Pumpkin Party

Here’s the scene: By scoring a perfect bowling “strike,” using a pumpkin instead of a bowling ball, Stefanie Ginsberg, 9, won a Flintstones character toy as a prize at a local farmers’ market last Sunday. She was cheered along by a pair of teenage vampires named Vernessa and Amber. “Hissed along” is the term Vernessa prefers.

Have you guessed yet that Halloween is making an early appearance in Ventura County?

Such goings-on will be repeated this Sunday at the Farmers’ Market of Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard. Kids can bowl with pumpkins from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., then join in a costume- and pumpkin-decorating contest at 1 p.m. (Registration begins at 10 a.m. when the market opens.)

And they can engage in “Conversations With a Vampire”--two of them, actually--any time during market hours. The vampires are, in real life, a pair of charming Ventura teenagers who preferred not to use anything but their vampire names while appearing in costume.

“When kids pumpkin bowl and they lose, they get a bite. When they win, they get a kiss,” said Vernessa the Vampire, grinning dramatically to reveal her plastic fangs. (They’re soft, so they don’t hurt.)

She claimed to be 420 years old, but didn’t look a day over driving age. Her sidekick, a Western vampire done up in black cowgirl clothes, claimed to have gotten into the vampire game much later than 420 years ago. Vernessa interrupted the interview to point out, “She wasn’t a vampire until I bit her.”

These Halloween doings are but a few of the antics that will take place Sunday. A regular feature of the weekly Channel Islands Farmers’ Market is an amazing performance on the electric piano by Benny Ginsberg, 11.

“Ask anybody who’s been to our market, and they talk about ‘The Kid,’ ” says Mark Rochin, a local orange grower and chairman of the market project. On Sundays, Benny, a sixth-grader at Rose Avenue School in Oxnard, delivers a steady and professional stream of show tunes, plus Bach, Joplin, etc. Last Sunday he threw in some Christmas carols as a warmup for his job as a one-man pit band for his school’s production of “Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown.”

Also on the little “midway” at this Sunday’s market will be a dance show by Sarah Grether, 15, of Rio Mesa High. Somewhat in the tradition of Parisian and London street musicians, she performs classical ballet to recorded music. Congratulated by someone in the audience for her intricate dance routine, she replied coolly, “It’s right out of the book [of classical ballet steps].”

Art will be matched by science this Sunday because The Plant Guy, proprietor of a booth devoted to “water gardens,” will be there. Steve Harvey’s display of aquatic plants will be instantly comprehensible to kids because they have all studied ecology, specifically pond water, in school.

For kids who might otherwise be interested in keeping a terrarium with desert creatures and low-maintenance vegetation, Harvey’s water gardens, complete with tiny fish, snails and other-worldly floating ferns, present an engaging novelty. “You get to create and maintain your permanent ecosystem,” Harvey explained.

BE THERE

Pumpkin Bowling at the farmers’ market, Sunday, noon-2 p.m., Channel Islands Harbor, 2801 S. Harbor Blvd. (next to Harbor Landing), Oxnard. Costume- and pumpkin-decorating contest at 1 p.m. Free. (805) 652-2089.