

One of my best friends, Barbara, and I no longer live in the same city. We first met at the restaurant where she was a shift supervisor. The owners of the restaurant where we worked always decorated the place for all the seasonal holidays – Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Easter. Since Barbara was supervisor of the evening shift, most of the actual decorating fell to her. All of us on her shift had to help. While she would use most of the same decorations from year to year, somehow she always managed to make it look different.
But at Halloween Barbara would really outdo herself. Skeletons dangled from light fixtures; spiders hovered overhead in the stalls of the women’s washroom; the huge front window was one big tangled web. I didn’t give it much thought until a few years later I had stopped by her place on Oct. 31st for a quick visit and discovered that her house resembled the restaurant almost exactly. Except the pumpkins – the ones at the restaurant were made of plastic and the ones that decorated Barbara’s front steps were real and meticulously hand-carved. And yes, in true Martha Stewart fashion, the seeds had been toasted and the pulp magically transformed into pies. Barbara loved Halloween.

After seeing the movie “Jack the Bear” for the first time, I hurried to the phone and called Barbara. Based on the book by Dan McCall, Danny DeVito plays a TV horror-movie host. As the father of two sons, he tries to keep his family and himself from falling apart after his wife’s death. Of course, as someone who’s in the business of the macabre, John Leary (DeVito’s character) loves Halloween and the way he decorated the front yard and the house instantly brought Barbara and her similar passion to mind. But Barbara has never seen the movie and every time I ask her, she admits, that even though other people have mentioned it to her as well, she still hasn’t seen it.