What would fly for my daughter with Rett syndrome on Halloween

There are three things it would never occur to me to do that some people actually do:

• Catch a rattlesnake and eat it. 
• Play hockey underwater.
• Board a commercial airliner wearing a Halloween costume.

This last one comes to mind because of an article I saw the other day with the headline “Halloween travel: TSA rules what costumes can and cannot fly.”

Apparently there are people jetting to, say, the Village Halloween Parade in New York who are on such tight schedules that they have to go straight from LaGuardia to the stepping-off point at Sixth and Canal. Well, according to this article, they’d better not try to board a plane dressed as an axe-wielding Viking or that pitchfork-carrying guy from Grant Wood’s famous “American Gothic” painting.

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This made me curious about how my daughter Abby, who has Rett syndrome, would have fared had she tried air travel while wearing some of her costumes from Halloweens past. For us and other Rett families we know, Halloween is the perfect holiday, because our children, so limited and often marginalized in their day-to-day lives, can be anything and everything on Halloween, from a princess or superhero to an ogre or vampire. And although it’s often unclear how much Abby understands, she certainly gets the concept of “Hold out a bag and candy will be put into it.”

So we’ve had some joyous Halloweens in years past. Not this year because, as I’ve written previously, Abby is going through a bad stretch that involves a lot of crying and very loud screaming. And we’d certainly never try to get on an airplane with her right now, in or out of costume. We’d end up being one of those “Unruly Passenger’s Deafening Screams Force Flight to Turn Around” news stories.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has a remarkably detailed list of what you can and cannot bring on an airplane, either as a carry-on or in a checked bag. So — sorry, all you costumed Vikings — axes, ice axes, and ice picks aren’t going to get past the screeners (but are OK in a checked bag). 

Abby as Moaning Myrtle for Halloween in 2014. (Photo by Neil Genzlinger)

The list is both perplexing and amusing. In the subsection on “Sporting and Camping,” I learned that Abby’s 2009 costume may have been problematic had we tried to fly that fall. That was the year the New York Yankees played the Philadelphia Phillies in the World Series, and living in New Jersey, we’re halfway between those two teams. So Abby’s mom, Donna, made her a baseball uniform that was half Yankees, half Phillies.

That uniform would have been fine to wear on a plane, but had she tried to accessorize it with a baseball bat, she would have been turned away by the screeners. And yet, from that same subsection of the list, I learned that a bocce ball or antlers — yes, antlers — would have been fine to bring aboard. Go figure.

In many years, Abby went as one or another character from the Harry Potter universe, because she is familiar with the first four Potter movies and because her mother is a rabid Potterphile. More than one of those costumes involved a wand, and, surprisingly, the TSA list has a specific entry for “Harry Potter wand” — it’s OK to bring one as a carry-on. (Apparently whoever made the list had not seen the first Potter film, “The Sorcerer’s Stone,” in which young Harry first tries out a wand and boxes come flying off the shelves of the wand store. Imagine that with overhead bins.)

So feel free to fly with your wand. But the TSA list, which has hundreds of entries, is less helpful on another accessory Abby used when she went as a different Harry Potter character, Moaning Myrtle, in 2014. Myrtle died when she was a student at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and now haunts one of its bathrooms as a spirit. Donna made Abby up to be a pretty convincing Myrtle, then topped the costume off by putting a toilet seat around her neck.

There is no entry for “toilet seat” on the TSA list.

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