JPMD

Everyone says "clown college" to make fun of lower class education. Some of us know the pride and tradition involved in the real thing though. When PT Barnum was running around the profession of clowning was an honor, not a joke. So revered were the men who graduated from our universities that we were immortalized on velvet. These days...

I guess that isn't the point though. Like my father, and my father's father before him, I attended JP Patches University. I did very well. Pie throwing, balloon animals, folding into the tiny cars, the psychology of children and mid-west families. I aced them all. Valedictorian of JPPU, it was an honor just to think about it.

I agonized over my speech for nearly a month.

I thought about what my people had become. The tragedy of a group that once taught, enlightened, and made happy... now a laughing stock. The kind of profession nobody wanted their son to become, or even worse for their daughter to marry. That wasn't so bad.

The fact that we all pretended it was nothing, that offended me.

A little known fact is that in every class there is one sad clown. Not the psychotic killer that writers make millions on and mothers scare their children with. Those clowns occur once every three generations or so. However, the sad clown is a necessary thing.

I had to decide before I gave my speech, light or dark, happy or sad. I could take on the mantle of sad clown. If I passed on it, then the honor would fall to the class clown, I know, the irony. If he passed, then someone else would take it up.

Someone would wear the frown though.

I had two speeches prepared, and even on the day of graduation I wasn't sure which one I was going to deliver. I put on all the makeup except the bit around my mouth. I looked at my lips and I thought.

No longer did my brothers climb out of the car, amazing the world with simple magic. No, instead we led malnourished elephants around big tops with almost nobody in them. We did not even try.

Once we were the servants of the dream-makers. We did our jobs for no reason more than making children laugh. Every tinkling of those voices birthed one of the fae. We rejoiced in that. Now though? Now we bent balloons for children absorbed in their iPhones, children who no longer believed in magic. We did this for the price of a can of tuna. I hated what we had become.

I hated them for accepting it.

I hated me for accepting it.

I donned the downward slanting makeup and I took the stage. I looked at them in shame and rage. I took my horn in my right hand and held my breath. The horn issued one sad, condemning honk, expressing my disappointment.

My classmates felt shame and wept their face free of their smiling disguises.

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