Two-year-old Bentley knows he's gone viral, even if he isn't quite sure what that means.
The little boy from Trenton, Ont., has captivated Internet audiences across the country after his mother decided to dress him up as Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie for Halloween.
"If you ask him who he's being for Halloween, he'll say Gord Downie. We ask him who Gord Downie is, he'll say a singer. We say for who? And he says 'the Hippos,'" Bentley's mother Shannon White said with a laugh. "He's halfway there. He shakes his little tush and can bop around to the music but he doesn't fully understand what's taking place."
Bentley's costume has the tot imitating Downie's look from the Tragically Hip's recent cross-country tour.
Bentley has a pair of sparkly pants his mom made with special fabric ordered from the U.S., a "Jaws" T-shirt that has been altered to fit his frame, a Downie-style top hat sporting a feather, a neck scarf and — White proudly notes — a handkerchief hanging from his back pocket which once belonged to Downie and was tossed into a concert crowd a few years ago.
"That's definitely the highlight of his costume," White said. "He has a piece of Gord with him."
The idea for Bentley's costume came to White as she and her husband watched a livestream of the Tragically Hip perform their final concert of their Man Machine Poem tour, which the rockers embarked on after announcing Downie had terminal brain cancer.
"I thought it would be a pretty cool idea if we did a tribute to Gord," White said. "With Halloween coming up, what perfect timing. So we asked Bentley if he wanted to be Gord Downie for Halloween and he said yes."
Bentley has been surrounded by the Tragically Hip's music as White and her husband are both fans and have been to several concerts, she noted.
After weeks of carefully piecing together her son's costume, Bentley completed the outfit on Monday and sent a photograph of her son in his snazzy getup to family members.
A cousin, who is a huge Hip fan, asked if she could post the photograph to a closed Tragically Hip fan forum. White agreed but within a few hours the picture had been shared online by a radio station and really started to make a splash.
"It's been pretty crazy," White said of the reaction, noting that her son doesn't quite understand all the attention he's getting, though he's somewhat aware of it.
"After we got some recognition from local news stations, he was jumping up and down on the bed saying 'daddy, I became viral.'... He doesn't understand it, he's just picked it up from us saying it.'"
The most exciting response to Bentley's costume came when The Tragically Hip's official Facebook page shared the boy's photograph, saying "looking good Bentley!"
"To have the Hip actually respond to our photo, it doesn't get much better than that," White said.
When Bentley goes trick-or-treating with his family on Monday, he'll have a microphone in hand, and his parents will be carrying a portable speaker that will play Tragically Hip songs.
And while he'll have a little bucket for candy, Bentley will also have a little box with him where he'll be collecting donations for the Gord Downie Fund for Brain Cancer Research.
"We definitely try and talk with him about what's going on and the importance of why we're doing this," said White, adding that she just wanted to create some good memories for her son. "We're just going to do the family thing...this night is still for Bentley."
