My parents were big supporters of my brothers and I participating in 4-H when we were young. If you aren’t sure what that is, I won’t be much help as I am not sure what it is either. All that I really knew that it meant being able to get into the county fair for free everyday during the fair week, which as a kid was maybe the coolest thing ever. Ok, I will try to explain it. Basically they were clubs or groups of kids built around a common interest such as raising cats or riding horses. Some clubs were cooler than others, but the basic idea was getting kids to learn about animals and build skills that they could somehow use some day… like public speaking… or keeping animals alive, that’s an important one. If your project died… you couldn’t go to the fair. I am not sure if that is a rule, but I assume it is. Like I said some clubs were cool, like horse and dog clubs, and some were not, like chicken and cow clubs. It was a very sophisticated process. Basically, the cooler the animal that you raised, the cooler the club was overall, and if you got to ride that animal at the fair… double cool bonus points. I was in a number of 4-H groups growing up, and I was a hug fan of the fair.
The fair was the greatest thing ever for kids. It always fell on the last full weekend of August, so it always marked the end of the summer. I always remember how excited I was for the fair, but also how sad I was going to be on the Sunday of it because that meant I would be “back to school” shopping with my mom soon. That weekend every year also marked my annual emptying of my bank account so I could win amazing prizes from the carnies such as the coveted inflatable hammer. The inflatable hammer was maybe the best prize ever. It was just a huge hammer that you could blow up and then straight up smash your little brother in the face with it… or at least that was my first order of business everytime I got one. I could talk about the Island County Fair for hours… and I will… in another blog entry. This entry is dedicated to the mother of all bad 4-H clubs… the short lived reign of the “Clown 4-H Club.”
That is right. Clown 4-H… it existed… why you ask… no reason at all, and that is why it was a one year club. When I was 6 years old my parents asked me what 4-H club I wanted to be in, and damned if I wasn’t beyond excited to get all up in the clown club. Now let me state for the record that I am not a fan of clowns, and as a 6 year old I wasn’t either, but I was a gigantic fan of the sweet stuff the clowns got to carry with them. Magic tricks, pranks, fake cigars… there was nothing off limits in the world of clown accessories. To prove my point, when was the last time you said this phrase? “That clown has a (Fill in the blank)… really? The nerve of some clowns, that’s not believable at all.” I challenge you to put anything in that blank space and tell me it doesn’t make sense… Yeah, it’s impossible. So in reality, I didn’t pick “Clown 4-H,” I picked a club that I created in my head called “Awesome Clown Stuff 4-H.” My favorite clown accessory was the invisible dog… hours of fun.
If my child had picked “Clown 4-H,” I might have assumed that a murder was going to ensue shortly thereafter… because kids who like clowns have Steven King movies written about them. It must have been disappointing to my parent’s to say the least. If that decision wasn’t bad enough, the clown that I chose to be was the “Hobo Clown.” Nobody, especially not a 6 year old, should choose to be a hobo clown. I am pretty sure that you are just supposed to end up a hobo clown after years of poor clown related life decisions, like over dosing on cotton candy or sucking too much helium. The point is that “Hobo Clown” is not an entry level clown.
My “Clown 4-H” endeavor was awesome for a large majority of the year that I was in it. It gave me an excuse to go to tons of magic shops and buy awesome magic clown stuff that I could sneak with me to my Kindergarten class and dazzle my friends… who pretty much thought I was the coolest “non-clown” ever. This awesome plan fell apart for me when the fair time came around. Though I had decided to join the club, the realization that I would have to literally BE a clown at the fair had never dawned on me. I just enjoyed dressing up like a hobo clown at my house and having my mom paint my face. I know it sounds ridiculous, because the point of 4-H is the county fair, but I had kind of grown to enjoy just screwing around in clown gear and never having to be an actual “clown.” In reality, if you want a club that kids will like, just make a club called “Fun 4-H,” and all they do is whatever is fun… maybe meet at Chuck E’ Cheese weekly.
I was really pissed off when my mom informed me that not only would I have to dress up like a clown at the fair, but I’d also have to walk around and entertain people with the awesome tricks and gags that I had bought for the sole purpose of entertaining myself and my friends. The irony that I am comedian now and I am in the business of entertaining others is hilarious. Maybe the reason that I don’t sing, juggle, or do magic onstage when I know how to do all that stuff is because I have a “clown complex”… or maybe I just have performance integrity… or maybe it’s because I do magic and juggle for me only.
Anyways, I was pissed. I walked around the fair for days muttering angrily and being grumpy, like a true hobo clown should be. The fair weekend that year happened to be one of those Pacific Northwest freak weather weekends where for some reason it is 95 degrees and all the white folks in the Seattle area get to pretend they live in Palm Springs and it pushes back their eminent weather related suicide attempt until at least early December. I of course did no plan for this heat wave and at one point fell down on the sidewalk in my little hobo clown suit from heat exhaustion. There are moments in life when the true moral flexibility of the human spirit shows itself, and this was one of them. I laid on the ground sweating and mumbling incoherently for a good 30minutes until my mother found me, rushed me to a hose and started spraying me down with cold water to bring my core temperature back to “volcano” from “surface area of the sun.” Why did nobody do anything? Well, I can only imagine when they saw me laying there that they thought to themselves, “Boy, that hobo clown is really committed to his hobo character. He’s gonna be somebody someday… probably a serial killer.”
