Mar Katz, What We Need Now, More Than Ever, Is Mr. Worldwide

What We Need Now More than Ever: Mr. Worldwide

by Mar Katz

*

The year is 2012, and I am in seventh grade, in the midst of what many New York City Jews would term “bar mitzvah season.” I am on the dance floor, surrounded by tween boys in ill-fitting suits and girls who tower over them in black spaghetti strap dresses and fuzzy socks soaking up the ache of blistered feet, high heels abandoned under a table. I am decked out in party favors that feel precious right now, but will be in a landfill by the end of the week: plastic shutter shades, glow-stick necklaces, maybe even, dare I say it, a neon fedora. In other words, I am on top of the world. 

The year is 2025, and I am waiting in the longest line I have ever seen for the chance at free entry to a concert at the Feria Nacional de San Marcos. Some people camped out in tents overnight to secure their spots in line, but my friends and I were not so committed. We only arrived five hours early. One of my friends works on the book of Sudoku puzzles she brought to keep herself entertained. My other friend takes dumb videos of us on her camcorder. We are enveloped in a crowd of people dressed in a uniform consisting of dress shirts, ties, aviator sunglasses, face-painted goatees, and bald caps. 

*

The only connection between these two experiences that occurred half my lifetime apart is none other than Mr. Worldwide. Armando Christian Pérez, aka Pitbull, aka Mr. 305, aka Mr. Worldwide, was born in Miami, Florida to Cuban parents who had fled the Castro regime. Pérez was a precocious child. By the age of five, he was already reciting the poems of Jose Martí he had memorized by heart. But by twenty-three, he was well on his way to becoming the king of recession pop with the release of his debut album, M.I.A.M.I (Money Is A Major Issue), featuring top singles “Culo” and “That’s Nasty.” 

Recession pop is the dance music genre that dominated the top charts in the years surrounding the Great Recession, roughly from 2008-2014. The genre is defined by its catchy melodies, uptempo electronic beats, flashing-light synths, autotune, and lyric content. Recession pop lyrics reflect the nihilism of the day, promoting hedonism as the only appropriate response to financial precarity. 

*

There is perhaps no song that better exemplifies recession pop than Pitbull’s 2014 hit, “Time of Our Lives” feat. Ne-Yo, off the record Globalization. In the pre-chorus, Pitbull explains that his rent is over one week late, and though he’s worked his “ass off,” he still doesn’t have the money to pay it. That doesn’t stop him from having a good night though–he has just enough money to pay the cover fee at the club. Pitbull’s priority is having a good time “before my time is up.” 

This “YOLO” ethos was the predominant attitude in popular music during the most formative years of my childhood. The core message to live in the now was drilled into my generation. Oh, to be a Zillenial. We are the generation that reposted infinity signs on Tumblr, but were too young to make the mistake of getting them tattooed on our wrists. We are the generation who talked to strangers on Omegle and bullied each other on Ask.fm because parents didn’t yet understand the dangers of the internet. We are the generation raised on Degrassi: The Next Generation and America’s Next Top Model. We are the generation of hookup culture, of the loneliness epidemic. We are a generation who won’t wait up for a “Mr. Right,” only what Pitbull would categorize as a “Mr. Right Now.”

*

At Pitbull’s free concert at the Feria Nacional de San Marcos last year, I counted about ten heads in front of us when the bouncers cut off entry to the concert. I had had no problem getting into Los Ángeles Azules several days prior, but this was Mr. Worldwide. We had gotten so close to seeing him live, and we weren’t about to let this stop us. We had spent the last five hours killing time standing in line for a chance to live in the now. We were exhausted. As we bought gorditas from a nearby food stand, we noticed a man with a stack of lime green and royal blue plastic chairs. He was renting them out for the night at 50 pesos a pop; you just had to leave your ID with him. We quickly complied and lined our chairs up as close to the barriers as we could get, just as we saw other people doing. We couldn’t really see the stage, but had a good view of the screens, and were able to rest our legs. When Mr. Worldwide sprinted out onto the stage, letting out his signature, “DALEEEE,” people cried out with pure joy.

If I stood and craned my neck, I could see the now 45 year-old Mr. Worldwide on stage, gyrating his hips in his tux. Back up dancers in bedazzled bikinis groped him as he sang. At one point he removed his jacket to reveal a skin tight leather zip up...bodysuit??? He looked out over the sea of bald fans, grinning. In a viral TikTok from February of 2025, a fan captured Pitbull on stage addressing his impersonators directly: “I wanna say a special thank you to everybody that came out with bald caps here tonight. I appreciate y'all. It is amazing to see, it's amazing to feel, I hope when y'all put on those bald caps, you feel just like I do. Having a good motherfucking time every day of my LIFE!” At a time when hair transplants have become popular among balding celebrities, Pitbull’s embrace of his aesthetic leads the way for a level of authenticity we don’t often see in pop stardom. He didn’t seem offended that his appearance had become a meme. He was still living for tonight. 

*

At the tail end of Brat Summer, whispers of the second coming of recession pop began to circulate the internet. The majority of the articles about the phenomenon published in mainstream news outlets, such as Time, Vogue, and NPR, listed the top artists belonging to the movement as Kesha, Lady Gaga, The Black Eyed Peas, and Rihanna. And while some of them at least mentioned Pitbull, none of them entertained his outsize role in the establishment of the genre, one that I would argue deems him worthy of the title “King Of Recession Pop,” not that he needs any more aliases. Pitbull has been peddling recession aesthetics since his inception, before the recession even began. Part of Pitbull’s brand has always been to connect on the common goal of having fun despite being broke, of living in the now during the end times. In a world of Mr. Steal Yo Girls, Pitbull united us with the project of Mr. Worldwide. 

Many of the zeitgeisty articles about the genre that flooded the internet in 2024 and 2025 cited Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, and Chappell Roan as today’s artists ushering us into a new recession pop era, now that Usher himself has moved on. And I’m so sorry to have to be the one to say it, divas, and I say it with the hopes of not being disowned by the queer community, but while Chappell Roan’s ballads are great for karaoke, they just aren’t danceable. Only a few of them hit a BPM high enough to dance to, and even those lack the synthy, highly climactic beat drops core to the genre. And while Sabrina Carpenter does address the disposability of her partners, no one in their right mind would ever categorize her music as recession pop. 

Of the three, Charli XCX certainly comes the closest. I love Brat as much as the next person, and “365” and “Club Classics” certainly approach the attitudes present during the height of recession pop. But Charli’s description of a luxurious vacation to Italy in “Everything is romantic,” and her rivalry with fellow celebrities in “Girl, so confusing” and “Sympathy is a knife,” albeit set to electronic beats, are not relatable and hardly in the spirit of the genre. In “Rewind,” and “Apple,” she dwells on the past, rather than living in the now.  Besides, as Charli XCX herself said in an interview with British Vogue in April of 2026, she’s moving away from creating dance music because “the dance floor is dead.” As much as they might claim to be able to “get the job done,” the new guard just isn’t giving the people the recession pop we need. 

*

And it’s not their fault–we cannot look to artists to shift an entire culture. My generation has gained a reputation for playing it safe, for being boring. We’re drinking less than the generations that preceded us. We’ve been called out for not wanting to leave tabs open at bars (guilty as charged). And most importantly, since 2004, the U.S. partying frequency rate has decreased by 35%, largely due to us. We’re more cautious, more religious, and therefore less likely to feel, as Pitbull did upon hitting the clubs, that “We didn’t go to church but I got blessed.” It would be too much to ask of these artists to revive the mentality of a bygone era. 

As I watched Mr. Worldwide sing the opening line of “Hotel Room Service” from my plastic chair, I felt the crowd’s collective effervescence flow through me, chills running down my spine as they always do when I see a live musical performance. When the concert was nearly halfway over, I realized that I was familiar with far more of his discography than I had previously thought. I must have absorbed him through cultural osmosis. Never before his free concert had I considered it, but as I felt the joy of nostalgia wash over me, I asked myself if I was a fan of Mr. Worldwide. If I, too, would some day don a bald cap and aviator lenses, humming with the gender euphoria brought on by wearing a suit and drawing on a mustache with Sharpie.

Pitbull continued to make music after 2014, but nothing seemed to hit like his recession pop did. At his free concert, he chose to almost exclusively perform his biggest hits of the 2010s. And the crowd ate it up. It was fitting that, given his roots of only having “enough to get up in this club,” Pitbull gave us the gift of a free concert.

*

If you thought that the age of Pitbull had long since come and gone, you would be sorely mistaken. The false alarm of the return of recession pop has only left me craving the genre more. And in 2026, when Rihanna has effectively gone into retirement, Nicki Minaj is Nicki Minaj (RIP), and the contestants for Best New Artist were primarily indie songwriters of the likes of Olivia Dean, Alex Warren, and sombr, (and just in case you were thinking it, no, you can absolutely NOT be serious if you wish to convince me that ADDISON RAE is going to singlehandedly save recession pop.) we cannot trust anyone to give us the recession pop we require. As the shitstorm that is humanity in 2026 continues to rain down, as we continue to light this planet on fire, in these times of crisis, what we really need now, more than ever, is Mr. Worldwide.

Hayeon Lee / If You Are Reading This, This is Your Sign to Crash Out

 

Quentin Parker: Indecision / Percentages

 

Indecision / Percentages

Quentin Parker

*

My first diagnosis was an “unspecified” ADHD. I have a habit of almost, but not completely, meeting the benchmark when it comes to mental health evaluations. It took months for the label to shift from “unspecified” to “inattentive,” and a year for my therapist to suspect a possible overlap with autism. This was either due to or despite my autism screening results coming up inconclusive; she said it was unlikely that a non-autistic person met any of the thresholds, at least in her years of experience. I was instructed not to spiral about this, that my life wouldn’t fundamentally change with an eventual autism diagnosis, and that Google was the last place I needed to search for answers. Luckily, I was proactive and went to Reddit to corroborate her theory before the session ended. 

The signs seem to have always been there. I can now pinpoint the moments in my adolescence where I boiled neurodivergence down to being a kid: the excessive talking to my classmates in the second grade when we were expected to learn, my hyper-specific (bordering obsessive) interests that lasted years until I abandoned them completely, how I procrastinated on nearly every major assignment until a day or two before the deadline because the time constraint was more actionable, the overwhelming need to spend money so that I could have things for the sake of having them—only to forget they existed once the newness faded. Without knowing, I taught myself to hide in plain sight. My impulses became jokes and I laughed off my lack of motivation to do tasks or make decisions that didn’t result in immediate gratification. The phrase, “I’m just a boy,” was a crutch for my mind’s shortcomings. When I couldn’t hide, I masked the traits completely. I suppressed the urge to plan my responses and cut in the second someone finished a sentence, maintaining my composure when they’d go on another tangent and I lost my opportunity to participate. Once I sat in a graduate-level literature course unable to do anything other than daydream or fidget or pretend to read, I realized I’d actually been hiding from myself.

The ADHD diagnosis wasn’t revelatory or cathartic, it was inconvenient. Day-to-day tasks overtime became noticeably herculean compared to when I juggled almost twenty hours in the writing center, multiple 400-level courses, a teaching assistantship, an honors thesis, two capstone projects, nine graduate school applications, running a literary magazine, a 6-day-a-week workout schedule, intermittent fasting, and persistent essay submissions in my last year of college. Answering the long-standing question of how my mind worked meant that I suddenly couldn’t “lock-in” my way through academia. If I wasn’t on campus, I was lying in bed. I hated lying in bed. But I also loved it. But I also couldn’t not do it. I went years without meaningfully reading a book that wasn’t assigned and I couldn’t write unless there was a due date attached to the essay. Cooking dragged on longer than ordering food and waiting for it to arrive at my doorstep, the hard work already done for me.

My therapist introduced me to the concept of “habit stacking.” It was a logical solution to my problem: attach the things I want to do to something I already do routinely. If I run out of clothes to wear for the week, I can load the dishwasher after loading the laundry. If I need to buy gas, I may as well go to the grocery store while I’m still in the car. The hope is that one task snowballs into another, then the snowballs become dominoes, until every task has been knocked down sequentially.

Reading and writing are roadblocks. My brain hates to choose. In an ideal state of mind I can pick up a book that interests me (enough) and voluntarily begin to read, but I struggle to get past the action of staring at letters on a page; nothing flashy, nothing shocking, nothing extra to flood my brain with dopamine. Pages and text and pages and text until it ends. If I want to find something more in a book, I have to work for it. Essays are no different; there’s no finish line on a blank page. Concepts and outlines aren’t results, only “maybes.” I can spend hours revising, striving for perfection, because nothing needs to be made—just shaped. I can easily exhaust myself at the thought of focusing on one book, and many books, and one essay, and many essays. The repetition of reading and writing is incredibly unappealing, yet they’ve remained passions of mine since the sixth grade.

I started rolling dice because I needed something to do with my hands and my brain. Something repeated but not repetitive. For the last six years my “special interest” has been Dungeons & Dragons, which translated into an obsession with collecting dice (if and when my budget allows). Before I started playing, I developed a dice ritual. Everyday I rolled them in sets: d4’s, then d6’s, then d8’s, etc. I did this until I rolled the maximum number on each die. My ritual became an absentminded form of stimulation, something I’d turn to when I was bored at home, an alternative to scrolling social media or playing games on my phone while sitting in front of my laptop. This practice can take just a few minutes to complete if I roll really well, and some days I can do it for up to an hour, rolling slowly and methodically or messily and frustratedly until I get my desired results. In my creative nonfiction workshop course, we were given the task to develop a side practice; I decided to gamify incentive.

Dice rolling has been a method of circumventing my (possible) AuDHD. The rule set is necessary for success: the d4 represents the 4 essays I planned to revise for the semester, the d8 represents that 8 books on my shelf that I planned for months to finally read, the d6 and d10 represent that various times I allotted to read and revise so that rather than leaving task completion to the horrors of the indefinite, I knew there was a point in time where I’d be required to stop. However, structure is never enough. The dice incorporate a tasteful randomness where I never have to decide what book to read or what essay to revise, otherwise I can easily talk myself out of it. The dice, in removing the burden of choice, require me to switch between projects when they deem it so. They tell me exactly what to do and how long to do it, with options and variety. A near perfect reverse psychology. 

I act in sequence now, after years of behavioral contradictions and searching for ways to trick my brain while needing my brain to be aware of the tricks. The dice don’t create the doing, but they leave me with something I can do without much room for argument. I can leave my thinking to percentages.

Clare Boyle, Articles of Faith, Featuring Drake

*

Dear G, 

It has been seven months since we began talking about God nonstop. Technically, God’s name entered the chat when I was trying to tell you about the light in Arizona. 

But really, we had been walking towards one another on our Godjourneys for a long time. 

You know this: Over the past five years, my life has changed and changed in ways that can sometimes be disorienting. I’ve lived in four cities, in at least ten apartments. I’ve had about that number of jobs. Who’s at the center of my life has changed a lot over this time, sometimes because of friend break ups but also, often, because of banal things: busyness, distance. 

In September, having just moved to another new place, I began needing to trust that there was something inside, or behind, or coursing beneath the surface of life that would remain if everything else fell away. I was not concerned with whether our spirits persist after we die. I was scared of the possibility of a future in which I would feel like there was nothing/no one I loved enough for me to get out of bed, as had happened in the past. This was the fleshy pink center of my Godwanting. 

Your own Godjourney was accelerating around then, too, because of wanting to figure out how to be a good uncle to your sister’s baby without getting fucked up by proximity to her very dogmatic religious community. 

“God” became a recurring feature of 

the Google Doc through which we’ve remained tethered since you moved from Philly to Brooklyn and I moved from Philly to Minneapolis, then Tucson.

To feed our convos, I started mentioning my Godjourney offhand in every conversation to see whose ears perked up, and asking all of those people how they define “faith.” I chose “faith” instead of “God” for a few reasons. It seemed less likely to ruffle feathers as an entry point if an interlocutor had a very rigid definition of God. Also, in what I felt to be its forward-lookingness, “faith” still dealt directly with what I was worried about. This perception of “faith” as future-oriented was soon unseated. 

*

September, 2025 

Lesson: Faith is waking up one day to realize every beautiful thing in your life. - M

Object: Dried rose 

M said this to me when we were sitting beside each other on the curb near the gas station, drinking chocolate milk. The gas station is where I first met M, one hundred degree September afternoon. She was sitting in the shade by the door, asking if anyone could spare change. When I asked if she wanted a snack or drink, she chose chocolate milk. I had to ask the cashier to unlock a literal chain coiled around the refrigerator door in order to buy one for her and one for me. When I handed M her bottle, we bonded over the drink’s delightful efficiency as a drink. (In addition to being sweet, it packs a hefty punch in terms of both carbs and protein.) 

M started talking about God pretty much right away. She explained she was an angel rather than a human, something she had to remind herself when she was being harassed for living on the street. When I asked what faith meant to her, her answer reoriented a lot of things for me–specifically, it reframed faith as a practice of gratitude. That felt, and feels, much more accessible than Trusting the Future™.  

M’s friend, sitting with us, gave me this rose, then in tender bloom. 

*

October, 2025

Lesson: God is inside all of us, and the world is a series of doors. - Sadi

Object: Rock from Sabino Canyon

My old classmate Sadi is actually the person who introduced me to the phrase “God journey” (which I then smashed together here), when she visited Tucson in October for a translation conference. As we sat eating lunch in the grass, she explained that her own God journey–which has involved traveling to shrines across Pakistan to archive Sufi and Bhakti oral poetry–has led her to the understanding that “God is inside all of us, and the world is a series of doors.” The phrase “God is inside all of us” reminded me of something I am still learning, something I have to remember again and again: that devotion to community does not foreclose, and in fact depends upon, nurturing one’s inner life. 

I collected this rock on a hike at Sabino Canyon in October as part of a closing ritual with my Minneapolis therapist, who I continued seeing for my first few months of living in Tucson. To culminate a therapeutic relationship, that therapist asks people to go to a place that’s sacred to them, leave one rock, and take another. They instruct people to write a burden they want to leave behind on the rock that stays in the place, and write one reminder they want to carry forward on the rock they take. 

On the rock I took with me, I wrote two things. On one side, “Prayer is more than an order of words”–my favorite T.S. Eliot quote, which reminds me that effort can look like many things, including, counterintuitively, releasing conscious attention to something troubling me.

On the other side of the rock, I wrote something that sustains the possibility of my inner life. No one else knows what it says. 

November, 2025

Lesson: “No need to ruminate about that, it is God’s plan!”- Us

Object: The “God’s Plan” playlist 

The phrase “God’s Plan” feels tinged with menace after Pete Hegseth’s words about a “Holy War” in Iran, but between us, it began as a way to obstruct rumination. There was some bullshit happening in each of our lives in November, and saying, “No need to ruminate about that, it is God’s plan!” as a joke-not-joke was a way to defuse and redirect thinking we knew wasn’t going to lead us anywhere. 

On the phone, we said it to one another in singsong voices. Walking alone through our lives, we muttered it through gritted teeth and grinned. Then one of us (you, I think) typed it into Spotify. 

The “God’s Plan” playlist began with songs about faith, then swelled to include any notable song that referenced God, then swelled again to anything we listened to obsessively during and after you visited me in Tucson for my birthday (such as “Ten Drunk Cigarettes,” whose lyrics we were, in your words, “Put on this earth to learn”). 

*

Godjourney: 

Trying to figure out the nature of God, the nature of faith, and how articulating those things can orient us to ourselves, one another, and the world. Godjourneys may be undertaken both alone and in partnership. 

Godwanting:

A combination of loneliness and longing that becomes beautiful in the moments it pushes you outwards, in moments it “re-tethers” you to reality, to others. 

To quote a poet we abhor but nonetheless bop to,

I believe in you, and it makes me believe more in the world. 

My Objects: A Tiny Cabinet Installation by Caroleine James

My Objects: A Tiny Cabinet Installation 

by Caroleine James

*

 

Whenever I move to a new city (Salt Lake City to Tucson, in this case), I take a collection of semi-useless objects with me, for comfort and familiarity. These are a few of my objects. Some of the descriptions of them are true. Some are lies. Some are a mixture of both.

*

1. Hammer

Days after my move to Tucson, I used this hammer to construct a Target bookshelf. After constructing this Target bookshelf, I was very proud of myself. The first evidence my Tucson roommates had of my existence was a loud hammering sound that was me constructing my Target bookshelf with this hammer. I don’t have good enough scissors to remove its tag, so if you have some scissors you believe could do the job, let me know.

*

2. War of the Worlds Book Remnant

The Illustrated Classics edition of War of the Worlds was one of my favorite books growing up. The book disintegrated years ago, it was a cheap paperback, but I held onto this cover as a keepsake. Plus, it looks cool on my wall, which is where it resides when it isn’t in the cabinet.

*

3. Dinosaur with Painted Toenails

I stole this gentleman from my mother’s garden (with permission). He used to guard her dahlias. Now, he guards my windowsill. 

*

4. Cat Claw Clip

I used to be a full-on dog person. Then, after I got this cat claw clip as a gift from my sister two Christmasses ago, I started becoming obsessed with cats, particularly black cats, like the one in the clip. What the clip wants is to be in my hair while I hold a black cat in my arms. Once that happens, the clip will be set free.

*

5. Page of Imaginary Cutout Letters

I made this page of imaginary cutout letters for a printmaking workshop in college. This page has a personality and that personality is: trickster. Once, while legally using psychedelics, I thought it might be fun to stare at my page of imaginary cutout letters and watch them dance, but the cutout letters REFUSED to move. Instead, when I flipped the page over, the ink splotches on the back marched across the paper like army men. The page of imaginary cutout letters would not do the thing I wanted it to do, but it would do a different, also cool, thing.

*

6. I <3 Honor Code Pin

I stole this from my mother (without permission). 

*

7. “It’s A Beaver” Shotglass

This is a perfectly effective shotglass, but these days, I mostly use it to hold my earrings. 

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8. Blackberry Sage Candle

A friend of mine named Sage gifted me this awesome Blackberry Sage candle, which I am afraid to use, since I don’t want to deplete it, or burn down my apartment. Sage and I met in a small town in Alaska. She was a radio reporter and I worked for the print newspaper. Recently, she got a sick new job in Colorado and continues to be a person I am proud to know.

*

9. Evangelical Comic Book

I found this mini Christian comic book pinned to a public bulletin board in Wrangell, Alaska. I grabbed it because I loved the illustrations, and because I, too, have been tortured by horrifying anticipation of the moment when Jesus and I will get together to watch a supercut video of all my worst behavior on a big screen. Is any amount of shame enough to expunge the guilt of sin? I think not. But looking the worst thing you’ve ever done in the face is, I believe, a useful skin-thickening exercise.

*

10. King Cake Baby

I got lucky once and picked the King Cake slice with the baby in it. In all likelihood, I have already spent the luck I gained from this baby, so if you need luck, ask for him, and I will be happy to pass him on to you. 

*

11. Small Silver Dinosaur

His name is Norman.

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12. Rayme’s Bar Token, Good For One Drink

One time, I danced on the table at Rayme’s Bar in a tube top to the tune of “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” and the patrons rained these tokens down on me, I’m not kidding. I have a whole bin of them back home.

*

13. Jordan/U.S. Flag Pin

Jordan and the United States of America are two of the world’s many countries. This pin represents that fact.

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14. Stone Turtle

His name is Oliver.

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15. Sewing Kit

One time, before a high-stakes job interview, one of the buttons popped off my button-up shirt, due to my chest being so voluptuous. Thankfully, I had this sewing kit with me, and was able to repair my shirt before the interview. The interview went great and I got the job. Then, I got fired. After getting fired, I applied for this nonfiction MFA, where I plan to write a book-length memoir-slash-expose about the events that led to my firing. It’s a great story. I hope it gets turned into a movie. I hope that movie is a musical. Tate McRae would play the role of ME, in a stunning film debut.

*

16. Retractable Claw Herb Chopper

I believe this herb chopper could be an extremely effective close combat weapon, similar to brass knuckles, except sharper. I have not had the opportunity to test it, either as a weapon, or as an herb chopper, yet.

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17. Shakespeare Bust Paperweight

David Sedaris gifted me this Shakespeare bust paperweight. After attending one of his readings in Connecticut, I stood in line for a long time to talk to him. The line moved slowly because David’s whole thing was having an in-depth conversation with each person, and giving them a memento from his “bag of crap.” When he got to me, he told me that his landlord had given him this paperweight with the injunction to NEVER GIVE IT AWAY. So, looking me solemnly in the eye, he gave me the paperweight, and said, NEVER GIVE THIS AWAY. Obviously, I have to give it away someday, but I haven’t figured out who to give it to. If you’re a big David Sedaris fan, maybe I’ll give it to you. 

*

18. Bunny Head

One time, in middle school, after getting heavily bullied for wearing Vibram Five Finger shoes, I went for a walk around the block, alone and crying. In an instance of divine providence, I stumbled across this Bunny Head on the sidewalk. I put it on, returned to school, and used its frightening, mascaraed face to startle my bullies into submission. Soon, everyone started wearing Vibram Five Finger shoes just like me, because they were (and are) such a cool variety of shoe. And I still keep this Bunny Head with me, just in case.