I’m enjoying my first-ever experience as The Dude Hanging Out Candy On His Front Stoop tonight. In fact, I’m doing it as we speak, because the trick-or-treaters are fairly sporadic so I brought the ol’ Macbook outside with me.
And I just had my first experience with Scruffy Teenagers Hoarding Candy. These gentlemen did have costumes, though, which is more than I could say for myself for that year or two when I had no business trick-or-treating but did it anyway for the sugar rush. There were two of them and they took as excessive-but-not-insulting amount of candy from the bowl. On their way back to the sidewalk one of them eyed the yard signs in front or our house and our neighbors’.
He stopped and turned around. Then pointed to our Obama sign. “Is this yours?”
“Yep,” I said.
Then he pointed to the ones in our neighbors’ yard. (We have a shared stoop so it kind of looks like one yard.) “And what are those? Your neighbors?”
“LEON! Shut up! Let’s go!” said his friend.
“But they’ve got a McCain sign!” the first guy blurted.
They didn’t, actually, but the Mark Warner for Senate sign has a similar lettering and layout to a lot of McCain signs. Only so many ways you can do red, white, blue, and authoritative lettering, I guess.
“Read the sign, fool,” said the second guy, “It’s Obama, Warner, Moran. President, Senate, House. Come on, let’s go.”
And off they went, leaving me to wonder what Tricks McCain fans might be in for in this neighborhood, or whether it was just the sheer incongruity of the possibility of a McCain sign in northern Alexandria that threw him for a loop.