It wasn’t until 1994 that he came upon others who shared his interest. “Now I’m old and I’m warped, everybody knows it, so I don’t bother hiding anything anymore!” “I didn’t necessarily want to be the animal, but I wanted to have the animal shape, as far back as I can remember. “When I was very, very young, I knew I wanted to be some type of animal,” he says. He’s 39 years old and works as a network administrator at a rubber company in Akron. Ostrich, whose real name is Marshall Woods, is a compact guy in a denim jacket and blue jeans. The headlights illuminate the road ahead. We get into his Chevrolet Metro and speed away from the Sheraton, toward the nearest mall. “You regress into a child when you come to a convention,” Johnson says, “because it’s that kind of camaraderie, or childishness.” Riding with Ostrich “It’s like looking at it with baby eyes, or cub eyes.” “It’s a new way of looking at the world,” Dickinson says. Last year, Johnson, who has brought the ashes of his dead cat to the FurFest, persuaded Dickinson to attend another furry convention in Memphis, and that’s what did it. Next to him is his skinny, longhaired, fedora-wearing sidekick, a 23-year-old art student named Ian Johnson (nametag: r. But when you’re one of the furs, it’s one big extended family.” “In normal society,” Dickinson says, “two people who hardly know each other do not walk up and scratch each other’s backs. He started to believe that, somewhere deep down, he was actually … a polar bear. Instead I find myself talking with Keith Dickinson, a self-described “computer geek.” Not long ago, this man, a 37-year-old from Kansas City, Kansas, was so depressed he could barely bring himself to go to the grocery store. Here, a number of “furries”-people whose interest in animal characters goes further than an appreciation of The Lion King-are gathering together.Īt 7:30 p.m., near the front desk, three men known as Pack Rat, Rob Fox, and Zen Wolph are scratching one another’s backs-grooming one another, like macaques in a zoo.

High tail hall furry comic