I’m sitting on cold bleachers at a high school football game and here’s what I see: shivering sports fans struggling in vain to keep blankets around their shoulders; mothers trying to keep their children warm with quilts and shawls that won’t stay put; the terminally cold in coats and gloves who may die of frostbite before the end of the first half.
Chumps! If you want to stay warm inside or outside while maintaining full maneuverability, all you need is a Snuggie. A Snuggie, and a perfect willingness to be ostracized and laughed at by complete strangers.
The challenge was simple: I was to wear a leopard-print Snuggie to a Lewiston High School game and report on how I was treated.
When I accepted this challenge—because clearly I was drunk that day—I believed it would be a non-event. So ubiquitous are the Snuggies, I reasoned, that everyone at the game would have one and nobody would notice me at all.
“Nope,” said the man taking tickets at the gate. “You’re the only one.”
Just me strutting through the gates looking like a freakish combination of pimp and jungle beast.
To get where you’re going, you have to walk a sort of Snuggie Gauntlet, making your way through sports fans, young and old, who think you’re a total tool. They’re like a cloud of mosquitoes that fling derision and ridicule instead of biting.
They don’t do it discreetly. Wear an overly promoted article of warm-wear to a high school football game, and you can expect the reaction to be in your face.
It sounds something like this:
“Oh my God, that’s a Snuggie! Nasty!”
“Seriously, who would wear one of those out in public!”
“It’s one of those blanket things you see on TV!! That must be soooooo embarrassing!”
I was the laughing stock of the ROTC, its manly members in military uniform actually pausing to watch me pass.
“A Snuggie?” one of them said. “Really?”
I looked like a cult leader in leopard print, but felt more like Carrie in that horrible locker room scene.
