You take a big Miami moon and mix it with a small bat boy, a sleeping beauty, a jack sparrow with all the requisite blue eyes and long dreadlocks, a kitty cat who turns into a donkey, a tall man with a small woman grafted to his tummy, an orange-suited convict, a blonde bombshell, a net-stockinged tutu'd punk teen, a little red devil. Am I leaving anybody out? Oh, yeah, me. Add one goofball with shades. Sprinkle Miami moondust and stir with leaf of palm, and you get. . .

Oh, oh. Here come some more monsters. The hugest Frankenstein ever seen, twelve feet tall if he's an inch and right next to him is a fourteen-foot magistrate ghoul with black holes for eyes and chain mail hair cascading over his shoulders. I peek low -- the ghoul guy's on stilts and Frankie's not twelve feet tall, he's ten leagues or chains.

The whole world's on tilt. And there's hands grabbing ankles under tables and someone standing at the door with a stand-up bass playing the old TV theme of Batman as our little bat boy enters the house. There's one bluish-grayish-ickish house with a yard woven to the max with spider webbing. We found this freakhouse by following bloody tracks on the road.

Predator leaps out of an open door and a hundred kids scream muddy murther!

The whole neighborhood's laughing. The moon's got the face of Peter Lorre, and he's laughing, too. I am laughing at everything but especially at my daughter Hannah the kitty who has turned into a clipping clopping donkey. Will the man with the old lady stuck to his chest ever catch bat boy whose pumpkin is so full of goodies he has to sit down and get his breath.

I want to do this again next year. . .