Friday Morning Street Urchin Blogging [Bonus Juniper Edition]

The urchin costume was still in the closet, and it still fit her. Could I really resist?

Well over a year ago I articulated my totally annoying elitist-asshole position on Juniper and television here. I asked, with a certain very-punchable naivete, whether Juniper would ever love watching Charlie Chaplin movies with me. Well, for the first and probably the last time in our lives, Juniper and I have the same favorite movie: Charlie Chaplin's The Kid. She asks for it every morning. Some days we watch the entire thing together. When I pick her up and swing her around the room she screams, "fly like Chachi!" referring, I think, to the "dreamland" sequence at the end of the film when the Tramp wakes to find himself in heaven, and "flies" about the tenement courtyard with the kid on wires while wearing angel wings and white robes. Her idol is the kid, played by Jackie Coogan, who starred in dozens of movies typecast as a street urchin. When he was middle-aged he played Uncle Fester on the Addams Family series.

So when I found a pair of fairy wings at the dollar store next to the wig store down the street, I knew I could put together a costume that she and I both would love:

She just kept shouting "kid, wings!" and made me fly her up and down the alleys where we were walking down by the Detroit River during the day on Halloween. The only moments she grew pensive were when I put her down to take a picture. I took a lot of them.