Dress up, you readers …

… AbeBooks: Literary Halloween Costumes.

I once attended a costume party with my late first wife. The party we were attending was a classic Yuppie enterprise and we could not enter unless in costume (I have no memory of what Zelda was wearing, but she could pull off anything.). I was simply dressed in jeans and some jacket or other. So when asked about my costume, I said that was I dressed as Marko Levytsky, the well-known Ukrainian dissident, and that I was sure they had all heard of him. And indeed they said they had, and I was admitted, and turned out to be something of a hit. As it happens, though, Marko — who was truly Ukrainian — was a high school classmate and sometime boyfriend of my stepdaughter Gwen. Marko and I, in fact, became very close friends; he was like the son I never had. But he was not a well-known Ukrainian dissident. I always loved it that our so-sophisticated hosts bought into my line. So did Marko, who found the whole story endlessly hilarious. Marko died at too young an age a few years ago. I still miss him.