He would eventually leave the coast of Ecuador, searching the world over for a place to call home and finding it in the City of Brotherly Love.ĭave Raymond, HS79, grew up in a loving family with two interchangeable homes. The Phanatic was a Darwin experiment gone wrong, born among the tortoises and sea lions of the Galápagos Islands and shunned by his peers as unreal and unlovable. If you’re more man or mascot.īut where does one end, and the other begin? If you’ll lose the greatest gig of your life. Their love is so palpable it feels as if they love you too, a force so beautiful and terrifying you begin to wonder if the bean counters in accounting will find someone else to be stupid for less. 'If you’re not having fun, then the Phanatic won’t be funny and the fans won’t like him.” His pensive expression will worry you at first, but then he’ll break into a huge smile and calm your fears. Giles, what exactly is it that you want the Phanatic to do?” So on opening night, you’ll tentatively open his office door and ask, “Mr. Over the next 16 seasons, and in the decades beyond, you’ll follow the directive you were given that very first day in 1978 by Bill Giles, president, and later, chairman of the Philadelphia Phillies.īrilliant and fearless, he’s the man who installed slanted tables in the Houston Astrodome to help customers feel tipsier and knew instinctively to make you “fatter, greener and with a bigger nose.” “We’re 1 and 0 with the Phanatic,” catcher Tim McCarver boasts the following morning. Those feet carry you onward, almost of their own accord, to the nearby picnic tables, where you leap from bench to bench with the gracelessness of the flightless bird you’ve now become.

It’s a picture-perfect spring day, and the breeze ripples through your feathers as you run to the third-base stands, jump over railings, and feel the aluminum vibrate beneath your size 30 shoes. Their faces burst into smiles and whoops and laughter, and you can still hear the faint echoes of their cheers as you open the doors to Section 332, Veteran’s Stadium, right behind home plate.

Then you walk out of the dressing room, past dozens of staffers waiting for the game to begin. You move your hips from side to side, the fat, green belly swaying comically before you. You blow your lips and watch a rubber tongue emerge from your snout like a party horn. You disco dance like Travolta on a Saturday night. You touch your cheeks with green, furry hands. Your movements and mannerisms are your own, but in a face and body so utterly different than the one you inhabit, so unlike anything anyone, anywhere, has ever seen. It’s a strange feeling, to look in the mirror and not see yourself.

Alter ego game more bean dip