It was a beautiful spring day at the K-12 school where I
worked. The Middle School Drama class wanted to play a theatre game outside,
which we did occasionally when the weather was just too good to resist and I
knew they couldn’t concentrate. We stood out on the back lawn under the
electrical towers. We played the game of
passing strange movements and sounds from one person to another, transforming them
in a sort of “dance circle.” A couple of pranksters slipped out of the circle
and tapped me on the shoulder.
Lisa, a seventh grader of boundless energy and wit asked
“Can we do something special for April Fool’s Day? It’s tomorrow.” Her request was echoed by Ben, whose father, a black actor,
played a butler on a current television sitcom.I thought for a moment and said, matter-of-factly but without forethought, “We can dress up as clowns and visit classrooms. We’ll use stuff from the Prop room.”
Ben and Lisa jumped up at the idea and I knew I was in trouble. “Yes!” Ben shouted, and ran off to talk to his buddies about the idea.
The Clown Raid (as it became known in oral tradition at the
school) would not have happened if all of the various elements had not been
aligned: the boisterous creativity of the students, the day in question, and
what was undeniably the peak of a hypomania I was experiencing. Mania gave me
the feeling of certainty I didn’t have most of the time. It was like a magic
blessing that gives you the confidence that your instinctive impulses are
exactly right, that each decision and action are just what is called for. So
during lunch I ran to an arts and crafts store and picked up two dozen clown
noses. We had spirit gum in the prop room.
I figured we would put clown noses on some of the non-clowns as part of
our visit.
When the kids came to class that day we immediately began
cannibalizing the remnants of previous shows: costumes, puppets, wigs and
make-up, shoes, and a variety of props to carry just to be weird. My own
costume consisted of the “Harpo” coat with all the pockets that we had used in
Waiting for Godot; on my head was the
fireman’s helmet from the Bald Soprano, complete with whirring lights and siren
on top; and in addition to some extra-large boots I was carrying a whip and a
megaphone, through which I whispered
commands. I don’t remember what show the
whip was from. Probably Shakespeare. I
was too amped up to notice there was contraband in the student’s backpacks. It
wasn’t drugs, it was much worse. It was a few cans of pressurized silly string,
and two or three of the clowns were packing.
We got in the customary circle before performances and I
distributed the red foam rubber balls, slit in back, ready to make instant
clowns out of anyone whose nose was within reach. We broke, and with what I
remember as a rush of dangerous ecstasy, began to file out of the Prop Room,
outside the boundaries of the theatre and our sanctioned, safe space for
make-believe. This was real. I should
have remembered the overtones of the term “guerilla theatre” at this point, but
at the time I thought this was the best idea I had ever had.
Imagine me in the aforementioned costume leading a group of colorfully
disguised Middle-Schoolers in “mock-sneaking” single-file across the bright
green quad. I don’t remember all the costumes, but I will always remember that Ben
was wearing the March Hare’s left ear and had a black star painted around one
of his eyes. I was always amazed at how diabolically resourceful those kids
were. This was the same class that had put together a haunted house for
Halloween in two days, all on their own. I should have been remembering how it
scared the kindergartners so much that we had to visit their class and show them
we were just people pretending to be scary. Instead, I was sure everyone would
love a visit from rowdy, boisterous, slightly armed and scary-looking clowns.
Colin was late to class, or perhaps unwilling to go all in on this nonsense, so
he carried the Giant Goldfish puppet from one of our fable plays. The six foot
fish swam calmly above the fray, over the colander used as a hat and the open umbrella
with no fabric and the bobbing rainbow of wigs. We visited the classroom of my ex-wife who was teaching third grade at the same school where I worked. My memory of that visit is a blur that includes her giving me a look I had seen before, probably in a previous manic episode. It involved headshaking and tongue-clicking. We put noses on a few kids and the clowns followed me out chanting “Happy April Fool’s Day!”
No one seemed afraid or annoyed by us as we paraded past the windows of the other elementary school classrooms. The kids waved and pointed and laughed, and so did a couple of the teachers. Then one of the kids, probably Lisa or Ben, ran up to the front of the parade and whispered to me, “We should go to the high school!” For the first time I felt some reluctance with my euphoria, but I decided I would visit the science classroom of a teacher I felt would enjoy such an interruption. I don’t know why I thought this now. We were friendly but just work acquaintances. I didn’t know enough about her to know if she tolerated interruptions much less wild clowns.
The door of the lab burst open to my boot and through the megaphone my amplified whisper announced, “CLOWN RAID.” This was when the silly string came out. I started to “come to” when I saw that and felt that the performance was getting chaotic and out of hand. I started to put a nose on the teacher and then saw her face with a clear “No” on it. I didn’t realize that it was a “NOOOOO!” to the whole thing and not just that she didn’t want a red clown nose.
We were all breathless when we returned to the Prop Room and
took off our costumes and makeup. I remember Ben sitting next to me at the
mirror, removing the black star around his left eye, the right ear of Alice’s
March Hare flopping as he turned to say, “Thank you C.B.” At that moment I felt it was all worth it. I told the class to
pretend nothing had happened and say things like “What clowns? Oh I missed
them! I wonder where they came from.”
The bell rang and before my next class I saw the door of the
Multi-Purpose Room darkened with the tall backlit silhouette of my nemesis,
Nancy the Lower School Principal. She stood stone-faced in the doorway and
said, “You are wanted in Dr. Nicholson’s office. “.
I had butterflies
waiting to see the Headmaster, but I still thought they were just going to tell
me I should have asked permission. Dr.
N’s door was closed and I could hear the distressed voice of Mrs. Gordon, the
high school science teacher we had visited. The door opened, and the
headmaster’s voice called me in. Mrs. Gordon was in tears, angry, looking at me
in disbelief. I think I cried too and said I was sorry. I don’t remember much
about it except that by the end of the meeting I was suspended for a day. It
was Thursday and so I had an enforced three-day weekend to think about what I
had done.
On April 2nd, the day I had been suspended, I sat
all day at a sidewalk table of my local coffee place, wondering if I was going
to be fired.While I was sipping my espresso, one of several friends
named John approached me to say, “I heard you were the Lord of Misrule.”
"Yes. I got suspended for being a clown on April fool’s Day.
So I’m here being punished.”
My friend frowned with a pursed-lip smile and asked, “Wasn’t
it because you led your kids in a chaotic attack on a classroom?”
“Yes, but……It was April fool’s!”He didn't chastise me, but he shook his head and clicked his tongue just like my ex. A year or so later, this particular friend named John married her.
I later found out that on Friday all the students who had been involved were called on the carpet one-by-one to recant being clowns. “It was like the students being grilled in the Dead Poet’s Society” was one student’s nutshell explanation to me of what happened. Colin said “All I told them was that all I did was carry the giant fish.” The students who smuggled in the silly string admitted to the Headmaster that I didn’t know anything about it until it was too late. So, the kids "covered" for me, and I was glad of it.
When I returned to school the next Monday I went directly to the Headmaster’s Office. My attempts at getting sent to the principal’s office in middle and high school had always failed, but here I was, in my 3os and called to the office. Dr. Nicholson sighed and said, “You have a great reservoir of good will built up at this school, C.B., so you won’t be fired over this. A note will go in your file about it.”
Even after being punished I was in denial that I had done anything wrong. I justified it by thinking that Mrs. Gordon had an irrational fear of clowns. But it was not outright denial, it was really ignorance. After diagnosis it was clear. The Clown Raid became a story I would tell each new psychiatrist when they asked for an example of a manic episode. It was a valuable experience, offering many lessons in retrospect about the nature of my manias and the boundaries society has built around our need for the occasional chaos of the carnivalesque. But the most important thing that happened that day was "reaching" a student I had not been able to reach before. He thanked me sincerely for the opportunity to creatively break through some boundaries.
