Live Entertainment in the month of Halloween

There are two holidays in October, but Christopher Columbus (rightly or wrongly) has become just another reason for government employees to have a long weekend. Halloween, on the other hand, seems to become more popular year after year.

In my youth, a few of us youngsters managed to get up a mask and a paper sack and went around to neighbors begging for treats. A typical Halloween yielded a bit of candy and a few scowls from irate folks who wished we'd just go back home. As a teenager, I took my sisters on a couple of "trick or treat" forays, but the holiday was mostly forgettable until hubby and I had children. By then, trick or treat had moved from the neighborhood to downtown for the annual "Halloween Walk." Our children always enjoyed this event.

Nowadays, even adults enjoy the macabre celebration, and a more literate way to partake in Halloween is to see a play or take a ghost tour. In our neck of the woods, there are several choices—

The Aurora Theatre in Lawrenceville has a new version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which will run on weekends through the end of the month. The Aurora is also the host for Lawrenceville's Ghost Tour. There are both walking tours and trolley tours of the city. The Winder-Barrow Community Theatre is doing The Haunting of Hill House on two consecutive weekends, beginning October 29. The city of Roswell also has walking ghost tours, which leave from the city bandstand. Savannah has year-round ghost tours, and there are actually several different companies which do the "trolley tour" which is my favorite way to experience this colonial city. Another favorite venue, The Shakespeare Tavern, is doing Macbeth for six nights only, including Halloween.

While I sometimes write about terrifying situations, I don't particularly want to participate, so "haunted house" attractions don't attract me. However, for those who like this form of entertainment, here is a list of places to scream in Georgia.

Epitaph, Elegy, and Eulogy

My neighbor loves holidays, and the Halloween decorations have been up for a couple of weeks. There are more tombstones, ghosts and goblins than I can count across the road. My own children are inordinately fond of Halloween, and their favorite way to celebrate is to find a really good "haunted house" or see a movie with a horror theme. They recently asked hubby to order something about zombies from Netflix for this year's celebration.

The tombstones of Halloween are phony, and literature, by definition, is fictional. Still, some of the greatest lines in all of western literature are from eulogies, elegies, and epitaphs.

Of course, a eulogy is the talk given at a funeral, which differs from a funeral sermon, in that it is a remembering rather than a message for the audience. Shakespeare's famous tragedy has Mark Antony eulogizing Caesar with these words, "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." In a more humorous vein, George Carlin supposedly said, "I'm always relieved when someone is delivering a eulogy and I realize I'm listening to it." Despite the growing popularity of all hallows eve, most folks do not want to dwell upon death. Indeed one of my husband's friends says, "As long as you are not in the headlines or the obituaries of your local paper, you are doing okay." Hubby heartily agrees. A guy at my church quips, "It is better to be seen than viewed." Most of us feel that way.

The elegy is rare these days, since there are fewer poets, and fewer still who actually have talent. When I was in high school, I was struggling with my homework, and while standing at the counter in her kitchen, my mother proceeded to explicate Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." Only after she patiently led me through that poem did I realize the awe inspiring capacity of the educated mind. Mom did not finish college, but she was there to learn, and the knowledge she gained she used. Her explanation, done with no research at all, was superior to what most high school instructors could do. No one wrote an elegy for Irene, but when I remember all she did for me and for countless others, I covet the skill of someone who can write verse.

My parents are buried in one of those modern cemeteries, where the grave markers are so low that a bushhog can travel, unimpeded, across the graves. While efficient, such graveyards lack character. Older cemeteries have stones, large and small, marking the graves with sayings known as epitaphs. My sister enjoys visiting graves of famous and not so famous souls, reading the words of remembrance. Regardless of how the individuals lived their lives, the words used after death are usually flattering. As Thoreau stated, "The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth."

Others have said something similar, but Billy Sunday said, "Live so that when the final summons comes you will leave something more behind you than an epitaph on a tombstone or an obituary in a newspaper."