Monday, December 4, 2006

Quit Clowning Around!



I read today where imitation legendary clown, Emmett Kelly Junior, died last week, some 40 years after his originality. He spent his career doing his father's act, the great, original legendary clown Emmett Kelly Senior, star of Cecil Blunt DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, not to be confused with legendary minuscule-penile-overcompensator Charleton Heston, who played a small role in the film, doing his imitation acting. Cheston darling, when you are acted off the screen by a pretend hobo and Betty Hutton, it's time to retire, and that movie came out 54 years ago. You were never more than a Steeve Reeves wannabe anyway.

(Incidentally, The Greatest Show on Earth, though a ludicrous piece of melodramatic claptrap, nevertheless won the Oscar for Best Picture, a monumental example of the power of suggestion. In the picture, Jimmy Stewart, as Buttons the Killer Clown, delivers one of the greatest lines in the history of dialogue: "You know, clowns are funny people.")

Imagine spending your life pretending to be a hobo. Some of my closest husbands spent their lives pretending they weren't homos.

I shudder to think what my life would have been like had I spent my life doing my mother's act. She started out as Bertha Morehead, Baby Juggler back in vaudeville. I was the baby. Good lord, do you suppose that's why my daughter Patty disappeared back in 1959, and hasn't contacted me or anyone else since, despite publishing that libelous work of fiction, her "Autobiography," Mummy Darling, the very day before I received my second liver transplant, this one a perfect, almost familial, match from an anonymous female doner my daughter's same age who was beheaded in some kind of tragic automotive mishap not 500 yeards from my home in a series of coincidences that is almost eerie? Is Patty afraid I want to juggle her? For Heaven's sake Pattycakes darling, your were 21 at the time. You're nearly 70 now. Even if I had the upper body strength to toss you about, and the single, focused vision to see where you were with sufficient accuracy to catch you again, you still would no longer qualify as a baby. Please darling. Get back in touch. You'll always be a part of me.

In any event, Mother's primary career was as a housedrunk, something this Social Drinker has never been. True, I'm at home enjoying a cocktail or two at this very moment, but I'm not alone. Little Douglas is here taking this all down, and the Headless Indian Brave is mixing my drinks. All right, neither of them drink; Little Douglas prefers his intoxication via cannabis, while the Headless Indian Brave has no mouth. I suppose he could just pour his firewater down his open neck, but when we tried that, it just poured straight through him onto the floor, and my tongue got filthy lapping it all up. I'll have to sweep the floor before we try that again. My point is, I'm drinking and we're being social, so it's Social Drinking. Were I doing my mother's act, I'd weigh 400 pounds, smell like a urinal, and never move off this chaise.

I adored Little Emmett Senior. What a man, although so vain. The man wore a ton of make up, almost as much as I do, yet he still looked like a bum. It took me weeks to get my breasts clean again.

So Little Emmett Junior is gone now; another clown bites the sawdust. First Emmett Senior, then Chuckles shucked off this mortal coil when he was terminally shucked (But wasn't his funeral a riot?), then Bozo - actually several Bozos - went to the Big Top in The Sky (I adore a Big Top, as does Little Douglas.), Pennywise has danced his last dance and eaten his last child, Buttons finally joined his victim in Clown Hell, and now Emmett Junior. When will this Clown Massacre stop? Are they all buried in the same tiny coffin? I say put Krusty into the Federal Witless Protection Program now! (You know, the same program that protects Bush, Cheney and Rove, Witless Protection.) A world without clowns is unthinkable.

Save Krusty; save the world.

Cheers darlings.

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