The Halloween visiting event and our Halloween costumes were inspired by the facial cosmetics my mom was selling at home parties.

One of the unique items in the product line was a facial mask which was to be thickly slathered on the face and left to dry into a hard mask. It was some kind of fine textured sticky clay of a minty green color. As it dried it cracked into the texture of an ancient desert lake bed.

Though the promotional materials promised that the facial mask would make us beautiful, my college friend and I decided that it would do a better job of making us into Halloween monsters.

By that evening we had assembled our costumes that included heavy boots, gloves, black coats, bathing caps, scarves and hats to cover our hair.

We put black makeup around our eyes and on our lips, then carefully spread a layer of the pasty green goo on the rest of our faces. Placing plastic fangs into our mouths deformed the shape of our features enough that we were totally and frighteningly unrecognizable.

We knew that the biggest challenge would be not to laugh so much that our faces cracked off, once the beauty treatment dried into its hideous fractured texture.

We had great fun that night, visiting various friends while communicating only by grunts and gestures. In some cases we walked right into apartments, sat down and stayed awhile. Nobody recognized us. Some seemed a little nervous, most would not look us in the eye.

The most fun was the next day when people told about the giant monsters who had visited them on Halloween-- one surmising that it was a couple of adolescent boys who lived nearby.

We had trouble convincing them that it was us, until we provided insider details.

Years later my co-monster friend sent me a Halloween card with two monsters on the front. It said:

"These ghoulish things...

.... remind me of you."