They moved the date.  I swear they did!  We – two perfectly sane, college educated adults – most certainly could not have both read the invitation wrong.  The Halloween costume party we were invited to would be held, most certainly, on Halloween night, oh yes it would.  In particular because this was a year in which the actual holiday fell on a Saturday night.  The bigger question that came into play was the one involving my costume-hating-Halloween-grinch of a husband.  Would he actually agree to dress up as something – anything in a costume – for the sake of attending what promised to be a really fun party at the home of some really great friends?

[pause while holding breath for answer. . .]

Okay.  Yeah.  He finally, reluctantly agreed setting in motion a couple of weeks worth of word play back and forth about we would wear.  I was game for almost anything; him, not so much.  In the end, for some odd reason, when the big night finally came, I found myself as the clown driver in our car while ‘Sheikh Abdul Fat-Sal’  (please don’t ask – it just happened, and please don’t judge as we were NOT making any political statement whatsoever.  We were just trying to get to a costume party!) finally decided to get in the mood and play the part.  After all, he had relucatntly allowed my sister and I to wrap him head to toe in a couple of white bed sheets, draped him with tons of gaudy necklaces (please, I did already ask you not to judge us, right?), and used mascara to enhance his five o’ clock facial growth.  To that he slipped on the sunglasses and voila’.  Sheikh Abdul Fat-Sal was born.  Whew.  It’s no wonder that my last minute scramble to find a costume was easiest to complete by simply putting on the clown costume my sister usually wore along with her frizzy red headed wig.  Easy-peazy, and to be honest, at that point, I knew that husband was already going to be the hit of the party (no one, NOT NO ONE, could even believe he had agreed to go to a costume party).  So when it came time to get in the car and go, he decided to play the part of a rich Sheikh and have me be his driver while he sat in the back seat.  All the better for our entrance at said Halloween party.  Except that this is where the big mistake comes in.

Yeah.  It.  Really. Happened.

After laughing our heads off while driving down the highway being spotted by other Halloween revelers and sharing lots of horn tooting and such along the journey, we arrived at our destination only to find the house was dark.  Quite dark.  Say what?

Our first thought was that we were just early.  Very early!  So we sat outside and waited, watching little trick or treaters bobbing in and out of other neighborhood houses – it was after all, Halloween.  But then we realized no one was actually going up to our friend’s dark house.  Hmmm.  Curious, right?  The Sheikh pulled out the invite we had with us for directional purposes and discovered that yes, indeed, the Halloween party that we intended to go to that night had been held the week before.

Ok then.

So, what does a clown driver do with her Sheikh passenger when they’re both all dressed up on Halloween night with no place to go?

Well, in the end, we decided to join all the other club-hopping freaks that night (hey, we were much younger then!) and ended up still having a whole lot of Halloween fun despite the humiliation and disappointment of not getting to show our witty costumes off (um,at least husband had a good one) at the intended party.

And because I know you want to know, days later we discovered that our friends had held their party a week ahead because they had to be out of town on Halloween night.  (What?  Who does that?)