Different is hard

I want to be like Cinderella. No, I’m a boy. I want to be like Superman. No, I’m a human, I want to be like, uh… Wait a minute, what if I wanted to be like me. No,

that’s insane. Who are you? You are nobody. No I’m not, I’m me, and nobody is

me except for me, and that’s special, right?

Don’t you hate it when the grocery store rearranges the food? You have to go in search of the peanut butter instead of being able to bee-line there, grab your Skippy, and head for the checkout. But on your way to extra crunchy, you discover pretzels that are filled with peanut butter. That’s weird, pretzels and peanut butter. Okay, let me put on my super courageous hat and try something new. Man is this scary. Something that is not like everything else. I grab them with my Skippy and head toward that voice that says,

“ clean up on aisle 2, Bob, cleanup please, broken jar of Vlasic pickles.” There he is, standing proud at the counter, the man with the golden voice. He asks me, “So did you find everything okay?” I reply, “actually, I had trouble finding the peanut butter, but on the way I discovered these pretzels filled with peanut butter.” “You’re going try something new?!!!” Yes Mr. Voice of Food Giant, I’m going to take a chance on something different.

As I unpacked my environmentally safe bag, which is biodegradable and uses no animal parts in its handle, I pulled out this strange, one gallon jug of pretzels filled with peanut butter. My family stared at me with fear and desperation. “What are those, Dad?” I bit my lip and blurted out, “pretzels filled with peanut butter”. They dropped their poptarts and ran from the room screaming frantically for their mother. I knew the risk I took was huge and now I wondered about my future as a human being, could I ever fit in again?

My wife and I own a theater and toy store at a shopping mall in Dallas Texas. It’s a beautiful mall with over a hundred stores where you can buy faux-jeweled accessories

to match your Uggs and another hundred stores to buy Uggs to match your avian-inspired birds of paradise, matching under and outer ware, and yet another hundred stores to match you diamond- encrusted watches that are not only eye catching, but they tell time. And if you can’t SEE how luxuriously fabulous this shopping experience is, there’s another hundred stores to buy your progressive designer eyewear inspired by Studio 54. I know what you’re saying, how do I get there and do they take American Express?

Wait, before I tell you how to get there and the convenient holiday mall hours, I want to let you know that there is also an American Girl Doll store where you can buy your doll’s dog a two bedroom pied a terre with Milk Bone interior for under a thousand dollars. So, I’m not saying that this mall doesn’t have unique and much needed goods for the normal family shopper, it’s just that sometimes I feel like our store, Slappy’s Puppet Playhouse, gets shunned because we don’t have big pictures of multi-ethnic, unshaven, dental prodigy Tee Shirt models in our store front window. The picture of Pinocchio in a Speedo that I displayed just didn’t seem to fit into our mission statement. When you walk by our store it looks different. It’s not what you would expect to see across from Old Navy. Families walk in with their eyes wide open and big gasping smiles and ask, “What is this?” That’s when we tell them that this is a theater, for you and your kids, that you can enjoy some fun, fantasy and laughter together. It’s the magic of live theater, for everyone.

And on the way out, you can find a creative toy from our unique gift shop. Even the Wall Street Journal found our selection different, noting us as one of the best toy stores in America. There’s that word again, different.

I wish we could afford to be in every mall in America, like the rest of the stores in my mall, but we’re only in one location worldwide. I guess that’s the problem with being different. When you’re different it’s scary. It’s like buying pretzels with peanut butter in them because you got lost on the way to the Skippy. On the other hand, I brought home some normal pretzels the other day and gave them to my kids. As they bit in they did a Danny Thomas spit take. “These pretzels are boring! There’s no peanut butter in them.”

Thank goodness they know something different can be good. But it takes some courage.

It takes a lot of courage.

I want to be a famous Idiot

Have clowns changed in the last decade? Not a bit. They are still idiots, every last one of them. Oh grow up! Take off the wig. What’s with the big hammer? Clowns don’t change.

I just worked with about 30 clowns at a festival in China and I realized something. We all look and work the same as we did 10 years ago. Nobody wants to change. I’m not changing. Those quick-change acts, they have to change, that’s their act, even though they’re all the same. But I’m a clown. No need to change.

Okay, one thing has changed. I used to be in my forties and now I’m not. And do you know what afternoon delight is? It’s a good nap before dinner. Sure we follow trends, but only in comfortable footwear. Like a few years ago everybody wanted to be funny. But that was too hard. So we decided to be scary clowns. But that was too easy. So visual became the norm. But Slava took it too far. Then everyone was Russian for about three years. I felt so cold being a Russian clown, but it gave me the confidence to do anything on stage as long as it had drama and a wind machine. Absurdist clowning was the best. All you had to do was wear a long coat and wait for someone. But the French Canadian thing has been around a decade too long. I had to change my name to Jean Guy Marcel just to get a corporate gig. Thank God that’s over. And I really hated wearing that spandex hooded costume and working to Edith Piaf music while being lifted up and down on a wench.

Bello’s not going to change. He won’t be trying any new hairstyles. No way. And Grandma is still a Grandma, you won’t see her playing an Uncle. Uncle the Clown, he’s so lovable and funny. That’s not gonna work. The famous clowns don’t change. They work hard to stay the same. If they change no one will hire them. A famous clown? Hmm. That’s kind of like a famous plumber, except the clown doesn’t get a truck with his name on it.

If you’re a dentist and they discover a new way to pull a tooth, well you have to pull a tooth the new way. If you’re a clown and they discover a new way to pull a tooth, who cares, because no matter how you pull it, “you got the wrong tooth!” Can’t change that. Are you kidding? Change? All us clowns sit around watching old kinescopes of Sid Ceasar and Jackie Gleason because it’s the same. Clowns don’t change. And as I grow older it becomes even more clear to me that the oldest clown is really the youngest child and who would ever want to change that. To capture the joy of discovery in every breath is the fountain of youth as far as I’m concerned. I’m not changing. I do miss the spandex though.

(article first published in Spectacle Magazine)