You know that age when you are too cool

to go trick-or-treating, but you really want the candy?  That's the age that I was in 1978.   I had no idea what I wanted to dress up as that year, but I knew that I wanted to go.  My friend Wes told me that he was going to dress up as Paul Stanley for a Halloween thing he was having at school.  He suggested that we use his extra face paint to dress me up as my favorite KISS guy, Peter Chriss.  That sounded like a pretty cool plan to me.

I went over to Wes's house that night to get my makeup on and found out there had been a change in plans.  Wes's face reacted badly to the makeup that he had had on all day.  I was still going as Peter Chriss, but we had to brainstorm to come up with a costume for him.  We improvised, raiding his step-mom's and his older sister's closets and make-up kits to dress him up like a woman.  He used the same wig that he was going to use for his Paul Stanley costume, and the whole outfit came together pretty well.

I thought I looked pretty cool, but despite the drumsticks and uncanny resemblence to Peter Chriss, most of the old ladies thought I was supposed to be a cat.  I finally got tired of explaining myself and just started agreeing that I was just a cat.

Wes's purse doubled as a great place to stash all the candy that we collected.  Before we left, he cleaned it out to make room for the candy and I got to see a feminine pad for the first time.  We were quite the pair that night, walking around Philo as a cross-dressing Paul Stanley and a drum-playing cat.