Geusz:

To start with, how did you get into fursuiting?

   I’ve had an interest in costume characters for as long as I can remember, but being rather introverted in my youth, and also very small, I could never convince myself to try to find a way to be a character performer early in my life.

Geusz:

How long have you been active in the field?

   I discovered furry in 2002, by stumbling onto a website about MFF and fursuits. As I realized that I was myself a furry, I started to think that maybe I could get into character performance by creating my own character. After a year of exploration that included discovering the magic and joy of puppetry, I finally completed my first full-body costume puppet character and entered the wonderful world of costume character performance.

Geusz:

Have you won any kind of professional or fandom recognition?

   For all the building and performance work I’ve done, I’ve never been the kind to openly ‘toot my own horn’. This probably helps to make me a better character performer, since I quite naturally put the focus on my characters, but I’ve also never been interested in entering any judged contests or otherwise doing things to draw attention to myself. So, the only formal recognition I have ever received was to be asked to be the Panelist of Honor at RCFM in 2006, which was quite an interesting experience. Still, the greatest reward to me is getting to make people’s lives a little bit happier—to help them forget their troubles for a while and escape into the fantasy world of fun, lovable animal characters. Through my entertainment work, I’ve touched tens of thousands of lives in some small way over the years, and knowing that I made even a small difference for so many people is what counts the most in my mind.

Geusz:

   I’ve made every one of my own costumes—I don’t own a single costume made by anyone else.

Geusz:

Which of your suits are you the proudest of?

   I’m quite proud of all of my characters, so it’s incredibly difficult for me to pick a single favorite. But from a design standpoint, I’d say that I’m most proud of my tarantula, because he represents such a huge design challenge in terms of creating a large costume that looks like and can move like a real tarantula. I’m especially proud of building him as a workable quadruped and being able to have him scurry around places, in a way that startles, amazes, and every now and then even scares people a little bit.

Geusz:

Which is your favorite suit to perform in?

   I think my favorite character to perform has to be my stork, for as unwieldy as he may appear, he’s actually very easy for me to work with and I really feel at one with the character. I especially love his large wings and the level of beak-eye coordination that I’ve developed. I’ve become very adept at using his beak to manipulate small objects in the environment, and his beak is a point of fascination for nearly all of the children that the stork gets to entertain.

Geusz:

   A run-of-the-mill mascot performer would probably find my stork to be quite a challenge to work with, as he does require a strong understanding of his mechanisms and capabilities. However, for me today, he’s incredibly easy for me to perform, and I slip into character with him so easily that it’s almost scary sometimes. He’s one of a handful of my characters where I can really bond with the character while I perform, and I often truly feel like I’ve become the character for the duration of an event.

Geusz:

   Sort of—but maybe not in the way you’d think. The funny thing is that the stork is a character that was never meant to be. He started as an experiment to make a nice pair of bird legs, which then grew into a project to make an entire costume. He was originally going to be like my dragon and kangaroo costumes, where I manipulate the neck and head using my right arm held up above my head. But I was determined to have usable wings, and I couldn’t rig a mechanism to make them work the way I wanted them to. So I switched gears and rigged a mechanism for the beak, allowing me to keep both of my arms in the stork’s wings. This ended up being by far the best way of designing the character, and it allowed me to give him a rather tall neck, putting his head just shy of seven feet high.

Geusz:

How many other suits do you appear in, and what are they?

   Besides Santa Fox and the stork, I have a dragon, a kangaroo, a tree frog, a tarantula, a goat, and a penguin. I also have partial fox and dragon outfits. I’m currently building a new and much improved dragon costume to replace my original dragon, which is now all but retired from regular use. My new dragon will debut at MFF 2007.

Geusz:

   I coined the name ‘Santa Fox’ during the holiday season just before I went to my first furry con, MegaPLEX 2004. I didn’t know a lot about fursonas before I went to MP, but I knew that I’d always seen a lot of foxes in con pictures, so I figured that if I was bringing a fox costume, I should make him as unique as possible. So I left the Santa hat and jingle bells on the costume, and let him remain ‘Santa Fox’ for the duration of the con. It worked so well that I decided to keep the name. Over time, I’ve come to believe that it was fate for me to bond with this name that so very aptly describes the way I see myself now. I love to give of myself by volunteering my entertainment at events and volunteering my experience to panels and workshops. Most of all, I love nothing more than to give the gift of happy laughter to children and to see the joy on their faces when I get to entertain them.

Geusz:

   Costume characters are in essence just large-scale puppets, fitting in to the grand scheme of over a dozen different types and styles of puppets. Puppetry is the art that I got into initially, and when I finally got up the nerve to try to make my first costume (my original dragon) I’d decided to make a true ‘costume puppet’, modeling its functionality after Bear in the Big Blue House. That was so much fun, and so successful in terms of early audience reactions, that since then all of my characters (other than Santa Fox) are in some way costume puppets, integrating some form of puppetry design and/or performance techniques.

Geusz:

   My simplest advice is to study up on all the materials that you can find, and talk with experienced performers to get a clear understanding of what you’re getting yourself into. I think a lot of people look at costume characters, think “oh, that would be fun”, and then jump into it without any preparation. Only then do they discover the physical and mental challenges involved in really being a good character, and some don’t make it past that first time out, just because it can be so challenging. Becoming well informed about costume characters before you make your first attempt at performing will at least prepare you better for what to expect, and give you the foundations for understanding what a good character should be like.

Geusz:

And what would you say to someone setting out to make their first suit?

   My advice to them is similar: Study all the costume-building information out there, and go to building panels offered at furry conventions. Never be afraid to experiment, and most of all, don’t be afraid to fail—it’s through making mistakes that one learns and grows as a builder.
   Oh, and I don’t suggest that a newcomer try to tackle a costume version of his/her personal fursona as a first suit. It’s better to build several generic characters first, so that if your first tries don’t come out that well, you won’t become as frustrated as you’d feel if you messed up a version of your personal fursona. Once you get your skills sharpened, then tackle your fursona character.

Geusz:

   While I hate to admit it, I do tend to get very jealous whenever I see anyone performing a costume character in public at an event where I can’t perform—especially when I see a good performer who’s clearly having a very fun time with the character and event. There’s nothing I love more than entertaining a crowd, and if I could have my way I’d be out entertaining every single day.
   I don’t tend to get jealous of fursuits too often, just because I love my personal style and very few people build anything close to the kinds of suits I build. I tend to be more jealous of some of the suits I see used in TV, like the Bear in the Big Blue House costume or the Snook the Sloth costume. Recently I saw pictures of a TV-quality realistic quadruped bear costume that made my heart flutter. When I do see something that makes me greatly envious, I try to turn that around into fuel to drive me to build my own unique variation, implementing whatever it is that I like about that costume into a unique character of my own.
   Most recently, I've been completely awed by the new Coke polar bear costume, which is an overhead-manipulation costume-puppet design, just like my dragon and kangaroo characters. He's adorably cute, and looks like he'd be so much fun to play! He's even based at the World of Coke in my hometown of Atlanta. Unfortunately, though, I'm six inches too short for the requirements of the Coke bear, so I guess that only means one thing: I'm going to have to build my own costume-puppet polar bear next year ;-)

Geusz:

   Well, of course, there’s the puppetry, which I always try to be very involved in wherever I go. I love the comedy shows and the animal presentations that some of the charities will put on. I also try to get to a few writing panels, as writing is a lesser known but equally important pastime for me. Usually, though, I just don’t have a lot of time to do things beyond puppetry and fursuiting, especially at the three cons where I serve on staff (FWA, RCFM, MegaPLEX).

Geusz:

   I started out by writing that ‘Great American Novel’, in the form of a medieval fantasy story. I got into working on this story several years before I discovered furry, and I finished it up about the time I really started getting interested in puppetry. While I did start work on a follow-up to that novel, I got sidetracked into writing stories for my puppet shows, and now I’ve taken an interest in writing short stories about furry characters with Twilight Zone-type endings. I’ve never published any of my work, other than to perform my puppet show stories and to share one short story on my LJ. I’d like to eventually see some of my work get published, but right now I write for the sheer joy of creating vivid worlds out of words.

Geusz:

   Gosh, that’s such a difficult question to answer. I’ve had so many wonderful moments that it’s near impossible for me to pick just one that sticks out more than any other. I think one moment that ranks up there was when my stork got to help a grandmotherly storyteller with her performance at a reading festival where I was entertaining. I sat with the group of kids around her and acted out certain scenes at her cue. Another great moment was being asked out of the blue (and again in the stork suit, I believe) to pose with a group of high school seniors in their prom photo at a park where I was entertaining. From a furry con standpoint though, my coolest moment had to be when I, as Santa Fox, won the musical chairs fursuit game at MFM in 2006, beating out nearly forty other fursuiters, and doing so after another suiter landed on me in the basketball game. I was so shaken up that I had to take a break and be checked out by the con medic, so coming back from that and winning the musical chairs round just felt unbelievably wonderful—a moment I will never forget.

Geusz:

   I haven’t had too many bad experiences, for which I feel very lucky. I credit some of that to my careful selection of events, as well as to my not having done any work in extremely difficult environments like theme parks and sports arenas. Probably the most irritating thing to happen to me was getting tackled hard from behind three times in one hour at a charitable event—so hard that I was knocked off my feet and to the ground each time. After the third time, I had to just quit for about an hour to recover, but trouper that I am, I still went back out for the last twenty minutes of the event.
   The most embarrassing thing to happen to me was on one of my few actual mascot gigs (I’ve only done four, whereas the remaining 95% of my performance work has been with my own characters.) This was actually my best mascot gig of all in terms of loving the character and the event, but I got a little too much into it. The character was a certain fat cat from the comic strips, and in trying to be so much like him, I got down on the floor and pretended to take a cat nap. I then rolled over on my back and started to sit up, not knowing that the chin strap had slipped off of my chin. As I started up, the head rolled backwards and before I could grab the head, my own balaclava-covered head was completely exposed to some of the kids and parents. Now, I’ve lost a foot once during a dance routine, and had my tail fall off at a picnic where I was in partial costume, but never anything so embarrassing as losing my head that day.

Geusz:

   I work professionally as a freelance puppeteer and costume character performer through my own part-time entertainment business. I hire myself out to do puppet shows, walk-around character entertainment, and workshops. I do more volunteer work than paid work, though I love all of it and have no qualms at putting in all the extra effort, especially when many volunteer gigs can connect me to future paying gigs.

Geusz:

How do ‘mundane’ gigs differ from ‘furry’ ones?

   Working with the public is a lot more challenging than entertaining at a furry con, but it’s also much more rewarding. That’s not meant to knock cons—it’s just that it’s such a very fulfilling feeling to meet the challenge of convincing non-furry people to take an interest in my characters and to get them to laugh and smile and have a good time. Even with kids, it can be quite a challenge to capture their interest and get them to believe in the character, especially when some have had past experiences with rather poorly performed characters. Kids in general are always quite a handful when you’re in costume—something that fursuiters who stick to just furry events never have to encounter. You need the patience of an angel to deal with kids, especially at an event that offers lots of sweet foods, and it is an incredible feat to put up with their antics and just let anything that happens calmly slide off your back.
   There’s a very different challenge involved in entertaining at cons, because your audience is already predisposed to take a liking to costume animal characters. And unlike many public events where I’m the only character, or perhaps one of just two or three, at furry cons there are dozens if not hundreds of them. So, I have to do things like pull on my abilities to be ultra-lively, to act very animal-like, and to do semi-crazy tricks in order to really stand out and be noticed at cons. But, there are some great upsides to cons. Cons are great testing grounds for new ideas that I may eventually work into my public routines, and I can also be much looser at cons. Not that I ever get too loose, but there a few things that even I would do at cons but not out in front of the general public. Most of all, though, I just love being able to slip on a fursuit at any time during the four day weekend of a con and go out and have fun, whereas the public events that I work are scheduled for specific time periods that usually last just a few hours on a certain day.
   I’ve also done a little mascot work—four gigs to be exact—but it never really measured up to the magic of the hundred-plus gigs that I’ve done with my own characters. I can understand why some people love mascot work, and I have a lot of respect for those who perform those well-known characters on a regular basis, but it’s just not my cup of tea. I think that once you’ve spent so much time with comfortable, custom-fitted costumes of characters with which you have a deep personal connection, it’s really hard to go into a world where many times neither the costumes nor the personalities fit you very well. I’m also a very free-spirited, independent minded person, and that kind of personality is much better suited for the freelance kind of work that I do with my own characters.

Geusz:

   My love of performing is so strong that I hate to go through a weekend without entertaining others in some form or fashion. Since I can’t get official gigs every single week, I will regularly take one of my puppet characters out with me if I’m going to visit certain kinds of stores, malls, restaurants, or events and activities. I’ve developed a style of keeping low-key by carrying the character in a large canvas bag on my shoulder, performing him or her by making it look I’m carrying a small pet around in the bag with me. I’ve gotten so adept at this style of performing that on many occasions I’ll have people come up and tell me that they thought the character was real when they first caught sight of it.
   But I don’t just stop with carrying a puppet with me; whenever I feel comfortable with it, I’ll also wear my fox paws, gloves, tail, and my FWA jersey, letting me feel like I’m almost in full costume. I’ve gone into all kinds of places this way, and to my surprise I’ve always been warmly received, which pleases me to no end because I just love being able to spread a little happiness wherever I go. Of course, the winter holiday season is my favorite time of year—I am Santa Fox, after all—and to celebrate I’ll take my outfit a step further, adding a furry neck ruff along with my bell collar and a Santa hat with fox ears sewn into it. My fox outfit has become so comfortable for me that I wear it to almost every furry outing, get-together, or meeting that I go to, and I’m sure that some of my furry friends have no idea what I look like without that stuff on.