Banned by clowns...

Not creepy at all

I don't like clowns.

To be honest, I fucking hate them -- hate their noses, hate their face paint, hate their hair, their costumes, their shoes... but mostly I hate their eyes.

"Coulrophobia" is the psychological term for a fear of clowns, but I'm not afraid of them -- I just fucking hate them (okay, maybe I'm a little afraid of them). I know I'm not alone in this and that this is not a controversial stand.

It started in 1971 when I saw a giant sad-eyed clown picture in our neighbors' living room (for some reason every other living room in America in the 70s had a sad-eyed clown painting). Those goddamn clown eyes seemed to follow you wherever you went (even when I ran past the damn picture as fast as my little 3-year-old legs could take me).

Probably this..                    but to me looked like this

So it was probably inevitable that eventually I was permabanned from Cirque du Soleil (French translation: "Satan's Circus") for punching a clown in the nose in Seattle in 2000.

It looks so cool on public television with amazingly talented hot chick acrobats in tiny, tight stripper costumes flashing full frontal cameltoe splits every two minutes. That ain't the way it is in real life. IRL, Cirque du Soleil is a French-Canadian corporation (based in Montreal) that has 4000 employees and makes nearly a billion dollars a year.

They have 20 separate companies touring around the world at any given time. With that many people out performing, eventually it's going to water down your talent pool. I think many of the performers in the 2000 production I saw in Seattle must have been heroin addicts snatched off the streets of Montreal.

Preparing to eat a small child

There weren't any acrobats in the production my wife forced my 4-year-old son and I to attend -- just clowns, hundreds of clowns. They spent the show wandering into the audience to pluck some unlucky yahoo out of his/her seat to humiliate on stage. I am a shy guy from Minnesota so being chosen to come upstage when I'm at a performance of some sort is about my worst nightmare. 

It's a proven fact that clowns can smell that particular brand of fear. So, of course, one of these trolls with green face paint, purple hair and truly crazy killer clown eyes caught a whiff then came and took my hand and tried to get me to stand up. Nope, wasn't going to happen. I have an almost superheroic ability to NOT move when I don't want to. I am like a human donkey. If I don't want to move, nobody can move me.

Eventually Pierre the Psychotic gave up and moved on to some other sap. By this time my son was so bored he started acting up, yelling "bad clown!" and trying to kick the cavorting evil bastards when they'd get too close (don't know where he got that from). I generously volunteered to my glaring wife to take him out. Tickets were about $80 a piece even in 2000, but I would have paid 10 times that to get out of there.

We made our exit through the nearly empty lobby -- "nearly empty" except for snack bar clerks and, of course, Pierre the Psychotic, who apparently was on his break time and flirting with a teenager selling popcorn.

Pierre saw us walking out and I could see he recognized me immediately. He figured he had a ready-made sucker he could use to impress the probably underage popcorn girl with his brilliant mimicking clown skills.  I grasped my son's hand tighter and said, "C'mon sonny, we have to get out of here.":

Too late.

My son kept turning around and began to say, "Dad!" with more and more alarm. "Dad... Dad... DAD... DADDY!!"  I knew Pierre was right behind us, but I was willing to ignore him if it would make him go away. It didn't work and at this point, my son was crying.

I stopped short and Merde-For-Brains ran right into us. He had been mimicking me, walking about an inch behind me. When I turned he jumped back and pretended it wasn't him, just looking up at the ceiling and miming that he was reading an imaginary newspaper. 

"You better back the fuck off," I said. I'm not a big scary guy, but now I was pissed.

In idiotic silent clown language he mimed, "Who? Me?"

I turned and we kept walking. Sure enough, he did it again.

By this point, Pierre just had too many marks against him -- scaring my son, being French Canadian, ignoring a warning... but worst of all -- being a clown.

I popped him the nose and he went down like a sack of clown crap in ketchup. I think he was faking it a little because I didn't hit him anywhere near as hard as I could have. And yes, he really did have a red nose on, but I don't remember if it made a honking sound when I flattened it. But, at least, he stayed down and wasn't moving -- at all.

My son and I got the hell out of there, but they called the cops and they caught me in the parking lot because I had to wait for my wife. Pierre wasn't hurt, but they didn't want people going around punching clowns (that sounds like a great policy to me). I told the Cirque du Soleil people I would make a stink about their clown scaring my kid and running into us so the clown command staff didn't press charges... they just banned me from all Cirque productions forever and all time.

Ohhhh please.... don't throw me into that briar patch. What a punishment to be prevented from seeing a herd of talentless, French-speaking attention whores for the rest of my life.

"We won't be telling mommy about this, okay son?"

He tried, but it's hard for 4-year-olds to keep a secret -- especially about killer clowns being vanquished. 

I gotta admit it was worth getting the cold shoulder for a week to punch just one of these evil fuckers in the nose.

...and another one planning to steal your soul

because it was spawned without one.