Touch of the Clown (8 page)

Fun. My nerves seem to be having a jumping contest in my stomach. “Come in the side door of the theater,” Cosmo had instructed me. But I'm not sure if I can walk across the street and open the door and let myself into this whole new world. When I do move, it is like I'm a zombie.

The workshop room is a small amphitheater with kids clustered here and there on the seat steps leading down to the stage. There are three girls in a pool of backpacks, their hair in fluorescent colors: turquoise, purple, red. A tall, gangly boy with no hair at all, his shaved head shining under the lights, is sitting off by himself reading a book. Two other boys lounge against a pillar, their quiet talk broken now and then with hoots of laughter. One has dark, curly hair tied back in a ponytail. The other looks like someone in a Gap clothing ad.

A girl in a black leotard is going through some kind of series of exercises. Maybe she's a ballet dancer. She lies down on one of the terrace levels and slowly raises a leg toward the ceiling.
From across the room, an overweight girl with a lumberjack shirt tied around her waist watches her.

Suddenly I am aware that someone else has come in and is standing beside me. I try not to look at him but he starts talking to me right away.

“Hey, is th…this…th…the clown workshop?” he struggles.

“Yes.” My voice comes out as a little croak. “Yes, I think so,” I say louder. He is part Native, with dark hair to his shoulders.

“Good.” He smiles, flashing his teeth. “I've been all over th…th…” He pauses and takes a breath, “…this building.” He is wearing a small gold earring. His skin is a dark tan spotted with pockmarks and pimples. He drops his backpack and stretches his arms. I set the survival bag beside it.

From one of the side entrances, Cosmo comes onstage. He's wearing one of his outfits of many colors along with a red clown nose, and he moves slowly across the stage, lost in his own thoughts. We are all watching him. The overhead lights pick up the spun gold of his hair. Suddenly he stops, as if he has only just become
aware of us, smiles and waves us down to the stage. In a couple of minutes he has us all down there, sitting cross-legged in a circle.

Cosmo begins talking, but all I can hear to start with is a kind of buzzing in my ears. It's like all the blood in my body has suddenly made a mad dash for my head. Rush hour in the arteries. I take a deep breath. “That's it,” Mama would say when she was teaching me to swim. “Just take a big breath and hold it inside you and you won't drown. You'll be just like an inner tube bouncing around on the water.”

When I let my breath out, the buzzing in my ears has settled down into a soft, fuzzy sound.

“There is a clown inside all of us,” Cosmo is saying. I feel he has been watching me for the last couple of minutes.

“It is the spirit that we have inside us when we're children. The love of play, the wonder of discovery.”

It seems odd to see Cosmo away from his green kitchen, a teacher instead of a lemonade-maker, instead of the person on the swing set singing
Bingo is my ball-o.

“Part of the purpose of this workshop is to develop ways to keep this childlike sense of joy
close by,” Cosmo is saying, “as a kind of lifesaver. Picture yourself threshing away with problems and pressures. You have a twenty-page social studies paper to turn in tomorrow and it's already ten o'clock at night. Your boyfriend tells you he needs more freedom and maybe you should quit going steady. Your dad has decided you should work in the hardware store for a year instead of enrolling in fine arts at college. You grab hold of your clown life-preserver and it helps you float through.”

He passes around a bag of clown noses for us to put on. We are to introduce ourselves by giving our name and telling about a time when we were younger and everything felt good. The best time in our life.

“Close your eyes,” Cosmo says, “and I'll start.”

I close my eyes. The plastic nose pinches and makes me want to sneeze. Someone coughs and somebody else giggles. I have an urge to giggle myself, but now it is totally quiet.

“My name is Cosmo the Clown. This is a name I have chosen for myself.” Cosmo begins. “My parents hadn't figured out who I really was when I was born so I went through the first part
of my life with the name Garson Farber. You can see it really did need to be changed.” There is a little sputtering of chuckles around the circle. “The time I am thinking of is when I was about ten years old. I spent a month with my Aunt Charity in an old farmhouse in the Okanagan.”

Cosmo's voice is very soft. We have to listen hard to hear everything he is saying.

“It was August and we ran through orchards and gathered apples.” He stops and it is as if he somehow has those apples in front of him, in his hands. “Some of them we made into thick, juicy pies, some into apple cider, some into funny old people with wrinkly apple faces.”

He laughs softly, holding the sound in the back of his throat. “Apple people. Then we dragged a puppet theater out of the attic and made about twenty puppet characters out of worn-out socks, and made up plays. We dressed ourselves each day out of a costume box and rolled on the floor laughing as we looked at each other in different hats.”

The boy with the stutter has moved up close to me. An overhead light catches a shiny part of his earring.

“Each night, Aunt Charity read to me out of
her favorite books, and I would go to sleep in a warm upstairs room that smelled of cedar wood and mothballs, to the sound of my aunt's voice.”

Cosmo's own voice has almost faded away into the still air. “Who'd like to go next?”

The earring on the boy has quit winking at me. When I steal a look, I see he has sprawled down, totally, on the floor. And he's looking up at me.

The girl with the lumberjack shirt raises her hand. “My name is Jessica-Marie Daniels and my most perfect time was when I was about eight years old and my dad was still with us.” The words come in a rush and Jessica-Marie stops and catches her breath. “He was a little bit crazy but he liked playing with us kids and, for a Christmas holiday, we had a cabin at a ski lodge. It was too cold to ski and we stayed inside by the fire and played a game he invented called Magic Lines where one person would draw a squiggle and the next person had to make the squiggle into part of a picture. I was the best. I could make squiggles into just about anything. And my dad laughed and laughed, and even my mom cracked a smile or two.”

I don't want to go last, so after the girl with
the turquoise hair tells about how her best time was riding horseback on a guest ranch near Hinton, I recite my Alberta Beach memory. I can barely hear myself to start with, but my words get stronger and louder as I go on.

The Native boy is next. He stutters when he says his name, Nathan Meredith, but once he is telling us about his best time, the stuttering almost disappears. “I r-remember when my grandpa took me up to his cabin near St. Paul. It's a cabin on a lake and we went fishing every day and made bannock and ate fresh jackfish, and he would tell me stories, you know, about the Indian way, and when he was a young man. He liked to play jokes a lot, and we would split a gut…you know, laughing, and then…” He pauses and a choke comes into his voice. “And th…then, my m…mom figured out where we were and came and got me. But it was good for awhile…” His voice trails off.

“That's great.” Cosmo has lifted himself to a half-crouch in front of us. “All of you have pretty good life-preservers. Use them, like I say, when you're feeling blue, or you feel like you're being driven over very slowly by one of those big rollers they use for smoothing pavement.”

He flashes a goofy grin. “We're just going to limber up a bit now.” He has us become rag dolls and then mannequins. While we're doing that, he drags in a wooden trunk filled with things like scarves and gloves and different kinds of hats. We are to each choose one thing that catches our fancy.

“Look at the color of the item. How does it make you feel? When you put it on, let the color change how you feel. Let the object guide your behavior. I'll begin.” Cosmo leaves the trunk open and walks to the edge of the stage. He returns slowly, as if he is incredibly tired, almost tripping over the trunk. He looks at us with an expression of surprise and then it changes into one that is filled with excitement and wonder as he discovers different items: a pink scarf that he lets drift along his face, a beanie that makes him smile stupidly. Finally he settles for a pair of yellow gloves which he puts on slowly, shivering as he smooths the cloth over his fingers. Once they are on, he becomes filled with energy, electric, dancing around, waving his hands like a dancer, then keeping an imaginary ball afloat, then being a traffic policeman.

Cosmo crooks his finger and nods toward the
trunk. The kids all gather around him and everybody seems to make a quick choice. When I stand up, I feel my legs begin to shake.

“Go ahead and jump, sweetie,” Mama would holler when she was trying to get me to dive. “You can swim like a fish. Now you just need to learn to dive. You can do it. I'm right here.”

I would look down from the diving board to where Mama was below me, her hands reaching up. I wanted to get on my hands and knees and crawl back.

I have the same feeling now. I wish there were some way I could disappear. This is different than grade seven drama. There it was like everyone was in the beginners' class. Here I can see kids who look like they're training for the drama Olympics.

I have a feeling that Nathan Meredith isn't ready to rush up and get something out of Cosmo's trunk, either. We are the last ones. Cosmo spills the remaining props out so we can see them. There is a corsage of white flowers, the kind that college boys give to their prom dates in the movies. There's an old-fashioned handbag all covered with sequins and beads. There's a cowboy hat and a balaclava and a lady's straw sunhat with a green ribbon tie.

“Do any of these make you think of any-thing?” Cosmo asks.

“Uh–I'll t-take this.” Nathan picks up the balaclava. “I 1-lost mine after I robbed the S-Seven Eleven last week.”

The sunhat makes me think of an old movie called
Gone With the Wind
that Daddy and Grandma watch every couple of months. There's a beautiful girl in the movie and she goes to a barbecue in her hoop skirts and a big sunhat. She flirts with all the young men and makes their girlfriends jealous. Maybe if I take the sunhat I can turn myself into the beautiful lady.

Cosmo smiles at me and nods.

I take the sunhat over behind a pillar where nobody can see me. What do I do with it now? Do I just put it on and become a beautiful belle?

There needs to be something more.

Sometimes, when we had a few minutes left at the end of a drama class, Ms. Billings would pop a tape of Carol Burnett skits into the VCR and we would watch them. What would Carol Burnett do? I think of her cleaning lady act and I decide that's what I'll do, be a cleaning lady who's working in a theater prop room where she
finds the hat and then turns into a gorgeous lady. Besides, I've done the cleaning lady twice already in drama skits at school.

When it comes time for people to show what they've come up with, everyone goes before Nathan and me. The girl who looks like she's a ballet dancer does a dance, like a Japanese geisha, with the paper fan she chose from Cosmo's trunk. The boy with the ponytail tucks his hair up under a black beret and pretends he is playing an accordion at a restaurant.

When it's his turn, Nathan puts the balaclava on the lid of the trunk. He moves around the stage, timid, frightened. But when he finds the balaclava and puts it on, he is suddenly powerful, forceful, dodging back and forth like a boxer, doing Ninja kicks.

When he is finished, I grab my imaginary bucket and mop and move like a tired old woman onto the stage.

“Wonderful,” Cosmo praises us. He brings out a cooler of juice and a container of cookies. “Time for a bit of a break now,” he says.

On cue, Bella arrives with Livvy, who is dragging a large sheet of paper.

“Hey, look, Cosmo,” she says. “I did the best
elephant. It was going to be a dog but then I made it into an elephant.”

“Wow,” says Cosmo. “And you're just in time for cookies and juice.”

Some of the other kids are standing around us, and Livvy, never bashful, displays her picture for each of them. For the last half of the work-shop, she nibbles cookies on the upper terrace and draws on a piece of manila Bella has left with her–an elephant friend for the one she has painted.

“So, what do you think?” After the workshop, Cosmo walks with us as far as his house, wheeling Mehitabel alongside. “You were good, Miss Barbara Stanwyck. Great with the sunhat.”

“It was fun. A little scary, but fun.”

“I was great with my elephant,” Livvy reminds him. She has the large papers rolled with a rubber band around them.

“You were,” Cosmo laughs. “Bella says you're a natural.” We are at Cosmo's yard. “See you tomorrow,” Cosmo waves at us.

“You can't let Daddy see your pictures,” I tell Livvy.

“I want to show him and Grandma.”

“It needs to be a surprise for later. If he asks
where we were, you have to say we were at the playground and the library.”

“Oh, bah.”

“Yes, bah. Promise me, Livvy. It's really important.”

She scowls at me.

“Promise. Or I'll never play ball with you again, or read you
Winnie-the-Pooh”

“Can we play with Bingo when we get home?”

“If you promise.”

“I promise,” Livvy sighs.

Daddy and Grandma are both asleep when we get back to the house. The end of a videotape runs bright blue on the screen. I make a game of tiptoeing around the house with Livvy, getting her to the bathroom, putting her pictures up in her room, finding Bingo from where she's let him roll under the bed.