50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 40
For most of the year, the Naval Academy told us exactly what to wear.
On Halloween, things got interesting.
Even as a plebe, the night had a particular energy. Every class, every company had some costume fun. Company Officers sometimes brought their children through the halls in costume. The treat was wearing something different. The tricks were still ahead.
Dressing up at the Academy in my time was nothing like what it is now. There was no Amazon delivery of a well-fitted character costume. You worked with what you had. For me, as a plebe, that meant uniform pieces repurposed into something vaguely monstrous. I have a photo from one of those years where I appear to be going for ghoul, or possibly vampire. The execution was roughly homemade. The spirit was willing.
Within the company walls, costumes were relatively benign. Vampires. Ghosts. Bloody bodies and faces. The familiar vocabulary of October 31.
The dining hall was something else.
The parade of costumes through Bancroft during the evening meal was unbelievable—creative, shocking, not all of it gross, but punctuated with moments of: how are they even thinking about this? Cross-dressing was standard. Guys in nun habits and Playboy bunny ears. And then the costumes that concealed the person underneath and revealed something you couldn’t quite unsee. Some characters wouldn’t be tolerated now. Several were wearing history as a joke: a few phallus-looking creations and More than a few costumes that left nothing to the imagination. The creativity was real. So was the jaw-dropping.
My favorite Halloween was the year I dressed as an angel.
It was my attempt at an honest signal of where my faith was going. My roommate wore her father’s old sailor uniform.
Two women at the Naval Academy. One in a sailor suit handed down from a father who had worn it for real—one with a harp.
Neither of us had to explain it.
Not every trick was confined to Halloween.
Peanut butter and jelly sat on the dining tables year-round. For hungry midshipmen who needed filling up, the jars were a small mercy—most of the time.
Someone—and this was not spontaneous; this was deliberate—would take an unopened jar of peanut butter and work it carefully. A small cavity hollowed out. Filled with jelly. The surface smoothed back over, looking untouched. A “virgin” jar, they called it. An unsuspecting mid would reach in and find what was hidden inside.
The joke had a target. It was not subtle about what that target was.
There is no official record of this either. I doubt it appears in any Academy history. It arrived before we did, or maybe with us — I am not certain. What I know is that the jar sitting on the table looked like every other jar. You had no way of knowing until you reached in.
One other tradition wasn’t restricted to Halloween. A feely. I first experienced this during plebe summer at the dining table. An upperclassman would slide his hand under the table and squeeze the knee of the plebe to his left. No warning. No context. The plebe is left shocked, still deciding what to do with the signal.
The task was to pass it on.
The upperclassmen watched and waited. The point was discomfort, dressed up as fun.
We learned fast to pass it along impassively. But when a female plebe sat next to a male upperclassman—which was inevitable—the senior had a different opportunity. The squeeze happened. Then came the question, directed at her: What are you doing?
The discomfort was the point. All plebes both male and female were the target and the evidence.
If you tried to look this up, you would find no official record. I doubt it still carries on. I know it existed before women arrived. We gave it a different kind of charge.
It was one night a year. We wore what we could find. We saw what we saw. Then November came and the uniforms went back on and that was that.
Until the following October.
Monday Meanderings is a series of 50 posts marking 50 years of women at the U.S. Naval Academy. New posts publish every Monday
I wonder what became of the men who wore such offensive costumes? Halloween was creative, not much was funny.