Jamaican Halloween Spooktacular 2013 - Track Twenty-Three - Midnight Hour/Mask In The Dark

And so dear friends... we've reached the final track in the Jamaican Halloween Spooktacular 2013.  Like always it has been a lot of fun putting this mix together and sharing it with you and I hope it has provided enough creeps, spooks, chills and thrills to have made your October just a little more enjoyable.  Yes, we have reached the Big Day and like years past the fun is just beginning... for the kids at least.

I again will be in charge of transporting the kids around for trick or treating and this year I've got something diabolical up my sleeve for them - my sons have reached the age where I'm setting them up for the "trick or treat until you drop" technique which I used to practice many years ago... we've decided to forgo with the chintzy plastic bags and step up to the king-sized cotton pillowcase.  Trick or treating will not commence until either the pillowcase is full or their feet can't take another step, whichever comes first... and I will look on with a huge smile on my face and enjoy every moment!

A couple weeks ago my 9-year-old daughter gave me one of the biggest compliments I could ever wish to receive... She said "Dad, you're the King of Halloween." I had to fight the urge to hug her and tell her, with tears of joy streaming down my face, that that was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever said to me.  Bridget's simple words made me realize that all my efforts in helping them put together their costumes, and all the Halloween decorating around the house, and all the apple cider, and all the trips to the pumpkin patch, and all the scary movies (appropriate enough for them to watch of course), and all the spooky music, and all the trick or treating, and all the visits to the Halloween stores, and all the ghost stories (except for Me Ti Doughty Walker, which still terrifies the hell outta them), and all the pumpkin carving, and the yearly repeated viewings of "It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown," and all the love I have exhibited for this one final day in October, have worked... they love it just as much as I always have.  Hopefully many, many years from now, when I'm dead and buried, they'll have fond memories of Dad's fanaticism for Halloween and carry on the traditions I have established with them with my grandchildren and future generations.  But enough about that... let's get to the final track!

We've got a double feature, so to speak, to wrap up the Spooktacular!  Horace Ferguson gives us his rendition of Wilson Pickett's "Midnight Hour" and we segue rather nicely into Clint Eastwood's "Mask In The Dark," taken from both sides of a GG Hits 12" circa 1983. 

2013's completely uncut Jamaican Halloween Spooktacular will be available soon for those who have not been keeping tabs on the daily posts, so watch out for it!

And I want to leave you with these words, stolen from Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds."  75 years later, it still wraps up the spirit of this holiday so succinctly and perfectly...

"This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character, to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be; The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying "Boo!" Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the next best thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember please for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian, it's Halloween."

Horace Ferguson - Midnight Hour/Clint Eastwood - Mask In The Dark

Happy Halloween!!