Randy Robertson and I registered for this year's Halloween trade show in January as Wyandotte Jaycees because Jaycees are allowed to go as buyers. We then spent three months deciding if we should go ("You wanna go?", "I don't know. You wanna go?", "I don't know. You wanna go?" etc.). On Friday, March 21st, the day the show began, I decided on the way to Wallyball that I did want to go. So when I got to Zodiac, I told Randy, "Let's go. After a few games of Wallyball." So I arranged to meet Randy in Lincoln Park [Motto: Abe Lincoln probably never slept here] at 11:30 pm.

Kids, let me give you some advice: Don't decide to pack for a weekend with 10 minutes of planning following several games of Wallyball. I rushed home, showered and packed (estimated turnaround time: 23 minutes) and went back to pick up Randy. I managed to forget: my wallet (retrieved, fortunately), a change of underwear and socks, various diabetic supplies and my head (because it wasn't screwed on too tight). Randy either didn't forget anything, or was too embarrassed to admit it. We finally gave up driving at 1:30am, when my eyes glazed over permanently from the onrushing white lane division lines. That's hard to take when you're going 85 mph (Yes, we did TOO have to go that fast.)

Following a brief hotel stay in Battle Creek, Michigan [Motto: Actually, it's more like a river than a creek...], we had breakfast at the home of the world's happiest waitress. She was way too cheerful for people who have slept on the beds of Red Carpet Inn for 6 hours. Rejuvenated with coffee, we again rode the road to Chicago.

But not for very long. We stopped at Farmer Friday's, a store in the town of Coloma, Michigan [Motto: It's not a toothpaste. Or a hair tonic]. Farmer Friday's is the only store in the state (and possibly this dimension) featuring a fresh food market combined with a year round Halloween store. If you like Oct. 31st, you have to see it. It's too stupid to miss. Inside you find regular supermarket-style open fresh fruit and vegetable coolers with masks mounted right above them on pegs stuck in the wall. Where else can you thump melons under the watchful gaze of the Ayatollah Kohmeni? (Nowhere now, he's dead.) They also have what was once a meat market, but now features various grisly props highlighted by the fluorescent lights in the glass meat display cases. Shades of cheesy haunted houses!

The piece de resistance was their Haunted House. Yes! They have a year round Haunted House! Randy and I couldn't resist. You might think such a year round house would have a slick professional look, along the lines of Cedar Point's Earthquake ride (remember THAT?). Rest assured, this thing makes ours look like Taj Ma Hal. Plywood walls that don't quite reach the ceiling and overly spray painted props abound. Everything is automated, so the shocks aren't always that effective, but I jumped once or twice. OK, five or six times. We also got some fun house style ideas for this year...

Following this Halloween primer, we jumped back on 94 and drove into Chicago. Now, we didn't have a map, of course (Left that at home with my underwear.) (Well, not in the same place), so we had to wing it. Fortunately this was my third trip to this event, so I kind of remembered where it was. We arrived without incident.

We had to register, where we were given our official name badge with the official black sticker containing the official letters TW (TW? The halloWeen show? Truly Weird? Try Wolframite? Terrible Wordplay acronyms?) The girl said the sticker was "for security reasons". Riiight. We then headed in. The show was interesting to me, as it always is. Most of the haunted house stuff was in a darkened area, set up to look like a haunted house. In fact, if our haunted house had 30 foot high ceilings, 50,000 square feet and little tiny booths containing sales hungry sellers, it would have been dead (get it?) on. Your goal as a buyer at this show is to collect as many flyers and business cards as you can without giving anything in return. "Could I have a flyer?" "Sure, got a business card?" "Well, no...we're Jaycees!" Here you offer your show badge as proof. And grin stupidly. "Well, I guess you can have one, but..." "Thanks!" Snatch. Grab. Run!

We actually saw several new ideas that we could incorporate into this year's haunted house. There were a couple new interesting props and we grabbed enough flyers and business cards so that we can purchase some of this stuff when the season comes upon us. Three things always fascinate me about this show: 1) some people are dressed in costume 2) many of these people are about your parent's age and 3) they love this stuff; "Hey honey, c'mere and look at this Rotting Rudolph corpse with the realistic gristle. Isn't that a hoot?" These people are buyers from small retail stores, preparing for their biggest sales holiday.

After two and a half hours of examining Halloween stuff, we had had enough. As part of your registration, they give you $4 worth of tickets for free food. We headed to the cafeteria area, but stopped dead (get it?) in our tracks when we couldn't decide if the chunk of roast beef they were carving was a prop from the show or not. "Gee Randy, the gristle on that thing looks suspiciously like Rotting Rudolph..." So we decided to strike out for the city proper for food.

The nice thing about Chicago is that you can take the subway to just about anyplace. We got on a subway train (cost: $1.50) featuring a conductor (Ride Engineer?) who had a key that activated a speaker system in the train so he could incomprehensibly announce the next station. ("Next stop: Garuflsdks Eusdfkjsdfs.") The key wasn't as interesting as the 95 key chains he had attached to it. It was like a peacock with the key as the beak and the multicolored mass of key fobs as the tail. He'd never lose it, that's for sure. I'd have interviewed him for this feature but he was seriously occupied with putting the moves on a lady sitting near him. Ah, well. Having no guide or map, we had to rely on last year's subway travels to figure out where to go. We were fortunate again and arrived without incident on the corner of Some Street and Some Other Street.

Chicago is a shopping town during the day and we weren't really there to shop. It's neat to see the huge stores. (They have a three level Crate and Barrel. I didn't know Crate and Barrel could come up with three levels of stuff) but after walking through hundreds of booths of Halloween paraphernalia...well, the normal stuff just doesn't hold your interest. ("Hey Randy, notice how there's no internal organs sticking out of the mannequins? Isn't that bizarre?"). We did find a really expensive restaurant (cost of tip alone: $15) and a nice view of the Chicago skyline. Having had enough fun Chicago style, we did the only natural thing to do at this point: we found a convenient movie theater (cost: $8. Jeez). After 9 hours of walking around, it was a welcome respite. When the movie was over, we headed back to the subway to retrieve our car.

Since we didn't have room reservations in Chicago, we started driving back home when we got off the subway. We spent the night in Michigan City, Indiana [Motto: Of course it's in Indiana]. The rest of the trip back was fairly uneventful except for the fact that Randy ate an entire box of Caramel deLites girl scout cookies (cost: $3) pretty much by himself.

We finally hit the city limits of Detroit [Motto Say nice things about Detroit. We have guns.] at 8:30pm on Sunday and got home dead (get it?) tired. All in all, it was a lot of fun.