Think Foolishly: Tips From a Pro

Drew Richardson, the Dramatic Fool, is hard at work again.

His blog, Think Foolishly, is currently featuring his takes on how to Think Foolishly. He's got 60 great tips across five categories on how to create a clown logic for your work, how to enhance, create, or otherwise extend a clown routine in a logical and foolish way. He's currently on #18, so you've still got plenty of time to read all of the tips before they overwhelm you.

With tips like # 13: Give Up and #12 Never Give Up, you can see that you are in for a little bit of a blender ride. Although he doesn't specifically say so, I think it's safe to assume that you probably shouldn't do ALL OF THESE AT ONCE. (although that might be very funny) But as one of my teachers Daniel Stein would say, "If you follow all of the rules of great theatre, you are guaranteed to make mediocre theatre."


If you are looking to transform one of your clown ideas, try approaching the problem from one of these 60 ways, and see if that changes how you are feeling about your potential clown idea. If that approach isn't working for you, try another. Maybe even try two at once. After all, you've got 60 potential keys to unlock the secret to your new routine, and one or more of them might solve the problem. Well, right now there are only 18 ways, so maybe you should just wait 40 days before doing anything else... then come back to your creative difficulties (if you can remember them)

Read his blog here: http://www.thinkfoolishly.com
Find out more about Drew's work: http://www.dramaticfool.com

CLOWNALLEY SITE DOWN.

Perhaps some of you have noticed that one of the best clown sites-- Pat Cashin's Clownalley.net, has suddenly gone away.

To be more accurate, the website is still there-- but all of the archives are gone

It's not by design-- sadly, Pat Cashin, who has been working tirelessly on the site for the last three years, and had amassed easily over 3000 digital photographs, videos, and other ephemera about circus clowns throughout history, had an incident where he in error deleted his blog. So far Blogger (a Google-owned company where Pat did his amassing) has not responded to his pleas to restore his blog from the backup tape.

This is a huge tragedy-- clownalley.net was a great service to clowns and clown historians across the world.

In their defense, Blogger is a free service, and people are supposed to use it at their own risk, and they do provide a backup or export capability, but sadly Pat never used it. (this blog also uses blogger, and I do backup on a semi-regular basis (although I'll be doing it more often)

There is still a chance that Blogger will respond to Pat's pleas.

Cross your fingers, and hope for the best (and if you know anyone at tech support for blogger at google, maybe you could put in a good word or two?)

And in the meantime, let's hope that despite this tragedy, Pat will continue to work his special magic to make clown geeks like us happy.

International Clown Week is this week

Somehow it escaped me that this week is International Clown Week. I don't really celebrate it per se. In fact, I mostly shun this kind of stuff. The problem is that the kind of clown stuff that I am interested in (and hopefully, if you are reading this, you are interested in too) is not the cutesy stuff, of which most things like International Clown Week seem to perpetuate. I am interested in the funny, not the cute. See the examples on the left as the emblems of what I think of as cute. And although it's not perfect (I don't love Stupid as a Synonym for clown, although I do love The Stooges as a synonym for clowns) See my take on an emblem above. You can find out more at the celebration at http://nationalclownweek.org/ Apparently, Richard Nixon (Mr. Clown himself) was the guy who signed the proclamation for National Clown Week in 1971. Clown week is promoted primarily by Clowns of America International (COAI) a group that has as its purpose to bring together serious-minded amateurs and professionals. They have a number of "Alleys" around the country (and world, even) and host competitions in paradability, ballooning, facepainting, gags, and other stuff. Most of the performers in the group are amateurs, people who clown as a hobby, and take very seriously the Clown Commandments I love a lot of the ideas behind COIA, and I suppose I follow a lot of the Clown commandments (I don't show up drunk at a gig-- not because it's a commandment by an organization that is invested in keeping up the good name of clowns, but because it's good business sense) but I got into being a clown as a theatre artist, to create shows and plays, and not to join organizations or for my love of the word Clown. And while my goal for clownlink is in some ways exactly the same as the goal behind COIA, I don't think we share the same aesthetic or vision of clowning (although a lot of the elements are the same, I'm sure.) I'm not big on the competitive aspect. But to each his own, and if this will bring more exposure for good clown-work--and good clowns-- who am I to judge? More power to you, COIA! If any of my readers are members of COIA, please comment below. I'd love to find out what you like about COIA, and why you are a member, and what you get out of it. Perhaps I'm missing the boat here.