Happy Halloween

Halloween during my first year of law school completely sneaked up on me. Law school has a tendency to make you forget the outside world, so when on a Friday morning, I showed up to my 9:00am Contracts class and saw one of my classmates dressed as a clown - with a red nose, a red curly haired wig, and a bright yellow jumpsuit - I figured he had lost his mind. I wasn’t the only one. Several of my classmates watched him cautiously from a distance, paranoid our time might have come for one of those horrific school shootings, only instead of a trench coat, the shooter had chosen a more jovial, but no less terrifying clown outfit. Finally, it was the professor who remembered that Halloween would take place over the weekend, so he acknowledged the clown and wished the class a happy holiday. Collectively, everyone went, “Oh yeahhhh.”

After class and a nap, I went to find some of my friends and try to come up with some Halloween plans. Only one of my friends had marked the holiday on his calendar. Everyone else, like me, had completely forgotten it was late October. He announced there was a big rave in San Francisco and one of Europe’s hottest deejays would be spinning. We all hated techno, so we were far from impressed, but the idea of going to a rave in the city sounded exciting and refreshingly unlike what law students would normally do on a Friday night.

Of course, there was the matter of finding costumes.

“We should all be Supreme Court Justices,” I suggested. Everyone liked the idea and started shouting off which justice they wanted to be.

“I’ll be Scalia”

“I’ll be Clarence Thomas.”

And that’s were it stopped. It was a little embarrassing, but after two full months of law school, we were having trouble naming the rest of the justices, let alone knowing what they looked like. My short Jewish friend chimed in saying, “I guess I could be Ruth Bader Ginsberg.”

Then we thought twice about it. Did we really want to be in the middle of a rave, trying to explain to every girl we met who exactly William Renquist or Stephen Breyer were, and why we had chosen to dress up like them? So we went with more generic costumes. Instead of Chief Justice Renquist, I went as a cowboy. Instead of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, my Jewish friend, whose dad was a surgeon, wore scrubs and said he was an ER doctor. Clarence Thomas went as Hugh Hefner. And Scalia put on a headband, wristbands, and some running shoes, and claimed to be “a guy at the gym.”

The rave was fun, tough we felt a little out of place. We stood in a corner of the room, drinking beer and watching everyone dance and enjoy the drugs they were on. At that moment I was very glad we hadn’t dressed as the Supreme Court justices because we would’ve probably freaked everybody out – standing there with our robes and gavels, passing judgment on everyone. We might’ve been asked to leave.



“Is this the famous deejay?” I asked, yelling over the music, to my friend the techno fan.

“I don’t think so.” He said “Actually, I have no idea what he looks like.”

I asked him the same thing each time a new deejay took the stage, and he answered the same way, until finally the rave was over. We knew we had seen a famous European deejay, but we never specifically learned which one he was. During the car ride home, we each gave our best guess as to which one it might have been.

“It was probably the one in the orange tank-top. He looked pretty European.”

“No. I think it was the one with the bongo drums. He seemed to get the best response from the crowd.”

And that was a fitting theme for the night. We could say we had been to a rave and seen a famous European deejay. We could tell people that, and sound like hip twenty-somethings. But in all actuality, we felt awkward and out of place the entire night. We weren’t cool; we were law students. Our costumes sucked and we couldn’t even tell who the famous European deejay was.

But at least we tried. And that’s what’s important. Law school has a tendency to make you forget that you are still young. It’s almost impossible for a law student to feel cool. But every once in a while it’s important to try. Whether we fit in or not, we spent Halloween at a rave in San Francisco. And it beat the hell out of dressing up like a clown for a 9:00am Contracts class.