Where the Wild Things Are
When we were young, packs of unsupervised children roamed the city streets like motherless beasts on Halloween. We got bus transfers and gathered so many pounds of Fun-Size Milky Ways, and we had to stuff sacks in the bushes for future retrieval. These days, most kids are relegated to highly supervised trick-or-treat parties held in schoolyards and churchyards — in Southern California, they’re actually held in parking lots where vetted hosts arrange their cars with trunks full of candy — making our banshee heart wail. If trick-or-treating must be sequestered and scrutinized, we pray a
SuperNatural Halloween Party will always be held within the darkened halls of the natural history museum, because even we can imagine the thrill of trick-or-treating between live shark tanks and taxidermied lions. For the smaller kids, there’s face painting (which never gets old) and magic shows, and prizes for the best guess on the weight of the giant pumpkin before it is carved up into a fiendish face. Proceeds benefit the Academy’s education programs.
— Silke Tudor
415-379-8000
