It’s a Jungle Out There : Team Mascots Hit the Road to Hype New Transitway

There was a brief delay at the start because they had to stop and pick up the anteater.

He was supposed to be waiting out front, but when the gang pulled up, he was nowhere to be found.

That was fine with the frog and the dolphin, though, because the holdup gave them time to take off their heads and gulp some air.

It all sounds like something out of Lewis Carroll, but in fact there’s a logical science to being a mascot, a precise system. (For instance, Rule No. 1: Try not to think about the funny smell inside the head of the mascot costume.)

By the same token, there’s a precise system to staging a publicity stunt, which is what this escapade was. In an all-out effort to hype today’s grand opening of Orange County’s first “transitway”--a 60-foot-high, car-pool-only route between the Santa Ana Freeway and the Costa Mesa Freeway--California Department of Transportation officials decided to send 400 pounds of mascot rolling down the county’s car-pool lanes Tuesday morning.

“It’s really just a way to get more attention to the car-pool lanes and the system we’ve created on the freeways,” said Albert Miranda, a Caltrans spokesman.

In other words, if you thought you saw a giant anteater pass you in a Saab 900S convertible, you were neither hung-over nor hallucinating. You were simply taking a detour through . . . the PR Zone.

Specifically, that anteater was Peter, beloved mascot of UC Irvine. His back-seat buddies were Finley the Dolphin, of the Anaheim Splash soccer team, and Zeus the Bullfrog, of the Anaheim Bullfrogs roller hockey team.

Wild Wing, the Mighty Ducks professional hockey team’s famed mascot, declined to take part in the caravan. Big shot.

Probably just as well, since that poor car was packed like Noah’s Ark. Peter was practically riding on the hood, his long snout drooping over the Saab windshield. (Apparently, they don’t have anteaters in Sweden.)

Throughout the morning rush, drivers gawked, honked and cheered as the car-pooling critters waved like Rose Parade queens.

You. In the Honda Civic. You almost drove into the median wall, didn’t you, shocked by that Saab-ful of beasties? And you in the Volkswagen Jetta, admit it: You were doing dangerous double- and triple-takes over your left shoulder. And you, the driver of that Plymouth Voyager, you were laughing your head off (a phrase people in mascot costumes take quite literally and consider high praise).

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Drew McCaughey, marketing director for the Anaheim Bullfrogs, said that this is public relations in the ‘90s. Every event, every team, every cause needs a mascot. So great is the demand for Zeus that one man can’t handle the job.

“ I’ve been Zeus,” he confessed.

Tuesday, Zeus was 22-year-old Darren Jessee, a Bullfrogs office assistant pressed into service for the low, low price of free doughnuts and a few brownie points. Overall, Jessee was a good sport about the gig, but he did experience a wave of nausea when he peered into that frog helmet--a hot, foam-lined hat filled with hair and . . . stuff.

“It’s nasty,” he said, his voice muffled by fake frog skin.

Peter the Anteater, meanwhile, was Ken Ezell, and Finley the Dolphin was 22-year-old Vanessa Kromer, a Cal State Fullerton student.

“I live in a sorority of 24 girls,” she said. “I had this thing on this morning, and they just lost it. They thought it was the funniest thing in the world.”

She, however, did not, because a Saab convertible is deadlier than a tuna net for the average dolphin mascot. With the car traveling at speeds up to 70 m.p.h., wind sliced through the dolphin eye holes, causing temporary blindness as well as a nasty chill.

“It’s really cold,” Kromer said, her jagged little dolphin teeth chattering.

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When the transitway officially opens today, there will be yet another mascot parade. Then, at noon, ordinary human drivers will be able to change freeways without leaving the car-pool lane.

Eventually, the 4 1/2-mile transitway will link two of the nation’s busiest interchanges, the Santa Ana-Costa Mesa freeway link and the nearby convergence of the Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Orange freeways. Remaining construction is scheduled to be finished by the middle of 1996.

By then, perhaps, the mascots will have recovered from Tuesday’s embarrassment.

It’s the darndest thing, McCaughey explained, but there are real lingering effects from wearing that mascot costume.

Hours after taking it off, he said, “you feel like waving.”