Fright on Fairmont Street

The nicest compliment people could give Elle Becker this Saturday is to tell her that she’s one sick f***.

She’d like it if people raise their eyebrows and believe something is seriously wrong with her.
So she said on an October afternoon as she tinkered with a flashing red object in a jar labeled ‘heart of bat.’

Judging by her preparations two weeks before her Halloween party, Becker is well on her way to achieving the reaction she seeks.

Becker, 36, is hosting her third Halloween party in four years on Saturday night, and the cauldron of ideas in her head is bubbling over.

Her decoration collection alone would rival any Halloween superstore: stuffed snakes from a taxidermist, a blood-splattered chainsaw that plays loud whirring noises, and rubbery body parts with bones jutting out are just a few of the ghoulish items that bring a smile to Becker’s face.

And surely the decapitated heads in her foyer are deterring any would-be thieves in her Columbia Heights townhouse.

“I don’t have to go insane,” she said, “but if I do have life-size mummies in the living room, it’s fun.”

Champion of the Sun

In the darkness of night. In dimly lit alleys and in shadows on creaky wooden porches.

That's when mysteries are formed and revealed. Right?


Ah, but I'm finding the mysteries of the day are far more complex. Day people are creatures who openly move about during daylight hours, who run errands while freely soaking up vitamin D instead of squeezing in a grocery store trip by moonlight after a long day at the office. They are the women who attend mid-morning yoga classes, the city employees who clean up roadside brush and the backpack-clad kids who saunter home from the bus in the afternoon.

I never thought much about the day people or what day things happened when I was tucked away in an office. But now that home is my office, answers to some of my previously unknown yet apparently burning questions have been revealed.