Barney and friends

When I met Barney he was wearing a Barney the dinosaur costume. It took a minute for me to understand that his name really was Barney. Frank had hired him to work at the circus for the length of the Tennessee State Fair. He was homeless at the time or living at the Salvation Army, I can't remember which. Frank used to keep two or three of the guys he'd hired from the labor pool to work as circus hands through the week. One year, it was Steve, whose job it was to feed and water a donkey named Petunia. It was strange to see a guy who'd been systematically hardened by the street suddenly become the caretaker of a little donkey with a straw hat. It was the same with Barney. The costume gave him a gift that he otherwise wouldn't have found just lying around. He'd run into that circus tent and the crowd would scream his name and for ten days, he was Elvis.
It changed his life for a little while.