So how did this happen? It certainly was a surprise to me. Andrea has been doing volunteer work at the San Francisco Zoo, and today she was asked to help out for half a day with an event called the Teddy Bear Festival. When she takes public transit to the zoo during the week, she has a 3 hour commute each way. So, I decided to drive her this morning and save her roughly 4 hours on buses. My plan was to just hang out in the zoo while she did whatever they asked and then drive her home. She signed in at the volunteer's board, and we went back into a conference room to wait for a volunteer director.
The guy took one look at me and decided I would make a good teddy bear. Apparently they had planned for people to walk around all day in these 4 bear suits and greet children at the entrance as well as make appearances at the event. One of the guys who was supposed to this didn't show. So I got to spend the entire morning putting on and removing bear costumes and getting mobbed by small kids... well, the ones that weren't terrified of course. I don't understand how anyone could be afraid of this:
Nevermind, I kind of freak myself out with that one.
Andrea was assigned as my "guide" because your visibility is pretty much non-existent inside those suits. Andrea had to call out directions for where kids were coming up to hug me or take pictures.
One of the rules of wearing the suits was that you weren't allowed to keep one on for more than 30 minutes at a time because they are so hellishly hot. Luckily this was San Francisco, so it was a mild 65 degrees. It almost didn't matter, because I sweat through every suit I put on. Especially when they had me sit there for story time. Andrea said I left a big sweaty butt-mark when I got up. If I stayed standing and moving around it was tolerable, but any time I sat still for too long it got pretty uncomfortable. Now I'm back in Sunnyvale, and it's a balmy 90 degrees outside. I can only imagine what that suit would have been like in this heat.
Of course we had a changing-tent so that we didn't scar small children by pulling off a teddy bear's head in front of them. While I was changing in the tent, Andrea tried on one of the masks to check out the visibility.
