Boo!
Happy Halloween everybody! I’m playing it very low key this year since we had our party last weekend and that’s all the holiday I need. I was a pirate.
So I’m home, Suzan’s out. I’ve just listened to Saint-Saens’s Dans Macabre, a wonderful 19th century piece that my elementary school music teacher, Ms. Stafford used to play for us at Halloween and we got to dance around like skeletons. Dans Macabre means “Dance of the Dead” and the piece is all about the one day a year (that would be Oct. 31) when the dead get to stand up and dance like the living. Death accompanies it all on his violin.
Ms. Stafford would play the song on a record player, one kid would be Death (usually a little blond girl. I never asked why) and the rest of us would be the skeletons.
So I turned off all the lights in my apartment, put the song on the stereo and flung myself about the room like a pile of bones caught up by the wind.