Snuggie on the street: Watch your back

NEW YORK – Everywhere Snug-gie went, it found friends. It also found static.

Zap!

Ouch!

Snuggie – the fleece “blanket with sleeves” featured in the ubiquitous and oddly 1970s-style two-minute television commercial – is enjoying its Pet Rock moment these days, prompting all kinds of newspaper stories, Snuggie parties, fan Web sites and a trend on Facebook of donning one for profile photos.

But there is one aspect of Snuggie that has been little explored: its use in public. In the television commer-cial, the Snuggie is featured mostly indoors, with owners using the besleeved blanket to sip tea while curled up on the couch. But one in-triguing moment shows a family wearing burgundy Snuggies while sitting in some crowded bleachers, cheering.

“Great for outdoors!” the commer-cial declares.

Is it really? Seems like a bit of a stretch. So I took an electric-blue Snuggie (the makers call it “royal blue”) for a Manhattan field test.

My biggest fear was that I would be treated as some kind of doomsday zealot when I donned my Snuggie in Times Square. I have longish hair and a beard, and the Snuggie, with its generous draping sleeves, can appear from the front like a clerical gown. It seemed to shout: “Repent!”

As I stood near the TKTS booth writing this thought in my notebook, I realized that: “Hey, I’m writing in my notebook while standing up wear-ing a blanket. These sleeves are handy.”

Then a woman in red stockings who was promoting the musical “Chicago” came tap-dancing over to me. “You’ve got my favorite blanket on!” she said. She had forgotten its proper name. “It’s a, um, Huggy?”

She handed me a flier for the show, which I was able to take easily be-cause Snuggie has sleeves. I did not have anywhere to put it, however, because Snuggie does not have pockets. As I twisted to reach for the back pocket of my pants, the clingy Snuggie pulled away from my shirt and discharged a powerful bolt of static onto a sensitive area of my chest.

Ow!

On the subway downtown, a young woman named ToniAnn Willigar, who had a pair of diamond studs un-der her lip, giggled at me holding the rail in my Snuggie. She said she was considering buying one and asked if it was comfortable. “Staticky, but yes,” I said.

I asked what sort of piercings she had. “Snakebite,” she said. They were spaced to look as if a fang-bearing snake had bitten her in the face, leaving puncture wounds. I asked her if I looked weird. “No,” she said.

At the other end of the train, a young man took a cell phone picture of me. “My girlfriend loves Snug-gies,” said the man, Sam Weber from Brooklyn.

Although blankets with sleeves have been around for a while, Allstar Products Group, based in New York, created a direct-response advertising campaign for the Snuggie, which it began testing on television in August 2008, complete with a toll-free num-ber. The commercial, with actors shown struggling to manipulate sleeveless blankets, then relaxing comfortably beneath Snuggies, has helped sell 4 million.

As I got off the train, the doors closing behind me, Weber was ex-plaining to another rider: “It’s like a blanket with arms. It’s the most cracked-out thing.”

Outside Pizza Lucca in Greenwich Village, my Snuggie billowed in the cold wind and pulled off my shoul-ders, although the sleeves did make it easy to eat a slice. I wished that the Snuggie came with something to fasten it, like a tie or a zipper. But then I remembered it is not a jacket. It is a blanket.

With sleeves.

“You look like the grim reaper a lit-tle bit,” said David Furst, a sixth-grader at the Clinton School for Writers and Artists, who had pointed me out to a classmate as they walked along Hudson Street.

“What the?” said a stunned girl in a lime-green puffy jacket. But she quickly recovered. “Oh, OK,” she said to herself, resuming her stride. “I saw those on a commercial.”

I had almost forgotten about the static issue until I shed the garment again. It made a sound like a Geiger counter as it pulled away from my body, then marshaled a mighty zap!

Ouch. I doubled over briefly – and noticed that the static was also caus-ing the Snuggie to pick up a lot of lint and bits of twig and paper from the street.

I didn’t wear the Snuggie much as I walked because it is so long that it kept getting trapped under my shoes. This also made it difficult to ice skate, which I tried, putting Snuggie to a bit of an unfair test at the Rockefeller Center rink. My blades kept catching fleece.

“I thought you were a Sherpa,” said Linda Lalancette, who was warily watching her son skate near me.

It was safer to stand outside the rail and do as the family does in the ad: watch others participate in sports.

“It looks cool because it looks warm,” said Charlie O’Brien, 7, who was putting on his skates with a group from Public School 87. He didn’t notice that my back in a shirt and thin sweater was exposed to the cold.

Across the street at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I worried that tourists would ask me for priestly advice. None did. Then a priest walked past in a regal white robe, which, I noted, went all the way around him.

I had never before thought about the fact that a blanket is open at the back. Usually the back is covered by a mattress or couch cushions. In the commercial the family at the game is not shown from the back, but if the wind were blowing on a Meadow-lands Sunday, one might feel a spiny chill.

Apparently some Williamsburgers have taken to doing a Brooklyn pub crawl in Snuggies, as do fans in other cities. It isn’t hard to understand why. At Pianos bar on the Lower East Side, I could not even don my Snug-gie before the woman sitting at the bar next to me, Jeanne Halal, squealed, “Snuggie!” and insisted on wearing it herself.

“So Gandalfy,” the bartender said, surveying Halal’s new look.

The sleeves were useful for holding a wineglass and for attempting yoga poses. But she was frustrated when looking for a place to stash her cell phone. “It would be nice if it had pockets,” she said.

“It’s a blanket with sleeves,” I re-plied. “What you are talking about is called a jacket.”