Endless summer

THE HANGOVER OF THE TENTH OR SO "last weekend of the summer" in a row, Daylight Savings persists a week more, like the behaviors of a solstice summoned that now will not go. Monday's light is thin but staunch: global weather displacement makes Chicago seem temperate when ice ought to have frosted the get-ups and gewgaws of Saturday night's Halloweeners, the grown-ups not yet grown-up enough to realize that every day is costume day, and the buffo buffoonery of cartoonish garb leading to the thirty-first is less an externalization of inner self than how you're cloaked each day at work and play. Bars and parties overlap, texts and rumors prompt movement like a Blue Line train with slow zones and delays at rush hour. Recurring characterless: Santo, the masked wrestler, holds court in a beautiful 1940s-cut suit. A brunette always proud of her legs makes an alarming French maid, layers of black exposing flickers of flesh. Plushies pounce on furries. A small, gorgeous woman makes an alarming Girl Scout, even with a purloined Darth Vader helmet. A man in a Blue Man skullcap passes cards, "Tobias Fünke, Analrapist." But "Arrested Development" is trumped by the towering, corrupt, rotting clown face that looms over a brown shirt with a 1940s high fade on the sides and a mustache distinctly not Charlie Chaplin's. There's discomfort close to this stray Hitler, but nearby, a pair of Obi-Wans in dun cloaks, like escapees from a Kevin Smith sketch, cross light sabers, the red one bright, the blue one spent. It's no battle. Hitler, shunned, scowls.