I have been a lot of very different people in my life-a cheerleader and a coke fiend, a good daughter and a bad girl, an exhibitionist and a shut-in, a religious seeker and a nihilist. It is my sickness that I can imagine doing, or being just about anything, complicated by the desire to infiltrate the lives of people much unlike myself, to see how they really live. How else to explain why I would willfully dress up in a raccoon suit and let stranger's grope me?

Unlike a true "furrie," I don't feel that my best and truest self can be expressed only through an animal alter ego, through sexual or non-sexual role-playing on line, or in person, perhaps through the adoption of furry ears or a tail, or a full fur suit. I don't have an intense spiritual connection to the animal world, and despite an erotic fondness in my girlhood for a sheepskin rug, I have never had a carnal urge to possess a stuffed animal-or, not yet.

For the Anthrocon Furries of Myth and Legend convention in the King of Prussia Hilton, located just miles from the scenic battlefields of Gettysburg, I have chosen to make my debut into the "furrie fandom" as Miss Trixie, enchantress of the night. I am fabulous in my rented raccoon fur suit, which appears to have been crafted out of a 1970s mid-pile brown-and-black-striped shag carpet.

Furrie fans have come from all over the United States, as well as Canada and Australia, to rub shoulders and noses with other lovers of Sierra Club calendars and Sonic the Hedgehog video games, not to mention their online furrie sex partners and chat room confidantes. They've come for the furrie workshops like "fursuit dancing" and "fursuit sewing," roundtables on "furrie spirituality," furrie drawing classes, an erotic furrie art auction and more. The furrie set is vast, encompassing many worlds: there are also sci-fi aficionados, computer wizards, Renaissance folk, gaylaxians, nerds, cat people, dog people, erotic-art fans, born-again Christians, lovers of parade balloons, shamans, healers, animal rights activists, bikers, and curiosity seekers.

I have chosen Trixie, or Trixie has chosen me, because we share certain personality quirks. Like the Kinko's employee I met who was a wolf-loyal, dangerous, a loner—or the substitute teacher who was a panther-sleek, brave, and feared—I, like raccoons, have a fondness for the dark and for dramatic eye makeup, and the desire to spy on the neighbors, inciting the kind of commotion that causes people to throw on their robe and grab a flashlight. Trixie, masked and mysterious, like desire itself, plays to all my worst voyeuristic tendencies. Hidden behind her face I can move undetected, in the darkness of my suit, taking in all the action around me. It is hot in my head, and my breathing is heavy, echoing disconcertingly in my ears. It's the same sound you hear in slasher movies, the frantic panting of the stalked ingenue hiding in a closet watching the killer, chain saw slung across his back, sniff her panties. Or maybe it's the other way around. Indeed, aren't I the crazed maniac hidden in the shadows, just waiting for my moment to pounce?

Certainly I do not look scary. Sadly, I am not regulation human-raccoon size, so the suit hangs on my shoulders and bags around my ankles, giving me a kind of hip-hop rodent look. My head is a huge plaster cast, fitted inside with what looks like a welder's helmet. All breathing is done through a narrow slit scarcely big enough to accommodate a cocktail straw, and through my big, sexy, heavily lashed eyes, which are made of mesh. Trixie's wide-spaced eyes are cute, but render me walleyed. I keep bumping into people and furniture, paws out feeling for the walls, like a drunk out of a Beatrix Potter book. I have seen people in bunny and tiger ears, and others wearing bear, iguana, and wolf tails. But I have yet to see another fur suit.