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Original EssaysRepeating My Own Historyby Monica Drake
Me and my rubber chicken, my stack of books, my big dreams. Yes, it's the kind of store I never go in. I couldn't afford a pair of socks in that store, but this was different. The Mario's windows are huge, lovely, prominent. I emailed back, signed on. I'm a hand-raiser. I get enthusiastic, and this sounded like a good time. I packed a suitcase full of red rubber noses and my best rubber chicken — a girl chicken, complete with eyelashes, hips, boobs, and a purple and white polka-dot bikini. A sure crowd pleaser. I opened a new bag of one hundred long, skinny balloons and warmed up my hand pump. I folded five plump Clown Girl dolls in half, and tucked them in the suitcase. These are dolls I bought at the Goodwill and hand-painted in clown drag. One is a marionette. Another came with a crocheted Easter outfit. Depending on your phobias they might veer toward creepy, and according to some three-year-olds they smell funny, too, but nobody would catch a whiff through the glass. These dolls are my props, my friends, my little audience. I'd arrange them at my feet as if they were listening attentively. With their sweet plastic faces painted in variations of Gene Simmons, they'd make that window display shine like Christmas, sing like a birthday party, or maybe just glow like an old Twilight Zone episode. The trick to performing in a window is to make people stop. I threw the whole kit in the trunk of my car. At Mario's, a young man showed me to a gorgeous bathroom. He poured the champagne. I took the glass, closed the door, got to work. The thing about promoting a book like Clown Girl is the question of how much to let myself, as an author, merge with the narrator. My narrator is a clown. I'm not. It's my hope that in the book clowning stands for all creative arts. It's about risk taking, integrity, and vision. I worked as a clown more than a decade earlier, but not anymore. I'm a writer now. A writer! I pulled on a red yarn wig. I rolled up my pants and put on size massive Converse. I painted a heart on one cheek. Outside the bathroom door, Portlanders browsed Mario's racks. They chose clothes to fit and flatter, things that would scream wealth and style. I tucked in my oversized shirt, fluffed the red wig, and opened the door. I slapped through the aisles in big shoes. I balanced my champagne in one hand and wheeled the suitcase behind me like some kind of clown flight attendant in the off-hours. I climbed into the window, dumped out a pile of dolls, and started blowing up balloons fast. The clock was ticking, my slot in the window short. I tied a balloon dog, rubbed it against my wig and let it stick with static electricity to the white walls behind where I would read. I tied another, and it clung to the window in front. I kept going. I filled the space with dogs and giraffes. In balloon tying, a dog and a giraffe are the same animal except one has a long tail, the other a long neck. A fast transition. There was a microphone hooked up to speakers out on the street. There were four red armchairs set up on the sidewalk. I started to read. People kept walking. A few winked. Others smiled. Kids looked, but most people just put their heads down and didn't acknowledge me at all. A foot away from the glass, they didn't blink. I was a puppy in a pet store window, barking my head off. Was that mic even on? I could hear my voice going out into the world. The situation started to feel familiar. Then, I saw the rub. I'd set myself up against the exact same problem that had, long ago, taken the shine off a good day of clown work. Once upon a time I worked as a clown in a window display. I was hired by Mrs. Field's Cookies to work in what's called the "Pac-West" tower. It was a glass building a stone's throw away from the window where I now belted out lines from my new book. How had this happened? I was repeating my own history. What I learned, in the Mrs. Field's Cookies gig, is that a continuous narrative doesn't work with the moving target of downtown pedestrians. What they need are fast jokes. This round, I had over three hundred pages of continuous narrative. I saw somebody out there give a glance over his shoulder. The woman next to him mouthed the word "clown." They kept going, busy people. "I'm not a clown!" I yelled. My words sailed out, over the mic, over the crowded city sidewalks. I straightened my wig. I went back to reading. I was only clown-like. Clown-ish. Clown inspired. Okay, I was a clown. I'd circled back to the very tricks that shaped Clown Girl in the first place. I'd let myself merge with my material entirely. The last time I'd performed in the window of a store, it was hard as hell to get people to stop and look. This time, it was harder. I had a microphone, but now they had cell phones. They had iPods. They had all kinds of distractions. I had an audience of smelly Goodwill baby dolls in face paint. Then a few people stopped to listen. A brave man sat in one of lovely red chairs that lined the sidewalk. Sitting implied a commitment: he'd listen to the end. A small crowd of familiar faces gathered. Wesley Stace, author of By George and Misfortune, aka musician John Wesley Harding, showed up. James Bernard Frost, author of World Leader Pretend, came down on his bicycle. Paul Neilan, author of Apathy and Other Small Victories, came to lean against a bike rack. The hilarious and prolific Poe Ballantine showed up out of nowhere, and it was like a dream to see all this talent gathered together. And my husband, Kassten Alonso, author of Core: A Romance, made it down on a break from work. There were other writers, those still working on novels, short story writers, essayists. The party was out there, on the street. The shuffling, iPod-wearing masses kept going. For all they could hear, I was a mime. But the ones who turned to face me on the sidewalk, who stopped when everyone else was walking, those guys made me happy. These were smart, thoughtful, funny authors. They were people who took the time to write ideas down.
Writing is all one big conversation and it's been going on for ages. It's call and response. I've always been a reader, and for decades I've been writing. Now I finally had a novel out. My crew was out there, and this round, they were listening to me. I was in the written conversation, the world of ideas. That, in one more clownish moment among too many, made all the difference.
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