Nothing is so freeing as the fur of a mascot suit. Your face, your limbs, all of you masked in anonymity. It’s a change of identity, a freedom from judgement, an assurance of walking to your car after the game without being recognized.
Mascot suits are a lot like sunglasses: concealing where you look, allowing glares at slow photographers and goofy grins during their eventual pictures, providing an amusing preoccupation, fun harmless expressions hidden from the public. In the cloak of a character, your movements can be exaggerated and absurd. What is mascotting but a performance designed to delight and surprise?
As a mascot, you hope to draw curiosity, to call focus to yourself. You want to shock and amuse. You want people to laugh–sometimes because you’re doing things you aren’t supposed to.
People expect mascots to wave and dance and run through the stadium, to hug and high-five their kids, people expect a certain routine in the culture of stadium life. Yet normality, while comfortable, is forgettable Q: Why?
Why: Memories of the regular blur and fade like sidewalk chalk after a day of rain. It’s the absurd, that which pushes the boundaries of ‘allowed’ which is stained forever in our minds. These are the stories we tell, the experiences we want to remember.
Could you forget seeing a mascot dance on a pole? Or streak across the field? Could you forget seeing mascots sliding down the ramps on the capital building or stretching out on a yoga mat in the second inning?
No. You couldn’t.
When mascots ‘wake up’ the suit, they’re expected to bring a special flare to the character. For anyone can dawn a fur suit and walk from person to person taking pictures and giving high-fives, yet what is remembered? It’s the personality, the unique–dare I say–humanity each entertainer provides that serves as viewers’ takeaway.
Inside the suit is air so confined you smell yourself-times-ten with hints of Lysol and Febreze. This stew of you consumes and outweighs any and all smells attempting to penetrate from the outside: wafts of hotdog and garlic fry, of spilt beer and cracker jacks are lost on you. All senses are muddled. Vision is only that directly ahead. Sound is gargled in auditory swirls like crowds before a parade. Jittery kids skirt beneath you, only recognized through their pokes, prods, and hugs. The only word you discern is your character’s name screamed and shouted and pleaded again and again from every direction.
Your senses are muddled, altered, confused by your own stench and the mesh of an oversized head and yet you know none of it. Your confinement is your freedom. Your freedom to dance, to joke, to not be judged. For such energy surrounds in a stadium. Energy that’s welcoming, exciting, overwhelming in the best kind of way. Always something to do, somewhere to be, someone to greet. You forget your stench. You forget your fears. You embrace yourself. The game has begun.