Last week, someone asked me a question for which I had no ready answer... a question no one's asked me for decades.  "So what are you going to be for Halloween?" my friend wanted to know.  "With any luck, gone," I told her.

She rephrased the query.  "No, I mean, what are you dressing up as?"

Me?  Dressing up?  I suppose I could buy some pantyhose and heels, put on a skirt and disguise myself as a grownup.  That would fool almost anyone who knows me, but I'm not willing to be that uncomfortable even for a few hours.

I'm not so old that I don't remember when "What are you going to be for Halloween?" was a question of elementary school importance, second only to "What are you getting for Christmas?"  Neither am I too old to be embarrassed by the memory of my nearly annual foray into pink princessness.  This vain exercise was interrupted only by the year I dressed as a cowgirl in what were really just my everyday second-grade clothes... a Dale Evans fringed leather skirt and vest that I wore to school day after day after day with red boots that allowed me to ride without a horse.  (My mother was a patient woman.)

Part of the difficulty with the pink princess thing was that I was so decidedly unprincess-like:  not one pretty thing about me.  I was always slightly grubby around the edges, a skinny, long-legged kid with scrawny wrists sticking from the sleeves of my pseudo-gossamer gown.  No one would ever take me for fairy-tale royalty.  Add to that, pink paradoxically washes out my complexion, making me look as if I'm about to come down with the flu.

Then there are the glasses, without which, even as a kid, I was barely ambulatory.  Put the glasses on over the silver-lame half-mask and you're a horror movie insect.  Slide the mask over the glasses and you give a distorted, space-alien shape to the face.  Either way, I soon consigned the mask to the bottom of my bag, all the better to scurry quickly from house to house and devote myself to the real work of efficiently collecting as much candy as possible.  We lived in a small town and, masked or not, everybody knew who you were anyway.

Dreams of Disney princesshood die hard but self-awareness soon won out. Shortly after I reached double digits, I took refuge in the generic bum disguise... trashy jeans and an old jacket of Dad's over a faded flannel shirt... not that different from most of  my current wardrobe, although the look was accessorized with an artificial 5-o'clock shadow and a shapeless felt hat found in the back of the hall closet.  This worked much better for me.  Most of my friends were boys, and I slipped into being just one of the gang.

My mother heartily approved of my approach, which took her out of the costume-providing business entirely.  A no-nonsense and decidedly non-crafty person, Mom once attended a party, for which invitees were instructed to dress as geographical locations, wearing her everyday clothing with an alarm clock hung from a cord around her neck.  She was Wake Island.  You have to admire that kind of simplicity.

I stretched the bum thing into young adulthood, thus weathering years when my female contemporaries favored the sexy Catwoman-Bat Girl-Wonder Woman look, something I knew wouldn't work any better for me than pink princessness.  I envied my friend Tom's annual disguise as a nun on roller skates, but I possessed neither the habit or the balance for that.

In my full adulthood, I've adopted a truly minimalist approach to the whole Halloween thing.  When I find myself in any sort of disguise-mandatory situation, I wear the black jeans and turtleneck that are normal attire and top the ensemble with a T-shirt that reads, "This is my costume."

Unfortunately, the T-shirt, as you might expect, is jack-o'lantern orange, the one color I look worse in than pink.  Still, I think Mom would be proud.