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ST. PETERSBURG - Malcolm Heagle is an emergency room physician at Bay Pines VA Medical Center who stands nearly 6 feet tall, is bald, lifts weights and plays in a flag football league in Tampa.
Friday night, he'll be a wide-eyed little girl from Kansas.
He'll slip into a size large blue and white gingham dress, pull on a reddish wig with braided pigtails and become Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.
And of course he'll accessorize with a pair of one-size-fits-all ruby slippers and a stylish yet tasteful woven basket containing a brown fabric Toto.
"I kind of like the shock value," said Heagle, 31, as he modeled his rented dress among stunned customers at Features Costumes in St. Petersburg. "This is the one day when you can dress as wild as you want, and nobody will give you a strange look."
Like millions of other adults, Heagle is part of the take-over of a holiday that was once the exclusive domain of children.
Call it the graying of Halloween.
Halloween is the second-largest decorating holiday in America, behind Christmas, and this year, the National Retail Federation predicts Americans will spend about $7-billion on candy, candles, props and, of course, costumes.
Adult costumes especially.
"I've never seen a season like this," said Joe Marver, founder of San Francisco-based Spirit Halloween Superstores, a chain of nearly 200 specialty stores nationwide that open just for the weeks preceding the holiday.
Adults, Marver said, now represent up to 65 percent of his costume sales, a noticeable shift compared with years past.
"People are getting out of the dumps," Marver said. "We saw with 9/11 that people were pretty depressed. And then last year, it came back a little. This year, with the spike in the economy, it's incredible."
Marver, who said he is "60, but only 40 from the neck down," also thinks Halloween allows adults who lead quiet, inside-the-box lives to boldly go where they they've rarely been before.
"I have a friend who is about 40 and really shy. He has bare social skills. So he went to a bar for a Halloween party, put on a Nixon mask, and every woman in the place was coming up to him."
Retailers say pirates are hot costumes among adults this year, primarily due to the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. And then there are the homemade likenesses of people in the news. The Steve Bartman look (Chicago Cubs baseball cap, headphones) is big this year. Bartman was the fan whose innocent attempt to catch a foul ball during the playoffs caused a national uproar - and, some say, cost the Cubs the pennant.
"A lot of people are throwing parties on Nov. 1, which is the Mexican Day of the Dead," said Duane Wendel, co-owner of the Features Costumes store in Tampa. "It's a celebration of relatives who have passed."
Other factors retailers mentioned were subtle: Halloween falls on a Friday this year, allowing most adults to get into the spirit, then sleep in the next morning.
The crowds for Halloween costume contests at Storman's Palace in Clearwater, Marino's Martini Bar in St. Petersburg's BayWalk and dozens of other bay area clubs and bars are expected to be as big or bigger than last year.
In fact, the parties have already started. A record crowd of nearly 1,000 people paid $50 to $70 last Friday night to show off their costumes, dance, eat and help raise money for veterinary care programs at the adults only Nauti-Night Masquerade at the Florida Aquarium.
One man wore a net over his body (the Catch of the Day). Sue Ellen Richardson, the aquarium's marketing director, was dressed in black, with pieces of cotton stuck to her. She sprayed people with water from a small bottle. She was The Evening Forecast: Partly cloudy, with a chance of rain.
"The key is Halloween is an opportunity for adults to be almost childlike," she said. "How often do we get to wear costumes? To have fun like kids?
"But we do it on an adult level and take it way beyond Cinderella and Tinkerbell.
"I know Tampa Bay loves Halloween," she added, "but I don't know who loves it more - the adults or the kids. I'm tempted to say the adults."
Experts say the traditions that gave rise to Halloween - the Celtic "Samhain" festival and the British All Hallows' Eve - were mainly for adults in the first place.
But horror purists harken back to 1948's Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein as a watershed event in the adults-having-fun-with-Halloween phenomenon. Those movies begat Lily and Herman Munster, who begat Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.
That low-cut black gown. That long, straight jet black hair. And all that makeup.
For the past two decades, one of the most popular costumes among adult women has been Elvira.
"This year, we sold out a couple of weeks ago," said actor Cassandra Peterson, who plays Elvira and sells the costume on a Web site. "That's earlier than we ever have before."
Peterson, whose mother and sister live in Pinellas Park, said Wednesday she didn't recall any adult costume parties when she was a child. "And my mother owned a costume shop in Colorado Springs."
She thinks factors such as scares over razor blades in Halloween apples and concern from religious groups that Halloween is satanic "combined to pull kids back, and adults forged forward."
The good thing about Halloween, she said, is that it's stress-free. It's not tied to any religion, and it doesn't involve gathering with relatives or giving or receiving gifts.
"It's a deep psychological release," Peterson said. "It's the one day you can get away with being weird or sexy."
But for the first time in 23 years, Peterson will not be either one. She's going as Cassandra Peterson. A mom.
"My daughter is 9 now, and I've never been with her on Halloween," she said. "I've always been working. So I'm taking her out and we're trick or treating, and I'm dressing in some loose-fitting clothes with low heels. Maybe a muumuu. It's the first Halloween I can relax.
"And hey, I live in Hollywood.
"Every day is Halloween out here."