Hitched.

For a length of time when I was kid my father was a Party Clown. Long from being truth at this point, it’s degenerated into a kind of trivia, falling into that genre of factoid that’s meant to both spur a conversation of it’s doldrums and explore something deep and true about ourselves withour actually having to admit to something deep and true about ourselves. I told this , uh, factoid to someone yesterday and realized that I had absolutely no information about it’s chronology. I do not know when he took up clowning or why, what spurs a person into this profession and what keeps them at it. That’s not meant as a transgressive comment, I’m assuming that being a party clown is as much an art and a compulsion as being a weeknight Jazz guitarist or the sort of person who sells oil paintings at craft fairs. It just means that it has been for so long such an amusement that I know almost nothing about it.

And most people don’t poke at it. Aside from the sloppy cliche of, you know, “Oh, I may look funny on the outside, but inside I am a tortured artist and/or a whirlpool of pain”, the most frequent prodding was to somehow get him to don his make-up for the first time in 15 years and come entertain us. I never relayed this desire. I can be bad at anticipating outcomes, but I am reasonably sure that getting my father to dig up the corpse of his old hobby so that he could entertain a bunch of stoned college kids was unlikely to end in a net-positive.

Anyway, it was in this spirit that I felt a weird and awkward kinship with the Great Zuchinni, a man who makes over a $100,000.000 a year wearing a diaper on his head. The Washington Post, whose archives are a fantastic resource for weird, touching non-fiction, has an article about him. There’s a Q&A follow-up that’s a must. The article is more than 3 years old, so I was wondering what happened to the guy after the article was published. His website still exists, but that’s all I can find.

The article, which spins in equal turns the absurd and the tragic, is worth the 40 minutes or so of your Monday morning that it will require.