“Ain’t nothin’ funny about it."

The post-traumatic stress disorder has worn off, and we may now discuss Halloween.

There are in this world many manifestations of wrong, but I was not aware of just how many until last Saturday. We should have known, really. We should have known it was going to be a rough night the instant the guy wearing nothing but Incredible Hulk Underoos and a serene expression skated past. And as it happened, he had friends. These things happen, in Florida, but that doesn’t make it right.

Flipper, G-Force, and I were in Halloween attendance at a bar that may be most accurately described as the Mos Eisley Cantina. We were attired, respectively, as a pirate, Carmen Miranda, and a harem girl, which made for big fun when we dropped into a grocery store to pick up bananas for G-Force’s hat.

Mingling with the costumed never fails to add a new dimension to horrific attempted pick-ups; Flipper made a new friend when a male pirate walked up to her making very unconvincing “RRRRAAAAHHHH!” noises while brandishing a dagger.

“Mine’s longer,” she said, unsheathing a two-foot plastic sword.

G-Force had many fruit-grabbers to her credit (“Are those real?”) I had an all-American run in with half of the winner of the costume contest, an Osama bin Laden who was wandering around at the end of a lasso held by George W. Bush.

“Hey baby,” said Osama.

(Our own personal winner was the guy in the t-shirt with an arrow pointing up next to the words “THE MAN”, immediately followed by an arrow pointing down next to the words “THE LEGEND.” "Ain't nothin' funny about it,” he said when we burst out laughing.)

A proposition from the most evil man in the whole entire solar system made me feel far cleaner, however, than simply seeing the Village People. The actual Village People are the ultimate Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That; but dressing as the Village People from the waist up while wandering about in Underoos from the waist down? THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH THAT.

“F—K YOU, REDSKIN!” the cowboy screeched when he ran into the Indian outside the men’s room.

“F—K YOU, COWBOY!” said the Indian, and then followed a fight scene followed that has likely ignited the apocalypse. I turned my eyes unto the Lord in my distress, for really, hasn’t Florida suffered enough?

But the Village People, in their dreadfulness, managed to do what the entire combined forces of the United States government could not –they united the people of a furiously contested swing state forty-eight hours before Election Day. In a small space holding the approximate population of greater Chicago, these guys traveled the bar with a space cushion of at least fourteen feet. It was like the aftermath of a natural disaster: We had no other recourse but to turn to one another in a desperate attempt to overcome the massive psychological damage. We should send them on a world tour. The entire Middle East would be wrapped in one gigantic hug, after seeing this.

“I think I’ve had a little too much to drink,” a money-covered woman dressed as FEMA said, watching them go.

“And I haven’t had enough,” said G-Force, ordering a shot.

People were resembling the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark—we would behold the awesome power, and our faces would melt. They managed to find their way onstage while the house band took an intermission. One was particularly enamoured of the keyboard.

“You might want to Lysol that,” I said to the keyboardist when he returned. “In fact, you might want to burn down everything within a four-mile radius.”

Things took an upward swing when we were simultaneously hit up by three roofers from Ireland, (“I apologize for my nation,” I said, indicating the Village People) all of whom were currently becoming very rich men by picking up post-hurricane construction work, which probably explained why, as one of them threw me around the dance floor, he kept yelling “I LOVE AMERICA!!”

They were alarmingly culturized, screaming the words of “I Will Survive” over the band, and excellent conversationalists. “What do you do for a living?” one asked me.

“I’m a writer,” I said.

“And what do you write?”

“Things that don’t make much money.”

“Well, you should hang in there,” he said solemnly as his friends nodded. “Think of the woman who wrote all the Harry Potter books. Write something like that.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Or,” he added, “Winnie the Pooh!”

We left the Irish Tenors behind at three in the morning wih a high-quality version of “I Love This Bar,” despite their entreaties to invite them home to, quote, “a party.” The entire encounter was summed up by Flipper: “Nice guys,” she said, “but oh my God, the teeth.” Then followed a discussion of socialized health care, and modern toothpastes, and how for some reason these two things seemed to have resulted in utter lack of oral care in the entirety of the British Isles.

“Solid good times,” I said as the man in the green fright wig rolled past. He had since added an X of electrical tape over one nipple. I cannot wait for Thanksgiving.