It was hot and I began to sweat. I had never seen, well, an orgy before, much less been invited to one. Actually we hadn’t been invited. And we weren’t going to be. Charlie looked at me deadpan and stated the obvious.

“I’m dressed as a chicken.”

It was true. From head to foot, Charlie was dressed as a giant red chicken, waddle and all. But at least you knew what he was. I’d come to this Halloween party wearing a neoprene scuba dive suit with an aluminum chimney pipe duct-taped to my chest. I’d painted my face silver and given myself a Mohawk. When people asked me what I was I would just say “Thank you,” or “Batman,” or “Are you kidding? You don’t know? You really don’t know!”

Because the orgy was not going to become a part of our evening, we went back downstairs to the party. Outside it was a rainy Seattle night. We were in our late 20s, an age where single people who dress up for Halloween parties also dress to flirt. We weren’t even going to get that far.

That’s when Charlie had the great idea to take our sense of isolation one step further. We were out on the dance floor making grotesque and uncoordinated movements and he just froze. One foot in the air, his fluffy red wings open. He was staring at a spot on the ground and smiling like he’d just run into an old friend. I let four beats pass then followed suit, crouching slightly, twisting my hips and holding out my hands like I was scattering birdseed. Frozen.

At first it was embarrassing. I felt so self-conscious. Here we were, posing literally in a sea of posers and pretty people bobbing and gyrating all around us. Someone, a guy, danced past me in a bathrobe without even a glance. Others bumped into us by accident. It was our fault for not respecting that natural flow of bodies in motion. Then, after a few minutes of being ignored, I started to feel like I was a part of things anyway. A stone in a swift moving river. And I liked it.

So does Jorge, one of the human statues along downtown Barcelona’s famous esplanade, Las Ramblas. He and 30 other artists earn their livings by doing nothing. By standing stone still. For the tourists. And the nothing that they do is so much work.

The hours pass. The tourists stop and gawk. By 11 a.m. the sun is burning high overhead. In pancake makeup, dressed as soldiers, Indians, famous artists, guys being blown in an invisible wind on stationary bicycles, gargoyles, maraca playing dandies, in whatever their elaborate costumes, these artists, men and women alike, suffer. And it’s not just the heat.

They are taunted, tempted, heckled and pulled on, mostly by kids. They are booed or cheered and leered at, all in attempt to break their ghost-like will.

At that Halloween party some 15 years ago the same thing happened to us. Where the crowd of dancers once ignored us, more and more of them began to notice. Not just that we were in the way. But that we were statues, purposeful statues, mannequin on a mission that apparently did not include them. A couple of people tried to dance with us but we weren’t in the dancing mood. Some sneered. So we were rebels too.

How dare we? But how dare we what? Were we making a statement? Were we too good for the revelry? Had someone sent in saboteurs to undermine the merriment? The worst, it seemed, for the onlookers, was that they could cajole no answers from us.

The difference between Charlie and me and Barcelona’s human statues is that no one threw us coins. The men and women on Las Ramblas earn their living this way. They’re professionals in spectacular costumes, with spectacular patience. Listening, no doubt, as the euros land in the cups and hats placed before them. We only lasted for about 20 minutes. The two women who finally grabbed our arms and began manipulating our limbs like marionettes to the music eventually got us to smile, then laugh.

Come on, they said, let us get you some drinks. We acquiesced. It was time to flirt after all.

Though many people think of it as a country of two fiercely competing languages, with two groups of people who – even centuries on – still can’t get along.

Still guessing?

The World’s Clark Boyd speaks with anchor Lisa Mullins about the challenges of celebrating an American tradition in a place where the locals are a bit wary of it. Clark lives in Belgium, the answer to the Geo Quiz and he has a young daughter who’s raring to go trick-or-treating for Halloween.
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LISA MULLINS: Halloween is the jumping off point for our Geo Quiz today. The place we’re looking for is in Europe. Need more? Okay, but in at least one village, you’re going to find witches, warlocks, ghosts and goblins and some very excited children. This country has not one, not two, but three official languages. Even so a lot of people think of it as a country of two fiercely competing languages, and two groups of people who, even centuries on, still can’t get along. Still guessing?  Well, I’ll tell you the answer, and how one American has been searching for a place to celebrate Halloween this year, in just about a minute. I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. Halloween is Sunday. Most any kid in America knows that. And increasingly, kids in other countries know the holiday, too. But in some places, there is resistance for some reason, to having children go out in the dark in scary costumes and collect gobs and gobs of candy. Well, that’s the case in Belgium, which is the answer to our Geo Quiz, by the way. Belgium is also where The World’s Clark Boyd is right now. And what’s a man got to do in Belgium to arrange for his little girl to go trick or treating.

CLARK BOYD:  Well, it’s a fairly detailed process actually. We had to do some serious research and some serious digging. Essentially our first point of contact was, of course, our daughter’s school and say is the school doing anything for Halloween? Are you allowing kids to come to school dressed up? And we received a very curt email back from the headmaster saying well you Americans find Halloween to be fairly normal, here in Belgium the Belgians find it to be macabre and unpleasant.

MULLINS:  Well, that’s the whole point.

BOYD: Yeah. Well that was kind of what I was tempted to say to the headmaster as well.

MULLINS: By the way, when you say headmaster, how old is your daughter?

BOYD: My daughter’s four and a half.

MULLINS: Oh, so this is an age appropriate holiday?

BOYD: Yes, for her. I mean she, that’s all she’s been talking about. For the last two months, all I’ve heard is daddy I can’t wait to be a butterfly fairy princess, ballet dancer, sort of thing.

MULLINS: Alright. So she’s old enough to know about Halloween clearly and look forward to it, but she’s feeling a little bit lonely. So how did you Clark help her out?

BOYD: Once we heard that the school wasn’t really going to be doing anything for Halloween, I started digging around because what I noticed when I looked around was that what the headmaster of the school told me wasn’t squaring with what I was seeing on the streets. I mean the storefronts are filled with Halloween displays. There is Halloween candy in the grocery stores. There were bars and cafes that were offering Halloween happy hours. So we started digging around a little bit and we actually found a community outside of Brussels, out in the Flemish region of the country, which said that they were going to do an American-style Halloween. Se we signed up and last night we took her out there.

MULLINS:  So what was that like? Did it look like an American Halloween?

BOYD: You know, it looked like a little suburb. There was a golf course nearby. It could have been any suburban community in the United States. The decorations were fantastic. There were people who were scaring the kids as they came up to the door. All the kids were really into it. Their costumes were fantastic. And I have to say that the only big difference was, is that when you open the door you didn’t know whether you were going to be speaking Dutch, French or English.

MULLINS: And how about the Halloween treats?

BOYD: The Halloween treats. Yes, my daughter has become a connoisseur now of the European candy varieties. There are a lot of Gummi Bear sorts of things. Haribo is very popular, these little Gummi Bears. She got a lot of chewy fruit sorts of things. And of course the requisite chocolate, so she was quite happy.

MULLINS: Absolutely. And what makes her dad happy in Halloween candy terms?

BOYD: Not that I would ever, ever, ever take any Halloween candy from my child, but I’m quite partial to the European variety of Kit Kat bars.

MULLINS: If you reach into that little sack, no one’s going to tell, Clark. The World’s Clark Boyd in Brussels. Happy Halloween.

BOYD: Thank you, Lisa. Same to you.

MULLINS:  And you can watch Clark’s quest to celebrate Halloween with his daughter in Belgium in an audio slide show at TheWorld.org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Of course, we know there are a lot of other great Halloween-esque destinations. The BBC’s David Allan recommends the Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, the Halloween festivities in the Lan Kwai Fong district in Hong Kong, and Sleepy Hallow, New York.

Also in this episode, we spend some time pondering an out-of-this-world holiday in space. Businessmen like billionaire Richard Branson is betting big that enough people will want to fork over tens of thousands of dollars for a few minutes on weightlessness on the very edge of space. Call it the trip of  a lifetime? Sure. The ultimate bucket list item? Most definitely. But tourism? Well, not everyone who has bought the ticket to space, and taken the ride, wants to be called a mere tourist.

How about you? Would you part with $200,000 for a six minute ride in space? Tell us below.

(Photo: Stubes99)

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