Bear Behinds

Bear Behinds is the creation of Flo Critten, who used to run The Danville House.

It started as a home for unwed mothers and expanded to housing homeless women and children, too. It's an old hotel at the edge of downtown.

Flo needed something for the residents of the house to do, so they could earn some money and some self-respect, so she had them embroider cute little teddy bears on the bottoms of kids' underwear and sold them to grandparents. It became quite a sensation. Flo had to expand the operation into the abandoned Bulgarian Baptist Church complex.

Now they have expanded the line as well as the facility, to adults, and to overwear as well as underwear, and to real types of bears, like brown and black and ursus minor.

Bessie Bandervilt wore a Bear Behinds denim skirt to church Sunday. It featured a grizzly that smiled beningly when she was standing still during coffee time in the narthex before the worship service. When it came time for worship, Bessie started for the second pew, where she always sits, because the hearing aids are there, and she knows which set of earphones picks up the truckers CB channel during worship.

As she walked down the aisle, the previously benign grizzly snarled and gnashed its teeth.

It was quite traumatic for Zygmund Froid, who was being pushed down the aisle in his wheelchair behind Bessie, so that her Bear Behind was right at his eye level. It was the first time anyone at The Methodist had ever spoken in tongues.