“All this world is but a play. Be thou
the joyful player.”
Halloween—San
Francisco’s favorite holiday! In spite of a light rain, hundreds turned up on
Belvedere St., a neighborhood famous for its Halloween spirit. Three blocks in
which the street is blocked off to traffic, most every house is decorated to
the max, folks sit on the front steps with buckets of candy and the streets
swarm with adults and kids in mostly home-made costumes. There are garages
filled with coordinated music and dancing ghosts, real people dancing in
second-story windows, pumpkin carving that deserves its own gallery in the
museum, a live band at the end of the street and more. So fun to show the
Interns and out-of-town friends San Francisco at its best. One commented:
“It’s like Disneyland— without the long
lines, expensive tickets and corporate sponsorship!”
Yes, indeed. It
is homegrown fun and frivolity for no other reason than to have a rollicking
good time, be a bit zany and crazy, try on someone or something else’s persona
for one wild night. That’s the San Francisco way, a city built by folks
discontent with the stories they were handed down, the just a bit-too-settled
lives they were expected to inherit, folks who felt a wanderlust and followed
Horace Greeley’s advice, “Go west.” They came to the edge of the continent and
the edge of their comfortable psychic landscape and kept reaching, pushing out
the borders of the imagination and willing to hang out with their demons and
monsters, their fool-selves and circus acrobats, their jazz improvisations
outside the chords and their poems breaking free of conventional meters. They
walked the tightrope of excess, swung from the rafters of play, pushed out the
forms where love might live. One ongoing Halloween night.
But in the big
picture, there is safety in playing the full range of characters available to
us precisely because it is play. The
mask will come off the next day and we get to choose when to put it on again.
It is safe because we are playing with fake light sabers instead of real
assault weapons. We are roaring like demons just for fun instead of seriously
ranting like demons to get elected. We are making light shows with explosive
music instead of stockpiling megaton weapons and entering the theater of war. The
danger comes from those who refuse the play of life, who accept the mask pushed
onto their face by those who hate, who never wholly met their angel and were
left with nothing but their devil. Behind their mask is the frightened or
wounded or bullied or bullying little boy or girl and they hold on tight to
the edges for fear that the true revelation of their character would kill them. And it would—kill their inauthentic selves, that is. I believe something truer would grow from the courageous act of being unmasked.
Like so many,
each of the next eight days will find me shaking with fear that the masked
bandits might win, the ones who can’t tell the difference between the mask and
the true face. I will have to talk myself down from the ledge, keep faith in
the true lightness of play amidst the heavy consequences of our future at
stake.
But meanwhile, I
sure had a helluva good time going up and down the street on a San Francisco
Halloween Night.