Variety 57.

Variety 57

Did you ever hear the story of the man who painted eggs? It’s said he went mad. A bit like a hatter whose ingested too much mercury. Except he didn’t go mad. He was tricked. Should I be telling you this? You’ll probably won’t believe me anyway. With faces. That’s how it begun.

I never realised that every clown has a different face. Of course everyone has a different face, but what I’m getting at here is make up. Clowns make up. No clown is allowed to have the same make up as another clown. See, different faces. Its clown law. You’d think, if you were of a peculiar mind, this could be used to great advantage. By whitening up your face, and applying the particulars of a certain clown you could easily perform by day steal by night. A quick scarper off and let some none the wiser good natured sap with a red nose feel the full brunt of any criminal investigations. I suspect it happened all the time. A passionate love affair amongst performers. I mean even working in an office or coffee shop, casual relationships, can spring up over time or in the heat of the moment, into something shall we say more intimate. Imagine then the roaring flames of emotion, interaction, and seduction that lick at the canvas walls of circus tents. It is said the shadows of lust burn above circus troupes like flickering spirits of fire. It would be easy in such places, for one performer to fall for another. Perhaps a clown might become attracted to another performers girlfriend or better yet the ringmasters wife.
Day after day, the two of them sharing the same space, breathing together eating together, sleeping, apart but dreaming such sweet hot sweaty dreams. Soon they rehearse a dance together. Alone, touching each other’s bodies and eventually they end up. Well you never know just the right amount of rage and clever application of make up from a jealous husband could see, the wife’s body hacked into pieces, and her innocent handcuffed lover packed off to jail. Two bird’s one sponge.

Maybe all clowns are conman, thieves and criminals. I never really gave clowns too much thought. Until I found out about their faces. If every clown has to have a unique face, then a record has to be kept somewhere of each clown’s particular make-up. If you thought like I did, that this would simply be done by taking a photo and putting it in a album or catalogue, you’d be wrong. Each clown has their face painted onto an egg. These eggs are then kept together in the clown museum. So when a new clown decides upon their face it is checked against all the other eggs to make sure it’s different. This also means that it’s someone’s job to paint the eggs

Right now, the task falls upon a lady who lives by the sea. It was the previous painter, I was more interested in. Especially as in 1965 the entire collection of eggs went missing. Missing! I couldn’t believe it when told. So I didn’t. Especially as no-one seemed to be to clear on what happened. How did the eggs go missing?

I began asking around at various clowning events. I started going to circuses, and before long I was cornering clowns after they finished uni-cycling or swallowing swords in town squares. I even attended one or two children’s parties, posing as an uncle or older brother, which was easy enough if I kept my mouth shut and just hung round at the back until the end of the performance. It was at one of these shows, after Magic Mickey, had packed up his balloons, feather dusters, juggling balls, and other pieces of apparatus, and I confronted him, to ask about the missing eggs, when I twigged. Something didn’t add up. From what I had pieced together from all the other clowns that I had spoken too, the running theme was that the eggs went missing when they were being kept in a restaurant. At first I thought the clowns where pulling my leg. The more I hung out with them, the more I realised that clowns were a funny bunch. I don’t mean funny ha ha, I mean funny weird. Although I’m not sure whether I mean weird in a good way. They all have similar traits, its like there looking at the world through a fish eye lens. Talking to them sometimes I feel like they’ve all found out about the secret of how to turn water into wine, sunlight into gold. Except there’s no way their about to share that information with just anybody. Unless of course their another clown. So it would be just like them to try a joke about eggs being kept in a restaurant.

Was jesus invented by a clown...