Imagine you’re me (I’d apologize for the oncoming slew of chaotic brain imagery that follows, but we’ve got more self-indulgent literary tools to get to). You’ve recently moved from a conservative northern town into a house entirely populated with Queer arts students and you’re just about to start your first year at the University of Michigan. One night, your new roommate, who you’ve been desperately trying to convince that you’re interesting, casually mentions he’s a clown. You laugh, because of course you do — it’s polite after all — but he doesn’t. It takes you a second, but you finally realize — he’s not joking. This man is an actual clown, isn’t he?
It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to be convinced to don the grease paint with him, but once I finally did, I realized I had at last started to shed some of that deep-seated insecurity that had plagued me from childhood. Of course, dressing up with your friends in the safety of your house is pretty different than walking the town dressed in a colorful rainbow with more face paint than the average kindergartner at a birthday party. People stared, because wouldn’t you? At first, I wanted to die, the memories of the judging eyes of my hometown began to echo, and then someone turned the corner, looked me in the eyes, slowly realized they were staring at a clown and laughed in my face.
And I laughed back. What else was there to do? It was ridiculous. Objectively, it was funny — I was an angry teenager covered in pink and blue eyeshadow, I looked like a joke, but wasn’t that the point of clown make-up anyway?
Being a clown gave me a lot: It gave me a new art form, an instant conversation starter (the number of conversations that have started because someone thought I was in a band is honestly flattering), a way to experience reality without taking myself too seriously. Most importantly, though, being a clown gave me the ability to laugh at myself, and it gave me the confidence to be OK with the fact that not everyone will appreciate this exact breed of strangeness I embody. I’ve learned that being the joke is the best way to go about the world, and covering my face in grease paint has made those moments in life that seem impossible to get through easier to laugh at.
Senior Arts Editor Mivick Smith, can be reached at rmontsmi@umich.edu.
