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.
