Last Year At Clown School

Really.

Do you like my shoes?

I have to take a lot of continuing education for both my role as a teacher of young children and as an ordained minister. I have no idea how I manage to do this. Fitting classes into my busy days seems almost impossible.

Last year I decided to go to Clown School. I wonder if I can get CEU's for this? And for which job? I'm taking suggestions.

Why Clown School I hear you ask. Well. My youngest child is proficient in circus arts and I have been hanging around him quite a bit as he lives in an circus arts collective. He's an acrobat. Watching him gives me a heart attack.

I also have a dear friend who was a Ringling Brothers circus clown for many years. He eats fire. And builds amazing balloon creations. He's also an amazing activist in our City.

Every summer for the past four years I have been teaching a month of clown prep school for 5 year olds. By the time we hit August, the little babes are so bored waiting to go kindergarten that I need to shake them up. So if you want to be ridiculous, use it for good instead of evil. The experience totally throws them off their game.

I decided that I wanted some continuing ed that was completely different and that maybe learning to clown around for real would help me break out of my shell. I am actually very shy. And besides, working clown skits might be better and cheaper than therapy. Two birds with one stone don't ya know.

So I did a semester. The class was a mixture of new clowns and experienced professional clowns. It turned out that a couple of the professionals trained with my son. So that kind of strengthened the family business. God only knows how that will end up looking down the line.

After a few months of working on basic skills (skills are good), we began working on developing pieces for a show that would end our semester together. Now, I'm pretty funny. And I am a very creative type who can work a story line. That comes from doing a lot of children's pageants in church. I was the one who had pointed eared people read the Gospel in Klingon after all. On Easter Sunday no less. I am bold.

What I learned from the process was not what I expected. What happened was an experience of being forcibly molded in a box. The instructor had a perception of who I was and tried to keep me in that box. It really pissed me off at first. But then I realized that there was a real lesson in that and that continuing to press my idea wasn't going anywhere. I remembered a major theme in my early adult life of being pushed into a box. And here it was happening again. In clown school. A little bizarre.

I really wanted out of the box. I had developed a piece about being trapped into the cycle of being expected to be a wife as a vocation. I was being stalked by 3 clown suitors and it was funny. And the instructor thought it would be funnier if I was overwhelmed with children. Children hanging on my skirt; hanging on my neck; delivered in boxes. Good God I did not want to go there again! I had that in real life and during my day job. It turned out to be pretty funny but not really my thing.

But I learned something: my own life makes for good comedy if you can work past some of the sad.

I learned something else: I had to clown in white face so you can forget who you think I am and see who I really am.

And that is a real hoot.