Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

All Saint’s Day. All Hallows.  All Hallows’ Evening. Hallows Even. Hallowe’en. Halloween.

Not my favorite…well, you can’t really call it a holiday…not my favorite festival. Not even my second favorite. To be honest, my least favorite, which is to say, I really dislike it. A lot.

Growing up, it was just another example of social stratification, another peer-review spotlight that illuminated my inner nerd. You must understand that, back then, at that age, carrying a violin to school on a regular basis did considerable damage to one’s street cred. So did liking to read. Wearing glasses didn’t help. Neither did being sports-deficient. So, being a scrawny, gawky, four-eyed kid who walked to school, a violin in one hand, while reading a book with the other…it pretty much guaranteed that I was going to peg the lower end on the Cool Scale.

Halloween just rubbed it in.

There was only one time where Halloween and I got along. One night. In college.

 I was young, still very thin, with a mop of dark curly hair. I still had glasses, but I didn’t carry a violin anymore; I carried a viola. This was actually a step up, socially, because as every performance major knows, the violas are the party-people of the string world. Oh, yeah!

That year, for some reason, the faculty had scheduled a concert performance for us on October 31. I don’t know what they were thinking. College kids, on Halloween? Something was going to happen. But, on the evening of the concert, we all donned our black suits and dresses, rosined up our bows, and walked on stage, and everything seemed perfectly normal.

Our conductor, Laszlo Varga, a Hungarian-born cellist and a very talented teacher, stepped up to the podium and tapped us to attention. The concert began. I was sitting in the second row of violas, close to the conductor but not in the first-chair rank. Everything was going along well. We were well-rehearsed and the music wasn’t especially difficult, but there were a lot of broad grins among the strings, especially in the front ranks.

As we finished the first piece and moved on to the second, we all discerned a definite undercurrent in the audience. As we finished the second piece and moved to the third, there were audible chuckles from out in the dark beyond the stage lights. Laszlo frowned, knowing something was up, but not knowing what it was.

You see, I had taken two small pieces of pine and fashioned a pair of horns, each about an inch or so tall. I had connected them with a piece of wire from an old hanger, and then I had put another piece of wire on each side and bent them inward to form a tension spring. I had seated this contraption on my head, the wires hidden by my hair, the horns just tall enough to peek out a tiny bit. They were subtle, they were discreet, but once you saw them, you couldn’t see anything else.

The concert ended, and we got an enthusiastic round of applause.

The next day, Laszlo came up to me at rehearsal. He looked at me with a sidelong glare. “At the concert,” he said. “Did you…?” He was looking at my head, my hair.

I looked at him, attentive, waiting for him to finish the sentence. “Sir?”

“Nothing,” he said, and we got back to work.

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