He’s wearing a neatly groomed goatee, a plaid shirt, and camouflage pants rolled up to mid-hairy-calf. A dingy, matted pink polyester fur helmet sits snugly on his head. It has two conical ears. Perhaps a part of a costume retrieved from a garbage bin.

Young, attractive and otherwise clean-looking, he sits by himself in the black bolted seats. He’s gazing toward his knees, his face blank, tight, maybe a little desperate.

The other passengers waiting to board the flight from Phoenix to San Francisco are actively not looking at this Hello Kitty man. There is palpable tension.

He is going to be on their flight. Our flight.

Two seats to his right is a young man whose chin folds into flaps. His pale hair is pasted into horizontal perfection and he’s wearing a sweatshirt with an enormous full color eagle against the red white and blue of Old Glory. He does not seem to attract as much attention though perhaps he and Hello Kitty Man are embracing the same right.

Everyone else regardless of ethnic group, gender or age wears variations of a more mainstream formula: jeans or pants with a drab shirt, blouse or jacket. A few tattoos and studs, two people with go-to-church hats. These don’t alert passenger antennae.

Once we are on the plane, I see a little girl walk down the aisle in a fuzzy pink jacket. What if she were wearing the pink headpiece?