You can take the clown out of the village, but you can’t take the village out of the clown.
Challenge Three
You can take the clown out of the village, but you can’t take the village out of the clown.
Creative Writing ENGL 3516
Professor Meyer
Thursday, June 15 2006
Prepared by Richard Birch
This work Copyright (C) 2006 Richard Birch
As Gary watched the children run around the dining room he asked himself, “why are birthday cakes such an important part of birthdays?” He wondered why people needed to supply huge amounts of sugar to a dozen screaming, hyperactive three-year olds who are already hyper and crazed? Why do birthday cakes really need to exist in the first place? He considered the possibility that it is a form of masochistic cruelty when someone decides to bake and bring one to this type of ankle-biter hell? Yet in this case, it’s not the ankles of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or any other supervisory adult figures this crazed group of rug rats are biting. That luxury had been officially reserved for the cake and of course for him, the clown who was hired to be part of this middle-class urban madness. To Gary, both he and the cake were the purveyors of everything ridiculous and silly about children’s birthday parties. Everything that was fake, plastic, oddly colourful, and oppressive in birthday traditions is what he embodied as Clarence the Birthday Clown. He wished it were more an original and forgiving name. Though he knew he really shouldn’t be blamed for it, as it was the name his agent created. It was designed to be a clown stage name for him to use as he worked in this part-time bullshit while attempting to recharge his career as a female impersonator on Church Street. It seemed like a good idea at the time. He certainly did have the makeup for the gigs, and he knew wigs. He was also completely broke. It was really too bad the night club which was his primary source of bread and butter was closed down when the baths next to it was raided eight months before and the landlord’s assets were ceased. “You have got to love the 70’s!” he said to himself. He also imagined trying to explain that to a room of twelve sugar-inflicted preschoolers who want balloon animals and to play pin the tail on the asshole. That certainly would not happen.
To Gary there really wasn’t a shred of logic to the tradition of children’s birthday parties. To him they seemed tumultuous, noisy, and messy. Yes they were for the enjoyment of the children and the birthday boy himself, who Gary noticed was sitting across from the birthday cake at one particular moment with a very estranged look on his face. Gary could sense the knowing in the kid’s mood. Of all the other children he was the quietest one in the room. The less noisy. The less tumultuous. The less messy. He was of course was the most restrained. He couldn’t possibly be messy for his clearly overprotective mother was constantly keeping him away from the other children’s rowdiness and wiping every existent bit of hotdog and ketchup of his face every chance she got. It was if to show to the other people in the room that her child was the cleanest. Her son was the tidiest and will not be made a fool of, or more importantly, she would not be made the worst of as a result of ever-present scrutinizing eyes. Gary couldn’t resist screaming at the top of his inner-voice, “For fuck sakes lady let the kid have some fun at his own birthday party! Let him smear his own face with mustard if he wants to. He’s a three-year old damn it!”
Gary would see these types of parents all the time in his new line of work. The kind of middle-class family that still think the world they live in is supposed to be the kind they see in Woman’s World Weekly and Harper’s Family Annual on the news racks. It’s 1974 and they still try to believe the 60’s never existed. To Gary the world was a messy place and for some reason to these people in middle-class Southern Ontario, the suburban dream was still the goal. In the middle of this infuriating display of middle-class mediocrity, Gary wanted to shout to the people in the room the dream doesn’t exist. It certainly didn’t exist here in Southern Ontario, nor did it exist here at this particular sunny, springtime, happy, May birthday party.
The cake was an odd parody to Gary, something he knew way too much about in his line of work. The cake would certainly make the children crazy in approximately 12-minutes from an excruciatingly high sugar rush. The migraine will set in just as soon as grandpa and grandma have left the house for mom to clean up the mess while dad is away busy on the road work selling Underwood 80’s to the multitudes of waiting office secretaries everywhere. Then of course, so will eventually the recognition that after the dénouement of children’s birthday parties, cakes, hotdogs, ketchup, mustard, games, party hats, and clowns, the one who will lose out on everything will be the mother because she wanted way too much. Gary wished he knew her more, or more importantly cared, so he could go over to her before the end of the party and explain to her that it was not about trying to pretend something. It was about being.
Gary imagined one day in thirty years he would meet the birthday boy again. The kid now an adult would arrive with an entourage of friends to his drag show at Zelda’s in Toronto. Maybe at that point in his life he would be ready to shred his mother’s way of thinking that life has to always be such a performance. That is, as Gary thought, if he would still be performing his weekend gigs thirty fucking years from then. There was no way to speculate that. But he was an actor and an artist. He knew he could be just as much of a performer with his people as birthday boy’s mother could be with hers. Gary could only hope that he will be able to not look quite so much like this birthday cake was about to look like in another 9 minutes. Messed up, smeared of colour, lop-sided, crumbled, and in pieces. He also hoped in 30-years this mother may be able to avoid the same predicament.
Explanation:
I found that in writing this challenge exercise it was very difficult to not accidentally step into a monologue form. My first two drafts were completely monologue as it was the only way I could write the perspective of my third year birthday party, which was my first memory. Clearly I am the birthday boy, but I wanted to tie close character connections between the child and Gary, or Clarence the Birthday Clown. I wanted the clown character to be very bitter in his job because he has found himself in a position that scratches a bit too deeply into his cynical core. I also wanted to make this particular narrative text critical, particularly along Queerist critical thought. This perspective is based on performative comparative assumptions. Elements being compared and connected were things such as the birthday party and the Toronto gay scene of the 1970’s that was and still is very crazed and hyper. Children have birthday cakes and clowns to wind up with as gay men in postmodern sexual subcultures have drag queens and dirty martinis. The subcultural institutions of the period had police, jurisprudence laws, and social mores to deal with, as little children living in conservative middle-class Canada had mothers, fathers, institutions, and other authority figures shaping their constructivist cultural identity. The birthday cake is certainly a comparative metaphor describing the insanity of postmodern life, modern traditions in technocapitalist society, and the notion that our actions as both adults and children are performative in the social.
All of these things as described by the clown character were performative because he is also pure performance. Everything was a social gesture of construction such his clown identity and his gender choice. What I also wanted to make different however, was to write in the character’s recognition of the world he has found himself in during a period of personal hardship. The middle-class suburbia which clearly had strong family and identity political issues of it’s own. I learned that it is possible to write a character who though still in the social as an oppressed component of the collective, can somehow see patterns outside of himself, though fleeting as those moments may be. It was only after this part of the character was brought in when I was able to go through the monologue and convert it to narrative formation. It just wouldn’t work either way. The performative elements of the character literally had to be acted out before hand in order to fully understand where it was going. Ultimately this is purely fictional, but in some way the clown character is in actuality an embodiment of the world around the birthday boy. He suggests a montage of issues that mark the path of a young child, restrained, quiet, shy, and oppressed by those around him from a very early age.
You can take the clown out of the village, but you can’t take the village out of the clown.
Creative Writing ENGL 3516
Professor Meyer
Thursday, June 15 2006
Prepared by Richard Birch
This work Copyright (C) 2006 Richard Birch
As Gary watched the children run around the dining room he asked himself, “why are birthday cakes such an important part of birthdays?” He wondered why people needed to supply huge amounts of sugar to a dozen screaming, hyperactive three-year olds who are already hyper and crazed? Why do birthday cakes really need to exist in the first place? He considered the possibility that it is a form of masochistic cruelty when someone decides to bake and bring one to this type of ankle-biter hell? Yet in this case, it’s not the ankles of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or any other supervisory adult figures this crazed group of rug rats are biting. That luxury had been officially reserved for the cake and of course for him, the clown who was hired to be part of this middle-class urban madness. To Gary, both he and the cake were the purveyors of everything ridiculous and silly about children’s birthday parties. Everything that was fake, plastic, oddly colourful, and oppressive in birthday traditions is what he embodied as Clarence the Birthday Clown. He wished it were more an original and forgiving name. Though he knew he really shouldn’t be blamed for it, as it was the name his agent created. It was designed to be a clown stage name for him to use as he worked in this part-time bullshit while attempting to recharge his career as a female impersonator on Church Street. It seemed like a good idea at the time. He certainly did have the makeup for the gigs, and he knew wigs. He was also completely broke. It was really too bad the night club which was his primary source of bread and butter was closed down when the baths next to it was raided eight months before and the landlord’s assets were ceased. “You have got to love the 70’s!” he said to himself. He also imagined trying to explain that to a room of twelve sugar-inflicted preschoolers who want balloon animals and to play pin the tail on the asshole. That certainly would not happen.
To Gary there really wasn’t a shred of logic to the tradition of children’s birthday parties. To him they seemed tumultuous, noisy, and messy. Yes they were for the enjoyment of the children and the birthday boy himself, who Gary noticed was sitting across from the birthday cake at one particular moment with a very estranged look on his face. Gary could sense the knowing in the kid’s mood. Of all the other children he was the quietest one in the room. The less noisy. The less tumultuous. The less messy. He was of course was the most restrained. He couldn’t possibly be messy for his clearly overprotective mother was constantly keeping him away from the other children’s rowdiness and wiping every existent bit of hotdog and ketchup of his face every chance she got. It was if to show to the other people in the room that her child was the cleanest. Her son was the tidiest and will not be made a fool of, or more importantly, she would not be made the worst of as a result of ever-present scrutinizing eyes. Gary couldn’t resist screaming at the top of his inner-voice, “For fuck sakes lady let the kid have some fun at his own birthday party! Let him smear his own face with mustard if he wants to. He’s a three-year old damn it!”
Gary would see these types of parents all the time in his new line of work. The kind of middle-class family that still think the world they live in is supposed to be the kind they see in Woman’s World Weekly and Harper’s Family Annual on the news racks. It’s 1974 and they still try to believe the 60’s never existed. To Gary the world was a messy place and for some reason to these people in middle-class Southern Ontario, the suburban dream was still the goal. In the middle of this infuriating display of middle-class mediocrity, Gary wanted to shout to the people in the room the dream doesn’t exist. It certainly didn’t exist here in Southern Ontario, nor did it exist here at this particular sunny, springtime, happy, May birthday party.
The cake was an odd parody to Gary, something he knew way too much about in his line of work. The cake would certainly make the children crazy in approximately 12-minutes from an excruciatingly high sugar rush. The migraine will set in just as soon as grandpa and grandma have left the house for mom to clean up the mess while dad is away busy on the road work selling Underwood 80’s to the multitudes of waiting office secretaries everywhere. Then of course, so will eventually the recognition that after the dénouement of children’s birthday parties, cakes, hotdogs, ketchup, mustard, games, party hats, and clowns, the one who will lose out on everything will be the mother because she wanted way too much. Gary wished he knew her more, or more importantly cared, so he could go over to her before the end of the party and explain to her that it was not about trying to pretend something. It was about being.
Gary imagined one day in thirty years he would meet the birthday boy again. The kid now an adult would arrive with an entourage of friends to his drag show at Zelda’s in Toronto. Maybe at that point in his life he would be ready to shred his mother’s way of thinking that life has to always be such a performance. That is, as Gary thought, if he would still be performing his weekend gigs thirty fucking years from then. There was no way to speculate that. But he was an actor and an artist. He knew he could be just as much of a performer with his people as birthday boy’s mother could be with hers. Gary could only hope that he will be able to not look quite so much like this birthday cake was about to look like in another 9 minutes. Messed up, smeared of colour, lop-sided, crumbled, and in pieces. He also hoped in 30-years this mother may be able to avoid the same predicament.
Explanation:
I found that in writing this challenge exercise it was very difficult to not accidentally step into a monologue form. My first two drafts were completely monologue as it was the only way I could write the perspective of my third year birthday party, which was my first memory. Clearly I am the birthday boy, but I wanted to tie close character connections between the child and Gary, or Clarence the Birthday Clown. I wanted the clown character to be very bitter in his job because he has found himself in a position that scratches a bit too deeply into his cynical core. I also wanted to make this particular narrative text critical, particularly along Queerist critical thought. This perspective is based on performative comparative assumptions. Elements being compared and connected were things such as the birthday party and the Toronto gay scene of the 1970’s that was and still is very crazed and hyper. Children have birthday cakes and clowns to wind up with as gay men in postmodern sexual subcultures have drag queens and dirty martinis. The subcultural institutions of the period had police, jurisprudence laws, and social mores to deal with, as little children living in conservative middle-class Canada had mothers, fathers, institutions, and other authority figures shaping their constructivist cultural identity. The birthday cake is certainly a comparative metaphor describing the insanity of postmodern life, modern traditions in technocapitalist society, and the notion that our actions as both adults and children are performative in the social.
All of these things as described by the clown character were performative because he is also pure performance. Everything was a social gesture of construction such his clown identity and his gender choice. What I also wanted to make different however, was to write in the character’s recognition of the world he has found himself in during a period of personal hardship. The middle-class suburbia which clearly had strong family and identity political issues of it’s own. I learned that it is possible to write a character who though still in the social as an oppressed component of the collective, can somehow see patterns outside of himself, though fleeting as those moments may be. It was only after this part of the character was brought in when I was able to go through the monologue and convert it to narrative formation. It just wouldn’t work either way. The performative elements of the character literally had to be acted out before hand in order to fully understand where it was going. Ultimately this is purely fictional, but in some way the clown character is in actuality an embodiment of the world around the birthday boy. He suggests a montage of issues that mark the path of a young child, restrained, quiet, shy, and oppressed by those around him from a very early age.
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