressing up like something ridiculous lose its appeal after a certain point in one’s life?
False! Come to Chapel Hill for the night of October 31, and see for yourself. There were 82,000 people on Franklin Street (The main drag for UNC students, filled with cheap restaurants, bars, and other interesting stuff). Why were they there? Good question. I had a hard time explaining that one to my mom, too:
Mom: “So you’re going to Franklin Street tonight. Are there activities there?”
Drew: “No, not really. Not at all, actually. Just a bunch of people.”
Mom: “So why do so many people go if there’s nothing to do?”
Drew: “Um…they’re there because everybody else is, I guess.”
So I don’t really know why people come to Franklin Street, but they do come in droves. Even if the police hadn’t blocked the street, it would have been impossible for a car to budge. The street was flush with people, surging in all directions and no direction at once, struggling to move every which-way and getting nowhere fast, because the person in front of them probably just saw the break-dancing panda bears, so they had to stop and watch.
The costumes that night were, on the whole, completely ridiculous. Because I think everything is better in list form, here’s a list of some of my favorites:
• The Pope
• Tetris pieces (Tetris is a board game)
• Transformers that actually transformed from cars to robots
• Richard Simmons
• Three gorillas chasing a banana
• A group of people who were dressed up as the characters from the Mario video game series (Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Yoshi, etc.)
• Two robots playing guitars
• Borat (the title character from the movie “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”)
• Flava Flav (a rapper)
• Controllers for the Nintendo Wii
• Star Trek characters (it’s always nice to see somebody go out on the nerdy limb, especially because Star Trek raised me from the age of five to eighteen)
• Satan
• McLovin (the scene-stealing character from the movie “Superbad”)
The gender roles seemed outright cliché. I am speaking, of course, of those females who decided that this Halloween, they would be sexy. It appears there is a cottage industry that subsists by making Sexy (insert noun here) costumes. Sexy whats, you ask? Well on Halloween, I saw Sexy: Doctors, Teachers, Lawyers, Woodnymphs, Schoolgirls, Witches, Devils, Nintendo Characters, Magicians, Dentists, Emo Girls, Satans, Vikings, Spice Girls, Cowgirls, Indians, Girl Scouts, Guitar Players, Accountants, and of course the old standby, Sexy Cops.
While females seemed to feel that less clothing was more, many males seemed bent on making their figures larger than life. For example, one of my friends dressed up as a gigantic magnet and glued pictures of chicks (as in baby chickens) to it, and was a chick magnet. Get it? It’s funny, right? I also saw people dressed up as Scrabble boards, pumpkins, playing cards, drivers’ licenses, Solo Cups, and pretty much any other thing that you can think of, only bigger.
Perhaps what I found most interesting was that the UNC basketball team all decided that they didn’t need costumes, and would instead just go to Franklin, stand in the middle of the street, and wait to be recognized by the throngs. Which I guess is kind of a perverse way to enjoy one’s notoriety, but it yields beautiful little nuggets, like when one of my friends found Deon Thompson (a forward on the basketball team) in the middle of the street and asked him, “Wait, what are you dressed up as?”
To which he replied, “Deon Thompson!” That’s kind of a conceited thing to say, but I guess he’s earned it. He did drop 14 points against Georgetown in the tournament. Off the bench. Yeah, he definitely earned it.
And what/who did I dress up as, in the midst of this madness? Hunter S. Thompson, author/crazy person extraordinaire, who wrote the literary classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (which was later made into a not-so-classic movie starring Johnny Depp). Once I donned my costume, it became increasingly apparent that not as many people as I would have liked actually knew who Hunter S. Thompson was, as evidenced by the fact that one of my friends asked me, “Dude, are you Chevy Chase?” In fact, only about 12 people the entire night commented on my costume, and of those 12, probably half of them were other people dressed up as Hunter Thompson. (See the picture for one such example.)
So, in the end, why do people go to Franklin Street on Halloween? As Captain James T. Kirk once explained to Spock (shamelessly stealing a line from some ancient mystic), “Because it’s there.”