Please don't send in the clowns

"But then came the clowns/No, not the clowns/Don't send in those clowns/Anything but them ..." ("Don't Send In The Clowns," Space Ghost)

Seriously, don't. With the exception of trying to comprehend what seems like the rocket science of the boys' math homework, nothing can throw me off my mojo faster than a clown.

I've seen movies about the psychotic type with sharp teeth and claws that like to plant hatchets in people's skulls, which always leaves an "Ow!" expression on the victims' faces, like they were surprised it hurt. But I'm talking about your average, everyday clown with poofy hair and a huge nose, the kind that freaks the Nut 'N' Honey right out of me.

(Speaking of psychotics, am I the only one who wonders what Michael Myers of Halloween fame did during all that idle time before the H2O movie? Between then and the previous movie he had lots of leisure, and I know from experience that you can't exactly trudge around in blood-spattered coveralls and a weirded-out mask like that without drawing attention. I mean, here's a guy who, if you stopped and asked him the time, wouldn't think twice about pulling out your appendix through a nostril. Yet, I don't recall reading newspaper accounts during his slack period of any auto mechanics getting their necks snapped by a gore-streaked customer because they didn't offer him a free lube. And, anyway, couldn't he have taken one lousy afternoon to wash his stained laundry at his mom's house? These are the kinds of things I think about when I'm fooling around at my desk while the boss is gone.)

I can remember going to the circus and laughing at the show dogs in their little pink tutus and being thrilled by acrobats who wore their Spandex just a little too tightly for my taste. But then that miniature car would scoot up to the three rings, the door would pop open, 57 clowns would bop out of the back seat and I'd get the heaves. They'd flop around with their big shoes and deranged painted faces and throw buckets of confetti at audience members, and I would hold tightly with fear onto my brother until he would call me a wiener and bonk me with his box of Lemonheads.

Now I'm older, and see clowns at carnivals and grand opening events, where they're filling their big red mouths with helium to talk goofy and twisting long balloons, and my bowels start sloshing. They still freak me out (the clowns, not my bowels, although, yeah, they kind of freak me out, too) and these days I anxiously clutch my beloved, who calls me a wiener and bonks me with her twenty-ounce French vanilla cappuccino.

(Another thing about Michael Myers: Does anyone else wonder how he can walk around without a savings account and still regularly get his hair cut? My boss hasn't come back yet, so I was just wondering.)

Who was it that invented clowns and thought they'd be such a stitch? I happen to have several acquaintances who are also freaked out by them, and these are completely level-headed people with no discernible nervous tics, which, in my circle of friends if you don't see a lot of neurotic ticcing going on every few seconds it's only because the medication is finally kicking in. A guy wearing a frizzy pink wig and greasepaint can't expect to walk up to a rational adult and guffaw "Har har har!" and pull multi-colored handkerchiefs out of his ear and not expect to get whacked with one of his own size 60EEE shoes.

In my twenties I actually took a job as a clown at a chain restaurant. Nothing else had been working for me, especially the ad agency copywriting position in which my slogan for baked beans - "The tasty way to eat and repeat!" - forced my boss to re-evaluate my future there. So I put on a fright wig and a baggy suit with huge buttons and wore make-up that gave me zits and waddled around the restaurant for minimum wage. It lasted all of four hours, during which a dozen kids cried, I made balloon animals that all resembled two-headed worms and I got the telephone number of a woman who found my rubber ears strangely attractive. On my lunch break I went into the restroom and saw my reflection in the mirror, and let out a spine-tingling wail that made a customer choke on his bacon-wrapped potato wedgie, and that was the end of that illustrious career.

I look back on that warped episode aghast that I even attempted it. To this day, I have a recurring nightmare where I'm in the full get-up and backed into a corner, and multi-colored two-headed worms are baring ugly yellow fangs, and that woman with the phone number is caressing the rubber ears and saying, "Call me, you big lug."

So please, no more. I have enough of a problem dealing with my tic-y friends, whose lists of things that freak them out would keep us here all day. Besides, I'm on deadline to write a slogan for an athletic supporter, something that can't possibly turn out well.