Mike Pence makes an announcement, and my pumpkin is left uncarved

The GOP primary field gets a little smaller. And, my house gets a little glitterier...

We were in the car yesterday, running one of my boys from a school chorus tryout to a friend’s pumpkin-carving party, when my editor called.

An editor calling on a Saturday I’m not scheduled to work generally means one thing: breaking news.

Indeed, while I’d been blissfully, if briefly, tuning out the news, former Vice President Mike Pence announced his departure from the Republican presidential primary race during a speech before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas.

That meant I had a little over two hours to put a story together for All Things Considered and update the NPR newscast.

While I got to work, my husband took over and accompanied the kid to the Halloween party - where they failed to carve the pumpkin. (It’s okay; this is par for the course in this business, and we’ll carve it later. Maybe.)

My still-faceless pumpkin, in the aftermath of breaking news.

As I noted in my NPR story, Pence is the most high-profile Republican to drop out of the race thus far. His departure may create an opening for candidates such as former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who’s seen a surge in New Hampshire and has sought to position herself as an alternative to Trump - something Pence also attempted to do even as he ran on his experience as a former VP.

This could also be good news for South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who, like Pence, has made his faith a central part of his message and has sought to appeal to white evangelical voters - the ones who will factor heavily in the outcome of next year’s Republican nominating contests, particularly in the Iowa Caucuses in January.

In other Halloween news, for the first time in probably decades, I myself got a real, legit, store-bought costume, for our neighborhood block party on Friday.

When my kids were little, Halloween was all about them - and rightfully so! And most years I accompanied them to their events dressed as an authentic “tired mom.” As I’ve written about in previous posts, as a kid I had a weird, on-again, off-again, arms-length relationship with Halloween - or as some in my evangelical community euphemistically called it, “Harvest Evening.” I was not permitted to dress as a witch or anything that might “glorify the devil.”

(More on that backstory in my book, The Exvangelicals, available here.)

But this year, I did dress up as a witch! Well, kind of:

My costume in all its cheap-glittery glory, left, and my pregame frozen drink before the neighborhood Halloween party, right.

Our community goes all-out the weekend before Halloween. So, with the freedom to pick whatever I wanted and my very own Amazon account, I thought hard about my options and came to recognize that I really just wanted to wear a pretty, poofy, dress. And so Glinda the Good Witch it was.

And let me tell you, it is no less fun dressing up in glitter and pink lace now than it was when I was a little girl! I highly recommend it.

The best part was the delighted kids - and a couple of adults - who came up to me wanting photos with Glinda. I felt like what a princess at Disney World must feel every day!

And I will never, ever get the glitter out of my house, or my porch swing, or my car!

Also this week, I also hosted the NPR Politics Podcast, where we followed the many ups and downs of the House Speaker race which finally culminated this week in House Republicans’ selection of Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson. And in the Friday roundup, we talked about critically important subjects including partisan and racial gerrymandering, and the intersection of two pieces of old millennial pop culture: Britney Spears and the iconic romance film The Notebook.

You can catch up right here!