Cookie With a Hat!

In the spirit of THON happening this past weekend, the 46 hour no sleeping, no sitting student run Dance Marathon at Penn State, I thought I’d talk about something strange that happened during last year’s THON weekend. It’s a known fact that the dancers in THON often become delirious after so many hours of standing up dancing with no sleep. Last year, my roommate Jess and I were both on a committee called Morale, where our job is to be assigned a dancer that we will keep pumped up and moving throughout the weekend. I expected for my dancer to be delirious at a certain point, but I didn’t expect it as much for myself.

Around hour 32, Jess and I were on the dance floor when we saw a dressed up sugar cookie wearing a baseball cap walking past us. Since there are many dressed up characters that come onto the floor during THON, we didn’t think anything of it, until it registered to us about 3 seconds later that the character seemed….odd. We both did a double take then looked at each other, and since we have that special roommate bond, we both knew we were thinking the same thing. WHAT… was that? “Did that thing seem…really, freakishly short to you?” Now for Jess, with a stature of 5’1”, for anything to seem short to her needs to be, childlike.  Since the purpose of THON is to raise money for the Four Diamonds Fund, supporting families with kids who have pediatric cancer, there are many kids running around the Bryce Jordan Center during the weekend. Naturally, when you see anything less than 5 feet tall you think, “Was that a child?” But then we realized, it was almost 2 o’clock in the morning! What on earth is a child, unaccompanied by a parent I might add, doing walking around in a cookie costume at that time of night??

Then the next freakish thing hit me. While most costumes have visible places for the wearer to see out, in the 0.2 seconds I saw this thing, there was no such hole or screen. It didn’t have eyes! As we discussed this and got more and more confused by what we had just seen, we were determined to find it again. We thought, don’t worry, it couldn’t have gone far, it’s only been a few minutes.

We looked around and saw nothing resembling this character. Nothing. And at 2 o’clock in the morning, the floor at THON isn’t extremely crowded, yet we could not seem to find this mysterious…thing. We began asking, “Did you see that cookie? That cookie walking around with a hat on?” “Do you know which way that walking cookie went?” Based on the looks we got, we may as well have been walking around in coconut bras singing Christina Aguilera songs (…that’s really a story for another time).

Jess and I started to think this cookie character didn’t exist. After all, we couldn’t find it anywhere and no one else had seemed to notice it, so…maybe we had imagined it? We hadn’t slept in almost 40 hours, so maybe we, like the dancers, were starting to experience some delirium. But how had we hallucinated the same thing?

It wasn’t until about 40 minutes later that we finally added some clarity to our story. The walking cookie passed by again. And we were not about to let it get away this time. We started running after it yelling, “COOKIE WITH A HAT!!! COME BACK! COOKIE WITH A HAT!” We practically tackled it before it realized we were chasing it. And I say “it” because it still remains an extremely ambiguous character. We finally had proof that it was real and immediately whipped out our camera.

By the time THON had ended on Sunday afternoon, we had completely forgotten about the whole thing. Later that night, I loaded my camera card on my computer and it all came rushing back to me. I couldn’t show her the pictures fast enough.

 

We had located Cookie With a Hat, which appears to have been a mascot for Eat n’ Park, and gotten hard proof that it existed. However, the photos still did not answer many of our questions.

To this day, Jess still insists that the character and these pictures only exist in our minds due to the bizarre level of obliviousness displayed by the people in the background of the pictures. I’m more confused about how and where in the world this person, if what is underneath this costume is in fact human, sees where they are going. And I don’t think either of us will ever lose our concern about the fact that Jess, about 5 feet tall, is squatting next to this thing resulting in what appears to be a freakishly short cookie. A freakishly short, aimlessly wandering, forever mysterious cookie with a hat.