INSIGHTS

IT WAS CALLED the Easter Project.

The name had a kind of misleading, seductive innocence.. .the kind the Department of Defense used to exploit when it gave “fun” names to nuclear weapons tests. (In 1962, the way to win favorable PR for low-yield fallout in Hawaii was to name a quantity of megatonage the “Swanee Project” or the “Truckee Project” and detonate it, appropriately, over Christmas Island.)

The Easter Project had no such military connotations, it was explained to me, although the project, in a way, was still a call to arms.

Two behemoths of the business and photography worlds, Polaroid and Eastman Kodak, had chosen Easter weekend of 1977 as the critical period to plug sales of the low-cost, instant-color-picture cameras each had developed. Big bucks were at stake, and I was drafted to help in the marketing drive for one of the companies.

I was asked to play the Easter bunny.

Spewing a half-swallow of soft drink into the telephone receiver, I remarked casually, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

“No, not at all,” answered the lilting female voice at the other end. “We understand that you made a simply terrific Santa Claus.”

A few days later, an 11-page document titled The Easter Bunny Book arrived in a plain brown wrapper. From the book I learned that the Easter bunny was a creature gifted with speech. In fact, he (or she or whatever) was a veritable chatterbox, asking questions, making observations about spring and Easter and trying to keep a fidgety kid on his lap long enough for a bunny buddy to snap a picture.

That picture was the point of the whole charade: to make a free photograph of a child with the Easter bunny for Mama to treasure or mail to Grandma or drop in the waste compactor while, ideally, she has walked away with a new $30 camera and a purseload of instant-photo film.

I was incredulous. Who in his right mind would queue up with other crazies to have his child photographed with the Easter bunny? Santa Claus, definitely. Spider Man, probably.

But the Easter bunny?

My folks had told me about the Easter bunny. He was the unseen rabbit who mystically deposited colorful hard-boiled eggs on the kitchen table or hid candy ones under the pecan trees in the front yard.

Like the tooth fairy, however, he did his work while I was with the sandman. I couldn’t look him up in children’s shoes at Sanger’s or find him loitering among the auto supplies at Ward’s, much less ask him questions about his life style and favorite restaurant.

I tried to imagine what he looked like. Was he, like me, about 71 inches high? Did he have cute little white whiskers? Were his ears long and droopy or short and straight?

The costume turned out to be a real jaw-dropper. It wasn’t so much the furry one-piece white jump suit with padded bunny feet or the hooded bunny-paw mittens or even the fluffy detachable cottontail. It was the head that got to me.

It was a papier-maché replica of Bugs Bunny, standing 3 feet high and painted with wide-open eyes and gap-toothed grin.

The ears jutted up into infinity.

It was ludicrous.

Outside the dressing room, it was Chuckle City as I prevailed upon the store’s receptionist to help me with snaps that wouldn’t stay snapped. The darned things fastened down the back from neck to crotch, and the only way to tell that a snap was undone was to feel a blast of cold air at some point along one’s backside. This was easy, since the temperature inside the suit was somewhere above 100.

With a couple of safety pins backing up my recalcitrant snaps, fear clogging my throat and a basket of foil-wrapped candy eggs dangling from my “paw,” I burst through double doors with the feeling that my costume was coming off. It was merely an unseen hand pulling at my cottontail.

“Mr. Bunny, here’s someone to see you already,” said Ed Wilson, the account executive with Eastman Kodak. Turning slowly to view the unseen tail-puller, I tilted my body 45 degrees to see a small boy, about 4 years old, staring at me. His awe rapidly turned to horror -mine -as he burst into tears. This was not going to be a piece of cake.

“There, there. There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I said stupidly, kneeling and offering three chocolate eggs to the unhappy child, hoping the offering would stop his high-pitched wailing.

It didn’t, but it did alert a swarm of less timid children, who began clutching at my body and my basket just as a metallic voice rang over the PA system: “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the Easter bunny has arrived and will be greeting visitors in the jewelry and camera department located near the center of the store. Thank you for shopping with us.”

The children slipped by quickly. Seated on my lap, they didn’t know what to ask for, and I didn’t know what to offer them. No toys. No clothes. No goodies. Just a chocolate egg and a patter of conversation. Quick, neat, efficient. Tell the boys how big they’ve grown and the girls how pretty they’ve become. I was beginning to enjoy myself.

Many of the children had been on Easter egg hunts that morning; those hunts formed a natural topic of conversation. Others had been dressed in their Easter Sunday finest by folks who took this free photo business seriously. Usually they formed the bulk of the criers and screamers, which touched my sense of poetic justice. If I had been 5 years old and wearing my finest raiments, I would have had nothing to do with me, either.

It was with one of these finely dressed children -a little girl, about 5-that my only marring experience occurred. Kim-berly had jumped on my knee wearing a floral-print dress undergirded with a couple of petticoats, which pushed her dress up around her waist. The photographer signaled to me to brush the dress back down, which I did – with a bunny paw just stained with chocolate from an unfoiled Easter egg.

Staring abrasively at my smiling bunny eyes, located about a foot above my embarrassed human ones, Kimberly said curtly: “My dress is dirty. My daddy thinks you’re a sucker.” Relenting, she added, “But I think you’re okay.”

If you see the Easter bunny this year, please don’t give him too much grief.

He’s probably a good egg.