Touch of the Clown by Glen Huser Page B

of Jimmy Dean that she could find when she was a teenager. “I would trade Elvis pictures for Jimmy Dean,” she’d tell me when we spread the pictures out on the sewing-room floor. “Wasn’t he hand-some? I had twice as many as Marilyn Marsden.” Sometimes I take them out and look at them when Livvy isn’t around. She ripped the heads off six Jimmy Deans one time, so I’m careful to keep the box hidden. James Dean is sad, though. Even when he’s smiling.
    â€œPierrot,” Cosmo says, holding up a clipping of a figure with a painted white face and a sad expression like James Dean, in clothes something like Cosmo’s own, black with white pompom buttons. There are pictures of the other Italian clown figures, Harlequin and his girl-friend Columbine, and her scheming father Pantaloon. There is a scene of the jester and the king from King Lear. “The clown was important in a world where even the rich and the powerful lived close to death, close to the changing tides of fortune,” Cosmo says.
    There are other pictures. Cosmo shows them to us one by one, as if they were his family album. Nathan, I can see, is watching me again, rather than Cosmo. He has a puzzled look, as if he’s trying to figure out what I am thinking. He lounges back in the middle of the sprawl of clippings.
    â€œMaybe the clown is a mirror,” Cosmo is saying, but he seems to have lost us. It’s as if he is, in fact, looking into a mirror. “A mirror,” he says again, “into which we look, not straight on, but kind of out of the corner of our eye.”
    Cloud, checking the spikes in her hair, gives an audible little sigh and Cosmo shakes himselflike someone working his way out of a dream. “But enough reflection,” he grins at us. “Clowning is all about movement and action and expression. For the next half hour I want you to work with a partner, just to bounce ideas off one another. Try some little bits of action, mime moves, business that might possibly be built into a clown character.”
    Partners. As Cosmo goes on with instructions for the exercise, I look around. Nathan wiggles an eyebrow my way, but Jessica-Marie is already tapping me on the shoulder. “You want to work together? I think I’m going to be somebody who’s awesomely clumsy. I’m already pretty good at it.”
    â€œSure,” I say, giving Nathan an I’m-sorry look.
    As it turns out, Nathan and his partner, Cloud, attach themselves to Jessica-Marie and me. Cosmo has said we can go anywhere close by to practice, and the four of us end up in a park across from the theater. Both Cloud and Nathan are smokers, and Jessica-Marie is an out-doors freak, making sure she is upwind from the nicotine addicts.
    Nathan decides to be a character who mimicswhatever he sees, flapping his arms like a seagull, bouncing up and down like a puppy. Cloud thinks he’s hysterical. The crazier he gets, the more she shrieks with laughter, taking breaks to drag on her cigarette or re-apply her vampire-red lipstick.
    Jessica-Marie has decided to add compulsive eating to her clumsy routine, consuming everything in sight: leaves, paper plates, an abandoned running shoe. She is pretty funny, and we’re all giggling by the time she has finished plucking bits of velcro from between her teeth.
    I pretend I’m afraid of just about everything in the world. When I open a discarded pizza box, it’s like the
Nightmare on Elm Street
has been waiting inside. When I see my reflection in a mirror, I nearly faint from the shock. Nathan gives me a high five when I’ve done a few minutes of this.
    Cloud mainly just wants to smoke and watch us. Finally she decides she will be someone who goes around acting like a three-year-old. Nathan lets her hang onto him as if he were her older brother.
    It is a warm afternoon and people come and go in the park. A crew is setting up a stage andsome tents. One of the