Talk of the Town - Hootie minus the Blowfish October 24 2001

There are several reasons for a kid to avoid Halloween:

1) ?Eating 87 Three Musketeers bars in ?a row can't be healthy.

2) ?Adults make you hand over cash ?to the U.N.

3) ?You could sprain an ankle after ?getting tangled in someone's

garden hose.

4) ?Past age 10, you feel pretty silly ?about it.

Then there are the darker, more adult reasons to deny Halloween. When it comes to negative spin, grown-ups can really lay it on. In certain ecclesiastical environs, it has become quite the thing to throw cold cider on the Oct. 31 tradition, with dire hints of sulfur, brimstone and the devil.

I am amused to see adults — who themselves survived trick-or-treating without developing a predilection for Beelzebub worship — now primly denying the custom to their children. It proves once again that Puritanism — memorably defined by H.L. Mencken as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy" — is alive and crankily well in America almost four centuries after its buckled-up arrival on our shores.

Yet Halloween persists. Not because we are a nation of fiendish Satan lovers, but simply because we enjoy a little make-believe. It's what keeps Halloween alive — the chance to be a princess or a pirate, a bandit or a ballerina, if only for a few hours. It's a bit of license we allow to children, knowing full well that the career options most adults fall into are far more prosaic. But why tell a prepubescent Star Trek captain that his grown-up destination will be life as a desk jockey on Planet Office Park No. 9? It would spoil the fun, not to mention the sugar rush.

After all, without Halloween, I would never have been Hootie the Owl.

Blurry home movies are the best proof historians have of this incident, which took place when I was 3. Cousin George, 4-and-a-half and far more mature, wore a bunny suit sewn by his grandma. The costume had an odd stain in the tail region that, to this day, George insists was just a flaw in the dyeing process. Sure.

For years I have tried to figure out why I was Hootie. He sure wasn't up there with any of the other more glamorous Baby Boom icons — Superman, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, et al. — who defined the era, primarily through television.

Hootie didn't have a TV show at all. But a check of the mighty Internet search engine Google.com does reveal that Hootie was the mascot symbol of Rexall Drug Stores ("We Deliver," presumably at night, hence the owl) back before the corner apothecary was swallowed up by big-box Z-Mart stores that also sell Buicks.

My mom can't recall why I became an owl, either. But like many other Americans, she patronized a drugstore, which explains the Rexall connection. In an early example of brand-awareness marketing technique, the company probably sold costumes of its mascot.

Relatives still talk about my role as Hootie, but it has nothing to do with how adorable I looked. Rather, it was my never-since-imitated glad-handing performance as neighborhood bon vivant.

Nobody told me that trick-or-treat was a hit-and-run proposition — that you're supposed to knock, get the goods and go. Since people were nice enough to give you something, I thought you were supposed to visit with them awhile.

[Note: According to a guy I know from Scranton, Pa., there are sections of the nation where Halloween participants are, in fact, expected to perform a trick — such as a song or dance — to earn their treat. He said this worked fine until his parents moved. Their first Halloween in New York, kids showed up to demand treats, only to have his parents stand there insisting on a trick. There was an ensuing standoff, and a good time was not had by all.]

Anyway, the 3-year-old me barged into all sorts of households, chatting the bejeepers out of bemused locals. This caused some dismay among my older cousins, who knew that time was money and candy. And would Hootie please flap his wings and move along?

Such impatience was lost on me. I have vivid memories of pulling up living room and kitchen chairs, and devouring the sweets they gave me right on the spot. It seemed the only polite thing to do, and I never regretted it.

I trick-or-treated for a dozen years after that. Lesser Halloween highlights followed — like the time Old Man Schmidt, deep into a six-pack, said, "Here's a dollar for each of you," when in fact he was giving out 10s and 20s. But nothing equaled the glory that was Hootie.

So count me among the wicked who will welcome a horde of pint-sized Power Rangers and prima ballerinas Oct. 31, and who still think Halloween is a fine thing. Because the devil isn't in a bit of make-believe by costumed kids. No, these days you have to beware the adults in plain clothes.

Glen Slattery hoots in Alpharetta.??