The Mascot Chronicles

Prologue

A 7-foot, giant-eyed teddy bear containing a sweat-dripping, middle-aged man. Never in my life had a mirror presented me with such a spectacle.

I looked again — in horror and disbelief.

Deep within the darkness of the bear’s frozen-open maw blinked a pair of frightened human eyes.

“It’s therapeutic,” whispered a furry voice.

“It’s therapeutic.”

“It’s therapeutic…”

I

I’ve been terrified of mascots for nearly my entire life.

Like most irrational fears, mine has childhood origins.

Children are universally afraid of any costume-donning Homo sapiens. Just drop them onto Santa’s lap or at the engorged feet of a clown — and listen to their resounding screams.

Encasing someone fully in fluff only compounds a child’s horror. I once watched a small boy, in the arms of a massive, zipper-backed rabbit, howl until he vomited/lost consciousness, his grinning parents snapping photos all the while.

“Yours is the fear of the child-prisoner, having escaped its maternal costume, of being reincarcerated,” a cigar-smoking Freudian friend once told me. I’d argue instead that mascots, with their wide eyes and stitched-on grins, are inherently terrifying. Beyond the superficial, too, is a deeper reason for anxiety. Inside the most benign-looking costume … could be anyone. A pickpocket. A serial killer. One’s disgruntled ex. The possibilities are heart-stopping, the lesson clear: A mascot is never who or what they claim to be.

While most of us outgrow this primitive masklophobia, mine only worsened with time. I learned to avoid stadium sports, parades, and theme parks with partisan zeal and once risked my life dashing through traffic to escape a gorilla armed with pizza fliers.

“What’s your earliest memory involving a mascot?” a therapist asked me years back.

I couldn’t think of anything.

Then I recalled, mistily, an incident at a carnival when I was 4 or 5. I’d wandered away from my parents, in pursuit of an enormous teddy bear. I followed the bear behind the Ferris wheel, through a canvas flap. As I looked on fondly, the bear ripped its head off — and lit a cigarette.

I was confused and, it dawned on me, lost. Intending to be helpful, no doubt, the headless animal pursued me through the fairgrounds, to a soundtrack of my screams and the jeers of onlooking teenagers. By the time my parents found me, I was a wreck.

“Do you think that’s relevant?” I asked my therapist.

He nodded. As he plucked his jaw up off the floor.

I suppose that must’ve been the start of it all. Of a distrust that cemented into dread.

That wouldn’t be my last encounter of the mascotian kind. Or even the most unsettling.

Alas.

II

From age 30 onward, a birthday is a dismal consolation prize at best. You’ve survived another year on this tombstone planet … grown a little fatter … have some cake.

The morning after I achieved that sad tri-decade milestone, recovering from a night of consolation, I found myself in further need of cheering. As chance would have it, a dying department store chain I’ll call Bingo’s had just boldly/stupidly opened a new location not far from my home. Adverts for its grand opening, which was to feature “surprises … deals … and free coffee,” had been slapped onto every alternate surface in the city. As a lifelong fan of spectacular folly (and complimentary coffee), I’d made sure to circle the date on my calendar. That day had come and, headache or not, raining or not, I wasn’t going to miss out. I really needed a coffee.

Minutes later, I closed my umbrella and surveyed a boring, overpriced department store. I’d been to several Bingo’s as a child and the place hadn’t changed a bit — except there were customers in it. Hundreds of them. Rushing through the arteries of the store with their red shopping carts, rubbing against one another like blood cells. Before I had a chance to reconsider, I was swept along with them. Into the heart of the madness.

I kept my eye out for so-called deals, but even Bingo’s on-sale items seemed laughably outlandish. Ambient voices agreed.

“Ten bucks for masking tape?”

“These sneakers must be royalty.”

“Let’s eat out. It’s cheaper.”

Somewhere, a child screamed. That should’ve worried me, but I was too busy looking for the coffee station and wondering where on earth the blood-rush of humanity would take me. As it happened, it took me from the produce section to the dairy coolers, from there to the bakery, from seafood to junk food and back again to produce, where exactly no one was fighting over 12-dollar cauliflower and buck-a-piece plums.

Now the current took me from hardware to bedware to toys, where I heard more screaming. It was closer, this time. Much closer. I looked over the heads of my fellow non-shoppers…

And there it was. At the end of the aisle. A man-sized, smiling teddy bear. Wearing a stretched-out sweater with the words BINGO BEAR knitted onto it.

The most recent shrieks were coming from a (very sensible) 4-year-old girl who wanted nothing to do with a creature she probably thought viewed her as an entrée.

I tried to reverse course, but mascots are magnetic attractors of the worst people on earth, and against this torrent of deplorables I was powerless. No, I could only move slowly/inevitably forward. Watching camera-clutching sociopaths drop their horrified offspring into the arms of BINGO BEAR.

A ginger-haired toddler put up such a laudable fight that her mother abandoned the snapshot and restored her son to his shopping cart prison.

As his sobs faded in the distance, I readied mine. For the beast was alarmingly close now.

I stepped forward. Clutching my umbrella like a harpoon.

BINGO BEAR looked me in the eye. I looked back.

Perhaps the mascot sensed my animosity. Perhaps fortune even smiles on writers, from time to time. Whatever the reason, the bear retreated one step. Then another step. Then he turned sharply — and waddled off. The sociopaths followed him left to cosmetics, but I was gratefully able to steer the opposite way.

The human tide rose and fell and eventually deposited me on the happier shores of a makeshift, back-of-store café where a bored-looking teen poured coffee into Styrofoam cups. I grabbed one, scanned for mascots, and found a seat at a plastic-lined table.

I took a sip.

I grimaced.

Awful or not, I was determined to finish the coffee. I’d earned it.

When I finally made it outdoors — it was still pouring — I realized I’d left my umbrella behind. I glanced back.

On the other side of the sliding doors … a furry form.

I walked home sodden.

III

For a time, I was a member of a benevolent group of middle-aged men whose sworn duty was to serve the community — when we felt like it.

At our biweekly meetings, we scrutinized the list of things people wanted us to do and worked through the night to find reasons not to do them. Beer was also served.

The umpteenth item on one evening’s list called for a “tall, healthy volunteer to pose as a beloved mascot for an hour or two at most.”

The height/health requirement eliminated most of my fellow philanthropists, whose hands remained clenched around their beer cans.

Then one hand shot up. It was mine.

The other middle-aged men blinked at me in disbelief.

“I thought you were afraid of mascots?” the secretary asked me. He’d seen me flee them on several occasions.

I nodded.

“But it might be different … if I’m the mascot. It might even be therapeutic.”

Our president shrugged his shoulders and polished off his beer.

“It’s your funeral,” he said.

IV

A week later, I strolled onto a warehouse soundstage. A Stonehenge assortment of lights illuminated the center of the room.

A woman with a huge bouffant emerged from the blinding light.

“Do you have a lot of experience as a costumed performer?” she asked me, in a soft voice.

I shook my head.

“But you’ve danced with children?”

“Not that I recall,” I said, after thinking a minute.

The woman re-entered the light, spoke softly to someone, then reappeared.

“We await your transformation,” she said, pointing to a door.

I stepped into a change room, where a pair of boxes marked “H” and “B” lay on the floor.

I opened the first box — and shuddered.

“H” was for “Head,” evidently. The severed head of a colossal teddy bear. Its unblinking eyes were bigger than my fists, its mouth an unnaturally vast, black rectangle.

I closed that box and opened B, which contained the bear’s hide and feet. Those weren’t quite as upsetting.

Sitting on the floor, breathing deeply, visons of past mascots dancing in my head…

“How are you doing?” inquired a soft voice, on the other side of the door.

“Almost ready,” I answered as I contemplated stacking the boxes, climbing them, and discreetly leaping through the window.

I inhaled all the air in the room. Then I took the head out of the box and surveyed it like a Danish prince.

“It’s therapeutic,” I said to myself. I was still telling myself that when I took a last look at my fully costumed form in the mirror. And lumbered out of the changeroom.

Bouffant was waiting by the door. She took my paw. And guided me into the light.

In the middle of this bright expanse was a child. A 3- or 4-year-old girl, in a wheelchair/sequined dress. The latter glittered brilliantly. I squinted … and the child’s eyes widened, at the sight of me. Thankfully, she didn’t scream.

Then blaring music came from somewhere and, at the direction of a skeletal man, I awkwardly danced around the girl as she turned circles in her wheelchair.

We rehearsed this routine over and over, then filmed the whole thing over and over, until the skeletal man at last clattered his hands together, satisfied. Thank god. I was so overheated and sweat-drenched and dizzy in my bearskin suit that my heart had given me an ultimatum: either you stop, or I will.

I staggered to a chair in the corner and sat down, panting. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, the girl in the wheelchair was sitting in front of me. A dark-haired woman standing beside her took my hand.

“I just wanted to thank you,” she said. “For doing this.”

“It’s no problem,” I said.

“My daughter has a lot of problems…”

I swallowed.

“But you really made her day.”

The girl in the chair eyed me shyly.

I held out my soft palm…

She slapped it. And smiled.

Mother and daughter left the building. I pulled my head off and lay down flat on the floor, breathing hard.

“Are you all right?” asked Bouffant, softly.

“This is how Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother must have felt,” I said, as my sweat rolled onto the floor.

“Would you like a glass of water?”

“A bucket,” said. “Just pour it over me.”

Bouffant floated away. Presumably in search of a bucket.

“It’s therapeutic,” I said one last time. As I peeled off my skin.

Epilogue

The Ursine Transformation, as I came to call the above incident, is now an underlined passage in the annals of my life. It changed me. I’m not sure if it was donning the costume or watching a mascot induce actual happiness in a child, but after that fateful day, my masklophobia faded.

It really was therapeutic.

When I told my therapist about my self-effected fix, he only shook his head.

“It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “You can’t cure a lifelong phobia overnight.”

He’s mistaken. The old, knee-knocking horror is long gone. At worst, a mascot sighting now triggers the same mild anxiety I also feel while riding an elevator or using a public restroom. Instead of fear, costumed people now inspire my sympathy — for the unfortunate soul within, boiling and three-fourths blind, swinging his fleece limbs for our sorry amusement.

True: there’s no way of knowing who’s inside a mascot. But there’s no way of knowing which smiling passerby on a crowded street is, at heart, a maniacal killer. Over time, I’ve grown less distrustful of mascots, and more of my fellow man. It will take years of hard work conquer that phobia. Decades, even.

My therapist is giddy.

 

Copyright (c) 2026 by Rolli. All rights reserved