Article Contributed on: 11/18/2007 3:42:08 PM
I was sitting here thinking about what I should blog about when I realized I never wrote a blog about my eventful evening as Curious George. I volunteered with APO at the zoo for a program called Night Eyes where the little kids come trick-or-treating. I volunteered twice. The first night I was simply passing out candy. The second, well... let's just say it's blog-worthy. You see, when my fellow brothers and I checked in at the volunteer table, we found out I wasn't assigned to any particular place. I had to wait around for a while and then I would be put in somewhere where they needed people. Some volunteers didn't show up and they needed someone to dress up as Curious George and take pictures with the kids. So that's where I got stuck. I went into the costume room and saw this INSANE Curious George costume. It was this huge brown, fuzzy monkey suit, awful monkey feet, and worst of all... A HUGE monkey head. The head was awful. I had a mini-panic attack the first time I put it on. I could only see and breathe out of what turned out to be Curious George's mouth.. which was somewhere around my chin. I had a "buddy" whose job it was to walk me around and not let me fall which is a pretty important job seeing as those feet were impossible to move in. But, she was like an 8th grader and seemed to be afraid of me. Not to mention I wasn't expecting such an overwhelming reaction. Let's just say I couldn't move two steps before some kid would run up to me and wrap their arms around my legs. Which really wasn't a good thing if you remember the difficulties with the seeing. Eventually the people running the show just let me stay in one spot and had the kids come to me (thank goodness). Most of the kids who wanted hugs were about as tall as my ankles so I didn't hug them as much as I patted them awkwardly on the head. After a while I got the hang of it and I was kind of enjoying myself because I don't think I've ever had that many hugs in my life. It was kind of nice. I also don't think I've ever been in that many pictures and yet not been in any, if that makes sense. You want to know something a little dorky? I smiled in every single picture. Even though I was in that dumb ol' monkey head. It wasn't too hot in there, though because it was so cold outside. I was actually grateful to be in the monkey suit. Toward the end of the night, I ran into an elephant. Ok, I didn't collide with him, but the giant elephant costume thing came into the area where I was standing and wanted to play-fight. By this time I was a pro at operating this ridiculous suit so I played along. Until he kept shoving my chest. I think it's safe to assume that Curious George is a boy monkey, but little did the elephant know, the person inside the suit was, in fact, a girl. So he kept shoving my chest and there was not much i could do about it. I suppose I could have kicked him in the crotch to get my point across, but you don't wanna do that in front of the kiddos. So he kept at it and at the end of the night we went back to the costume room and we took off our heads (which sounds really gruesome) and he was like "Dude, I didn't know you were a chick!" and I was like "Really? You think you would have noticed with all that chest shoving..." He was really embarrassed. Especially because he couldn't have been older than 15.