Halloween on the cheap

It’s the happiest time of year! A time of generosity, family, and playboy bunny costumes. Every year I look forward gleefully to the Halloween season, with its fantastic television programming and free Milky Way bars, but I have to admit my last Halloween was a bust. So I started researching early this year, to make sure that the campy fun doesn’t end until November.

Here’s something cool to do before the parties around campus get into swing—and you don’t have to pay a cover charge.  From six to eleven on Halloween night, Santa Monica Boulevard will become a party ground for children at heart to troop around in costume. Every year West Hollywood hosts the Halloween Carnaval, which will culminate in an outdoor costume ball of expected raunchiness and glitter. Thousands are expected to roll out, so if you’re going, carpool or take the bus.

http://www.weho.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/detail/navid/339/cid/2183/

For the bus from USC, just take Metro 38 heading west from Jefferson and Royal to Fairfax and Apple, and catch the 105 to West Hollywood.

And if you’re feeling up to going out the day after, celebrate the Day of the Dead on Olvera St., located conveniently next to all the other historic neighborhoods (read: Chinatown and Little Tokyo.) Decked out with handicraft skulls on any day, it becomes a Tim Burton-esque paradise every November 1^st. It’s fun, and again free, and there’s good food all round.