Big Red Dogs, Little White Lies
Big Red Dogs, Little White Lies
My time as Clifford the Big Red Dog and some other stuff, too.
Focus.
Put on the stinky head. It’s show time.
Once you open that door, once you go bounding out of that shopping mall access hallway, you’re not the 14-year-old working for your dad this summer. No. You’re Clifford the Big Red Dog, or maybe you’re Curious George or a Berenstein Bear. Whatever you are, you are here to entertain these kids.
When I was a high school freshman, my dad worked for the local PBS affiliate in Harrisburg, PA. Part of his job was organizing an event in the area called Book Tour. Basically, they’d go around to libraries, community centers and malls and promote childhood literacy. There would be free books for kids, activities, children’s singers, magicians, and probably even an appearance by a beloved character like Curious George, Clifford the Big Red Dog, a Berenstain Bear, etc.
You know who fits really well into a Curious George, Clifford the Big Red Dog or a Berenstain Bear costume? A 5-foot-nothing 14-year-old whose dad can convince him to work a Saturday in June for 50 bucks.
The actual work was easy. I’d show up at the venue, find my home base where I would change in an out of my costume as stealthily as possible so as to not upset the kids. (This wasn’t Disneyland, though. If a kid saw that Clifford was really a kid in a Green Day shirt, I didn’t get sent to the Gulag.) It was usually a library office or that weird access hallway between mall stores.
I was told when and how often they’d need the character—for the sake of continuity let’s roll with Clifford—to make appearances. You didn’t want him out all the time. That would be anarchy. There’s a reason the Phillie Phanatic isn’t on the field for all nine innings. I would’ve driven those kids away from the nice magician like a floppy eared pied piper.
Speaking of that magician, he told me one time that he lived on a boat. I don’t know where he lived on a boat, considering this was in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains, but maybe he traveled from somewhere a little more nautical than Harrisburg. He was way cooler and nicer than the children’s singer they got for these events. That guy would yell at his teenage daughter who helped him carry his equipment to the car. He also didn’t live on a boat as far as I know.
The other reason Clifford wasn’t out all the time was because that suit was hot as hell, and I was still a minor. Clifford passing out would terrify the kids and send me to the hospital. My dad probably would’ve gotten in trouble at work, too. Nobody wanted any of that.
When it was time, I’d come out in my Clifford costume, usually flanked by another PBS employee or even one of my friends who was promised $50 to serve as a guide and protection from the children. Think about how Gritty has those suited-up bodyguards. You can’t see shit in that costume. Also, it’s like it’s written into childhood DNA that kids have to fuck with the costume character as much as possible. Seeing the suit unlocks something violent in their brains, like a primal urge to prove to the elders that they’re ready to take down an animal to feed the village, thus granting them the rite of passage into adulthood within the civilization.
For every kid who wanted to come up and high five or hug me, there were at least three that just want to terrorize me. It’s a miracle kids aren’t smart enough at that age to really work together. We could fend off stray attacks, but if they would’ve collaborated, I would have been toast.
No matter how much I got ambushed, I still had to act like Clifford would. Clifford wouldn’t push kids away. He wouldn’t run. He wouldn’t break his vow of silence and call a child a piece of shit. Clifford would wave his arms around and, like, mime things and silently belly laugh, so that’s what I did.
“No one can see your face,” my dad would tell me. “You can be as pissed off as you want under the head, but you have to at least be animated. The kids just see Clifford.”
The kids loved the waving arms, man. That was the move.
I did have fun with it as much as I could. I learned ways to entertain them, even if they made it their mission to ruin Clifford’s day. I never had any real dreams of acting, so this was the closest I ever got to a character study, to literally embodying the character. Really, it was more of finding ways to manipulate them into going along with it, stop attacking me, and have fun. It feeding kids a weak lie that they shouldn’t fall for – that this was the real Clifford and he’s excited to meet you in the Colonial Park Mall in front of the Macy’s.
But telling weak lies to kids was something I actually had a little bit of experience in by that point.
When I was in fifth grade at my small Catholic school, we were assigned kindergartners to, like, I don’t know, adopt. We did crafts with them. We escorted them to church when we went during the school day and made sure they didn’t ritch around too much. I had to lie to my little guy a couple of times, and both of them were lies that were way above my pay grade as a 10-year-old, and they always stuck with me.
Once was in church. The priest was getting communion ready. For non-Catholics, it’s the quietest and most serious part of the whole thing. The kid leaned over to me and asked, “Is it really the body of Christ?”
Now, even though I went to Catholic school, my parents weren’t strict on the Catholicism. Religion wasn’t super enforced in my house, and even at a young age I was pretty skeptical of the whole thing. But, not to rock the boat here (read: not get in trouble for telling a child the whole belief system is flawed), I said, “Yeah.”
He immediately looked upset, and then deep in thought. He turned back to me.
“What if you get his butt?”
“Well, it’s the risk you take, I guess.”
The other time I had to lie to this innocent boy was at an assembly. It was September of 2002, and we were commemorating the one-year anniversary of you-know-what.
It was in the school gym, which didn’t have air conditioning, and it was an understandably solemn affair. Not exactly up a 5-year-old’s alley.
“This is boring,” he told me.
“It won’t be much longer,” I responded, trying to keep him cool so I didn’t get in trouble, too. I was still afraid of getting in trouble with my own teacher for talking during the 9/11 assembly.
“What are we even doing here?”
I realized that this kid wasn’t old enough to be paying attention to anything on 9/11, and I had to be the one to explain it to him.
“It’s the one-year anniversary of when terrorists attacked New York and Washington, D.C.”
“Why’d they do that?”
Remember, I’m 10. To again credit my parents, they tried their best to at least start to explain the geopolitical events that lead to this (or at least that there were events leading up to this). But, because I was a child, they didn’t go too far into the weeds. That would’ve been weird and I would’ve been a weird kid at school explaining Desert Storm and Soviet-era politics to kids who just wanted to talk about exciting teenage high school basketball star LeBron James and whether he could really be the next Michael Jordan.
With my own tenuous grasp on the situation, and trying to keep my chatter to a minimum to avoid lunch detention or missing recess, I tried to think of a short answer that also would satisfy a young child. I found one in a phrase thrown around a lot at the time:
“They hate our freedom.”
I knew at the time it wasn’t the whole truth, but pressed for time and with a weak understanding myself, I went with it. I knew Bush’s dad had something to do with it. What I said was pretty much the boilerplate answer for people who didn’t want to think too deeply about the failings in the Middle East that lead to the prominence of Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein being in power. George W. Bush essentially gave that as an answer to all of America, and a ton of them were like, “Yep. Hate our freedom. That’s it. French fries are called Freedom Fries now.”
I gave that answer as an idiot 10-year-old to an even less informed 5-year-old. It shouldn’t have worked on him, and it shouldn’t have worked on anyone with a fully formed brain in 2001. But, we still invaded a sovereign nation under false pretenses and locked ourselves into a decades-long conflict and destabilized a whole region and screwed up our own national security spending for the foreseeable future.
All of this is to say that when I see the Phillie Phanatic roaming Citizens Bank Park without handlers or riding an ATV at high speeds, I’m impressed, because I know how hot and miserable those suits are, and how hard it is to see and walk in them, let alone do the things he does. I think about how my life could have turned out if I had followed the mascot path further than just that summer. I often criticized Hooter, the owl mascot at Temple University, while I was a student there, 100% positive I could do better than him. Maybe I could have even gone pro and inherited the Phanatic suit like you adopt the persona of the Dread Pirate Roberts. Maybe I’d even be Gritty right now.
And when I think about all of the answers people give to questions about our country that paint over, or at least water down, our past atrocities, I get it. We’re all just trying to keep some 5-year-old calm until the bell rings and we can go home and play Playstation 2.
This week’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Mo Troper.