Flaming Monkeys

I’ve been on a robotics team since my 8th-grade year. I was given the privilege of being my team's mascot for my first two years of high school. I’ve always enjoyed being able to do goofy things while smiling and meeting new people. My robotics team makes it a priority to do community outreach every year. So every year we go to NIU Stemfest in October. Since I meet a lot of people mascoting, naturally I make a lot of new friends on other teams from different areas. It happened that that year my friends on a team named Flaming Monkeys were at Stemfest. My team decided that we didn’t need a mascot for the event. So, instead, I was tasked with talking to people about FIRST, which stands For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology,
So I spent a few hours in the suit walking around and mascoting for them. While mascoting I had to stay quiet the whole time since the monkey can’t have a voice because different people wear the costume. Though I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone, I was still able to make a lot of other people happy. Making people happy was easy because all that I had to do was do a small funny dance or make a funny gesture. A ton of people also wanted to give the monkey high fives, knuckles, and handshakes, people also smiled in the monkey's direction some even took pictures with the monkey. It was fun having the costume on because no one knew who I was and couldn’t see my face, which occasionally made it hard. Because a little kid would get scared but there was nothing I could do but drag my finger from my eye down my face which made the adults laugh and giggle to themselves. What nobody could see was that the whole time I was in the costume there was a huge smile on face. Later on in the afternoon, I was taking a break. So I took the head off, my team’s main sponsor and his wife happened to walk by at that exact