Here's a fun experiment: Find a neighborhood in your city where you -- a privileged 22-year-old who still sometimes listens to Blues Traveler -- might not feel overly welcomed. Now go to that neighborhood dressed in shorts and a String Cheese Incident T-shirt, park your car and walk up and down the block staring at a map and looking really lost. Also make sure you are holding a bag of face paints and a coloring book. I'm not saying that anything bad is necessarily going to happen to you, but you probably aren't going to be making a lot of Sunday morning brunch plans.
Now, go back to that neighborhood and put on an Elmo costume and watch as you turn from Scott Howard into Teen Wolf strutting the halls of Beacon Hills High. Turns out a little bit of fur does go a long way, and Elmo has a shit ton of it. Car horns will announce you as you walk down the streets, children and adults will stop to ask you for autographs at every corner and "Yo Elmo!" will rain down from windows up and down the avenues. That may be going a bit overboard, but sometimes, in my desperate world, that's how it felt. I've never felt so close to fame as I did when I was staring at the world through mesh eye sockets, in a shower of my own sweat.
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Who's up for unlimited mimosas and french toast now, bitches?
There are a few unwritten laws in the universe to which absolutely everyone apparently adheres:
1. Don't shit where you eat.
2. Don't sell drugs in front of a school.
3. Don't mess with the dude going to a kid's birthday party dressed like Elmo.
Wearing the Elmo costume often brought an intoxicating sense of invincibility. It didn't matter that I was completely lost in life, with no real direction, prospects or food, or that I had been turned down for a hosting job at the LAX California Pizza Kitchen last Tuesday. Today I was Elmo. Elmo walked with purpose. Elmo walked wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted. He could even walk through this really sketchy neighborhood after dusk! On this abandoned street! With this cop car slowly pulling up next to him ...
"Hey kid, what do you think you are doing?"
"Just walking to my car."
"What's with the suit?"
"I'm Elmo."
"Well, why don't you let us drive you to your car before something bad happens, Elmo."
"... OK."
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For more insight into jobs you probably don't want, check out Why Tech Support Sucks: A Look Behind the Scenes and The 5 Most Impractical Aspects of Superhero Costumes.
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