I've been planning to revise this essay I wrote a few years ago called "I Was a Clown for Jesus," which is about my adolescent years spent in a Christian clown group at my church back in South Carolina. Christian clowning goes back to the wacky 60's Jesus movement and is based on the above scripture; the idea is basically that you learn Christian humility by, well, humiliating yourself. We went around to hospitals and nursing homes, trying to cheer people up, but mostly really scaring them. I don't think it helped that the miniseries of Stephen King's It had come out just the year before.
I loved every second of it, though. It was run by our youth minister's wife, who was sweet and adorable and wore cool shoes. Also, she was from the Midwest, which meant she was exotic. Every time she said "pop" instead of "Coke," it was like hearing someone speak French--totally glamorous.
That dressing up as a clown was somehow nerdy or embarrassing never occurred to me, as I was an embarrassing nerd. Whenever my mom picked me up after a clowning performance, I, still in full makeup, would wave at all the cars we passed on the way home, enjoying the drivers' surprised looks. Yeah, that's right, I would think to myself. I'm dressed up like a clown, and it is awesome.
I was also completely obsessed with a certain boy in the group. I was sure that we were going to get married and go to Africa as missionaries. Then we'd come back to South Carolina and live in this particular house I passed on the way to school every day, a house I referred to as "The Charmings' House" because of its resemblance to the house on this amazing TV series. I had the whole thing planned out, down to our four children and how we would all be raptured up to Heaven. The best part of clown group by far was riding in the car next to him on the way to the nursing home. One day it was just the two of us helping the youth minister's wife with a project for kids, and afterwards she took us out for ice cream, which I thought of as kind of a date. At least it was as close as I would get to any sort of date for many, many years.
So I'm trying to revise the piece now, as part of my endeavor to collect rejection letters, and I keep preaching to my nonfiction students about the value of interviewing other people for your memoirs, because it adds layers, plus you can't always trust your memory. And I decided that I should take my own advice, so I Facebook messaged my onetime future husband--now a Baptist minister, so thank freaking Zeus it didn't work out--and asked him what he remembered about the clown group. His response? "I remember how embarrassing it was to ride in a car like that. I hated that part of it. Beyond that.....I'm not recalling much. Does that help?"
Hmmph. The nerve.
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