New York has a parade for just about every holiday save Arbor Day, but the one that seems to suit the city best is the annual Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. This year, a confluence of factors made the parade a bit weirder than usual, creating a timely diversion from regular life so that people such as your correspondent could get out of their heads for a while and appreciate the lengths many New Yorkers go through just to entertain. For starters (and to paraphrase a classic rap track), this year Halloween fell on a weekend, making a traditional party night even more of one. Add to that a highly-charged election with easily-caricatured candidates, an economy in free fall, and the 25th anniversary of Michael Jackson's Thriller, and you've got the makings of a major Halloween spectacle. Being slightly past whoo-hoo! age, we avoided the six-deep crowd on the sidewalk and enjoyed the parade from a friend's apartment overlooking Sixth Avenue, and while it made for lousy photographs, the elevated perspective highlighted the effort and energy that goes into New York's freakiest mass happening of the year. ]]>
