If you\u2019ve been on campus at all this fall semester, there\u2019s a good chance you\u2019ve seen a tall, red and white striped hat poking up above the rush of students. That\u2019s not your imagination. That\u2019s just the Cat in the Hat guy.<\/p>\n
Justin Harris has made quite a name for himself at FGCU within the first two months of his freshman year. In between his classes, he strolls around the campus wearing the iconic Cat in the Hat cap.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He wears a backpack like the rest of us, except his comes with a twist. His \u2018bag of tricks\u2019 is stuffed full with props that he cleverly weaves into conversation with students.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The most infamous of these props is the skeleton that keeps peeking up through the zipper.<\/p>\n
Story continues below advertisement<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I just got a skeleton because I thought, well, I could do a bunch of bone jokes,\u201d said Harris. \u201cSo I thought that might tickle someone\u2019s funny bone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harris removed a detailed, rather hefty statue of Napoleon Bonaparte from his bag, stating that he was short on jokes. However, he has more than a few.\u00a0 As if the bag itself were bottomless, Harris had with him a chessboard, beachballs, over thirty dice and plenty more items he\u2019d like for students to see for themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Donning the hat doesn\u2019t happen by chance. Harris shared his intentions for stepping into the persona.<\/p>\n
\u201cOkay, so the reason for the Cat in the Hat would just basically be because I wanted to do something new for college,\u201d said Harris.<\/p>\n
Harris attended Riverdale High School before starting at FGCU. Though the Cat in the Hat identity is new for him, he\u2019s no stranger to playing eccentric characters.<\/p>\n
He was referred to by some at Riverdale as \u2018the wooden-handed boy\u2019 for carrying around an articulated wooden hand that he still keeps handy. He was also known for often having a sticky note attached to his forehead that would display a variety of messages.<\/p>\n
Harris says he wants students to get to the point where they\u2019d find it more peculiar to see him without the hat than they would to see him wearing it in the first place.<\/p>\n
\u201cKeep doing stupid stuff. There\u2019s not really much I have to say, there\u2019s not really a disconnect here at all,\u201d said Harris.<\/p>\n
Harris is the character, and the character is Harris. He\u2019s just hoping to keep his peers laughing. He\u2019s done quite the job of it, too.<\/p>\n
Freshman Bodhi Warren has had frequent interaction with Harris on campus over the course of his first semester. Like many others, he\u2019s found himself quite entertained by the routine.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think my take on him is that he\u2019s using his free will to his fullest extent. Like he knows that as humans, we can basically do whatever we want, oftentimes we don\u2019t in favor of going through the motions of our day,\u201d said Warren. \u201cAnd I think he fights against that in what he does, in using his freewill to the fullest extent to make people laugh, and I think, as such, we need more people like him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harris had no intention of taking the hat off anytime soon. He\u2019s even open to the idea of taking on companions.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf someone were to just walk up to me and just pretend to be Thing One or Thing Two, I would go along,\u201d said Harris.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you\u2019ve been on campus at all this fall semester, there\u2019s a good chance you\u2019ve seen a tall,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44006,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210],"class_list":["post-44005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44005\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}