HOORAY FOR FIONA

MICHELLE Curley’s husband does not like the baby-hippo tattoo. He tolerates it, but he does not like it. “He is not a fan,” Curley said, shoving a lock of her paprika-red hair aside to show me what’s inked onto the concave scoop of her upper back. Curley was standing in line for lunch on a recent afternoon at the Base Camp Cafe, the russet-coloured cafeteria at the entrance to the Cincinnati Zoo’s Africa exhibit. Every Formica table in the place was packed: with schoolchildren in matching T-shirts, middle-age tourists with giant SLR cameras slung around their necks, and a melange of zoo employees wearing branded fleeces and muddy boots. The air smelt of canola oil and charred coffee.

The cafe is the closest eatery to the hippo tank, and therefore the closest to Fiona, the 10-month-old hippo who bounces around inside it. Over the last year, Fiona has become something of an international cause largely because of the efforts of Curley, the zoo’s communications director, and her fourperson team, who started posting Fiona’s every move on social media from the day she was born on Jan 24 (prematurely, and perilously, but more on that later).

Fionamania has swept the country. Videos of her twirling around in the water,

and graceful, rack up millions of views online. She photo-bombed a local couple’s engagement photo, and it wound up on

The popular Cincinnati ice cream purveyor Greater’s made a “Chunky Chunky Hippo” flavour over the summer — a toffee base with salted peanuts and caramel truffles — that sold out at the zoo every day it was available. A local T-shirt company, Cincy Shirts, screen-printed a small batch of tees with the words “Feeling Hip” along