bad monkey 2: monkey love

I worked the 2008 NY Chocolate Show this week as baby Bananas, the lovablest loveball merry monkey mascot.
In earlier Bananas articles, i don't think i was able to communicate how much genuine love he inspires. I despair of ever really being able to do so, in words. The reaction to most mascots is "yes, you're a dude/girl in a chicken suit/big doughnut, and you can go now". For anyone not aged 2-5, the best one can hope for, even with mascots which aren't overtly annoying, is a "that's cute" reaction which is relatively quickly forgotten, but hopefully remembered subconsciously.
With Bananas, the average reaction is on a different level, to say nothing of the more profound reactions. I'm not saying that Bananas is the first mascot to transcend the genre. The Phillie Phanatic has been making adults forget there's a man inside there, for years. That chicken does it, too. So it's safe to assume that others have done it.
But the kind of love Bananas engenders is just more personal than anything i've ever heard of. For a significant percentage of the thousands who saw Bananas this week, he was the cutest and most unexpected thing they experienced at the show, and he stayed in their consciousness throughout the day. For a smaller percentage who had a more personal interaction, he'll be a part of their consciousness for a good deal longer. And for a few...
The best way i can describe the profound interactions is by telling you of one child and one adult. The common thread was that they simply could not get enough. Please believe that hyperbole is not my style. The child was around two, and this non-verbal lad convinced his parents to return to me three or four times. I'm sure some of those times he just bolted from their presence when he spotted me again. He would have stood there, waving and dancing and hypnotized, for hours. This interaction was on the last day, when i was a bit wrecked. Most mascot gigs are over in three hours, but i was doing more than twice that for almost four days. By the last day, the pain in my upper back torso was pretty well torturous within a few minutes of putting the helmet on. In that state, you grab at extra moments of relief that come with leaning your heavily-helmeted head back. But even when you're cheating, you try to do it in character, so on that last day, someone watching long enough might have wondered why Bananas was so curious about the ceiling. If our booth had a massage therapist on-call, or i had a live-in therapist of my own, i'd have endured better. I'm not holding my breath on the former, and accepting applications for the latter. But this child came on the last day, and i gutted out the pain needed to give him a little window of magic which will very possibly only come once in his life.
The adult mirror of this child was a girl in her late teens. She was with a friend, and as happens in cases like these, i could tell right away that she was feeling something very strange and personal, something which affected her whole being. The first time she hugged me, i felt her urge to not let go. There's no way this reaction could have been so profound if it was a one-way thing. Something in her presence touched me deeply, and we created a circuit. Like the child, she and her friend came back to me three or four times (and i found her once too). There was just no way she could get enough of what she was feeling, as she looked into the screens of my eyes while i cradled and stroked her hand. If i had left the building with her, she wouldn't have even analyzed it. I mean, you know, at some point reality kicks in with adults, and within a few blocks, she would have analyzed it. But think about how amazing that proposition is, that it might have taken that long. When i'm in that rare zone, which occurs about once per show, i'm certain the woman just wants nothing more in the world than to take Bananas home. Again, no hyperbole. I would call it likely that years from now, she and her friend will suddenly recall that monkey moment in time.
For the first time ever, i saw video images of Bananas this year. I've always been objectively aware of his cuteness, but i now know that i never comprehended it fully. The images almost startled me, and i'm the one in the suit! It seemed almost unfair that that amount of cuteness could exist in the world.
At the end of the show, Bananas gives a rose to his favorite worker from another vendor's booth. I began this tradition last year, and this year delivered one to the Chocolove stand.
And this year i experienced one other thing i'd never felt. I gave a monkey hug to a beaming woman, and after a second or three, through at least five layers of costume and clothing, i felt her heart. It was so strong and i was so surprised that i pulled back a bit, and as i did, she exclaimed to her friends in amazement that she could feel my heartbeat.
Just like that.
Monkey love.