Halloween has always been our most idiosyncratic of holidays, what with parents across the country encouraging their children to dress up like princesses and clowns and ghouls and go out begging for candy from strangers.

But here in Bangor, a dentist from Honolulu who once was famous as America’s “Disco Doc” has plans to make Halloween just a little bit odder. On that night, at the house on Broadway he recently purchased in anticipation of his retirement from dentistry, an “art horror event” will unfold.

It will be, promises the Disco Doc turned computer artist and writer, formal performance art in real time, an event “in the true fashion of postmodernist art.” An event, in fact, well-suited to the region’s new push for a diversified, creative economy.

At least that’s what Dr. Rodney Chang suggested one day in an exuberant e-mail that outlined the thinking that went into this curious Halloween project for our city, his adopted home. Before calling him, though, I went online to check out the Disco Doc reference. I couldn’t remember much about 1979, frankly, and only vaguely recalled NBC’s popular “Real People” show that made Chang a star back then.

Sure enough, there he was on several Web sites, an Asian-American dentist in dark glasses and an Afro, dressed head-to-toe in John Travolta white, boogying right there in his dental office turned discotheque. In “Da Waiting Room,” a chrome-and-glass structure equipped with flashing lights, a revolving disco ball, a cool disc jockey from Brooklyn and not a single outdated Time magazine in sight, Chang’s patients could forget their fear of needles and drills by grooving to disco’s feel-good pulsing rhythms.

After being featured on the “Real People” show, its highest-rated episode that year, the place became a Honolulu hot spot. Tourists and locals came by to dance to the sultry strains of Donna Summer on Saturday nights, and Disco Doc and “Da Waiting Room” got plenty of ink in the national press and the pop-culture magazines.

Dental Fever!

After exchanging alohas on the phone Thursday night, I could swear I heard disco music playing in the background.

“Yes, yes, you do,” said Chang, an amiable and effervescent dentist, while waiting for a patient’s mouth to get numb before he pulled the man’s tooth. “I had the disco until 1992, but the music still plays all the time in the office. I’m the last disco dancer around.”

I then asked Chang to explain the nature of his Halloween performance-art event, and how Bangor, which has been disco-deprived for decades now, fits into the picture. It was a convoluted path, he admitted.

With his 60th birthday approaching – he’s rented out a Honolulu nightclub for a disco-themed bash – Chang wanted to finally see what life was like far from the lush islands where he was born and raised. To do his computer-generated art, which he began in 1985 and has since exhibited in shows around the world, he wanted an East Coast home, where he could be closer to cities like Boston and New York.

Besides that, he said, it wasn’t easy making a name for himself as an artist on an island inhabited by so many other Changs.

That’s where Stephen King and Bangor come in. Inspired by the work of the Bangor horror writer, Chang visited the city and loved it so much that he recently bought the house at 164 Broadway. He also has just completed his first horror-fantasy novel, self-published, which will be available on Amazon.com around Christmas.

“Pygoya – A Novel of Art Rebels & Ghosts,” he explained, is a “dream-oriented” supernatural tale that moves from the 17th century through today, from old Hawaii to modern Maine, with some Salem witches thrown in along with a few human sacrifices to the volcano gods.

Now here’s the performance-art part: As a condition of the closing of the house deal in Bangor, scheduled for Oct. 31, Chang asked that the realty agents plant a Douglas fir that night on the property and string it with colored lights and Yuletide garland. It’s partly a sentimental request from Chang, a nature-lover who wants to make up for all the dead evergreen trees his family has left at the roadside after the tropical Christmas holidays.

But the women from the realty office will be doing more than simply planting a tree for “some eccentric Hawaiian investor,” Chang said. They will be performing an actual scene from a chapter of his horror novel, in which a ritualistic planting of a tree awakens a spirit from within the cellar of the very 1880s Broadway house.

“The event will have one foot in reality and one in fiction, making it experimental and innovative art,” said Chang, who also dreams of establishing a museum of Internet art in Bangor once his kids are through college and he can retire from dentistry. “It’s my chance to do something tangible for Bangor.”

Chang the artist and writer then excused himself, remembering there was a patient in his office who was waiting to have his tooth pulled.

“The Novocain has probably worn off by now,” joked the Disco Doc. “I’ll probably have to give him another shot.”