Sybil Bruncheon's 31 Days of Halloween!... October 29th, 2012… Lights OUT!!!

October 29th, 2012... After closing up our little place at the beach for the Winter, I had taken the last ferry out of Cherry Grove on Fire Island to Sayville, Long Island and rushed back to the NYC as Hurricane Sandy bore down on the Northeast. We lived on West 10th and Washington Street down in Greenwich Village with "a view of the world"!... all the way from the West 50s to the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, across to the Con Ed building on the far East side and down to Chinatown, Little Italy, and around to the World Trade Center and New Jersey... a view that you might have in a helicopter or if you were a billionaire! I had just gotten back to the city and stood at our windows watching as the storm got stronger and more turbulent with non-stop lightning and thunder... and then, suddenly there was a blue-purple flash of the Con Ed plant over on the East River... and the stunning, stunning march of blackness as it crushed each neighborhood, block by block, from the East River towards the Hudson. I stood there amazed to see the entire southern part of Manhattan go dark, from the Empire State building down to the financial district, a few buildings of which remained lit on their own emergency power generators. As the dark hit our block, we lit candles, and hurriedly filled pots, pans, and the bath tub with water!... water that quickly began to fail as the pressure slowly gave way.

In the following days, restaurants and stores began giving away their food and perishables. We were so lucky to have had our friend Barbara Grecki house us for the following week up on Central Park West and W. 66th Street. And although Halloween was completely canceled, I had actually packed my "Headless Fairy-Princess" costume for the occasion. Golly, that Central Park crowd gives fabulous candy!!... yes, they can be so stuck-up, but you can't argue with Teuscher champagne truffles in your plastic pumpkin, can you?? JEEEESH!

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Sybil Bruncheon's 31 Days of Halloween!... October 29, 2011... Frost on the Punkin'

October 29th, 2011… This was the Halloween show we were producing with the fabulous ladies of the Red Ribbon Foundation up in Greenwich, Connecticut! ....A Costume Ball and contest, an elaborately catered banquet, prizes, dancing, a whole evening of incredible fun that took months of planning MONTHS!!...and, well, do you remember what happened??? A freak blizzard hit the entire North East! An ice storm that clung to all the leaves that hadn't even begun to fall off the trees.... and so right after I arrived in Greenwich with my co-host and costume designer Gefil Tefish and went to the venue to get ready, we listened as trees began crashing in the woods all around us mixed with the thunder and lightning from the "thunder-flurries" that rumbled all night long. Jim Cantore and the Weather Channel cast were apoplectic! The headlines reported power outages that ended up lasting for weeks afterwards in many areas. Thousands of trees were brought down, oftentimes right into people's homes and businesses. And of course, Halloween was basically canceled in the affected areas.

That night the entire committee and the volunteers divided up all the prepared (and sumptuously catered!) food, and we all retired to the chairwoman's beautiful home and had our own impromptu Halloween party with games, ghost stories, and bobbing for apples... or was it Harry Winston brooches? The old saying in show business is that "The Show MUST Go On!"... well, here's the poster for the only event in all my years that never took place!...an odd and wonderful piece of memorabilia in my collection. (ps. Interestingly, exactly one year later, Halloween was canceled again! Hurricane Sandy blacked out NYC and much of the metropolitan area! JEEESH!!)

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