Mascots: Creepers in Disguise?

While visiting the future Mrs. Buck in Pennsylvania over the past weekend I was able to catch a local college football game at Kutztown University. When I was not watching the Kutztown Bears be brutally slaughtered, I was observing an interesting breach to American social etiquette: Mascots. The Kutztown Golden Bear was no different than any other mascot with the exception that he looked like he belonged in a kids cereal commercial and not a college football game. What stood out to me was that mascots throughout the world are granted free reign to defy all of the unspoken rules of strangers.

If a stranger were to come up to you at a football game and give you a big hug, sit down on your lap, spill popcorn on your head, put their arm around your small child, or just come up close and stare at you, there would be very good odds that stranger would end up getting the living crap beat out of them. Now take all of these same actions, put the stranger in a big fluffy animal costume with a big smile on their face, and suddenly everything is perfectly acceptable! Just because the mascot mask looks like an innocent smiling bear doesn't mean there's an innocent smiling bear on the inside. There could be a major creeper underneath there. What is the interview process like for a mascot? Maybe they should go through a full background check, do a polygraph, and have a good psych evaluation.

Nothing is as it seems.