why is everyone always hatin' on the clowns?

First they came for the clowns... But I didn't say anything, because I wasn't a clown.

Look, I feel sorry for the lady in the clip below. I really do! 


But I actually feel sorrier for the clown; look at the poor guy trying to be funny while the woman with the clown phobia screams and cries and basically behaves like he has come to kill and then dismember her. If not the other way around. 


Poor old clowns. They are being persecuted everywhere we look. And it's not a new phenomenon.

Stephen King took us to new heights of clown bigotry in It. Michael Richards from Seinfeld fanned the flames of clown hatred for years, but did anybody care?  John Wayne Gacy was a serial killer first and a clown second, you know.

As Shakespeare said so movingly about the deep down humanity of us all: "If you prick us, do we not bleed tomato sauce? If you tickle us, do we not laugh - then jump in a tiny car and try to run you over? If you poison us, do we not die - for half an hour, gagging and clutching our chests and pretending to hang ourselves with our own ties?"

Next time you are tempted to revile a clown, remember what the Bible has to say about it. 

Clownliness is next to godliness.

my latest act of creative genius

It's possible I have too much time on my hands...

The Porn Identity...

You have to laugh.

About five years ago, I drove into my driveway after doing some shopping and noted happily that one of the offspring had taken in the supposedly empty garbage bin without me having to ask.

Whoopee!

So. I get inside and my then eighteen year old daughter comes rushing right up to me. This is not normal. Although we've always had a relatively cordial relationship, the rushing to the door to meet Mummy the minute she walks in phase of life finished some years ago.

So Daughter, looking kind of crazy in the eyes, says, 'Mum! Someone put a bag in our bin.'

'They what?' I say. 'For that matter, WHO what?'

She says, 'They put a BAG in our BIN!'

'Hmm...' I wasn't sure why this was such an emergency. 'Yeah? And so?'

Someone put their garbage in our bin. Not that I want someone else's stinky garbage in my bin, of course, but I'm not going to the coppers about it or anything.

But Daughter's all agitated. 'No. No, not a garbage bag. A BAG bag! Come and look at it.'

I made her wait while I put the cold groceries in the fridge just because it was fun to watch my normally cool calm and collected grown-up jig around like a five year old who needs to pee.

Finally, I put her out of her misery and let her drag me out to where we keep the bin by the back door. I go lift the lid and peek into the newly emptied bin. Sure enough, there is a very big, very nice canvas bag in there obviously very full of something.

Something that someone didn't want but that they didn't want to throw away in their own bin. Something they needed to be rid of so bad they didn't mind losing a very nice canvas bag over it.

I look at my daughter and say, 'So what happened? Did you see who put it in there?'

She says no, she just went to bring in the bin and felt it was still heavy so she had a look and there it was - the bag - the mysterious sinister bag.

I looked back down at the bag and I felt a bit sick. If I'd been married, f#@% feminism; opening that bag would have been a job for my husband. I know. I know. I've watched too much NYPD Blue but I honestly thought, Oh God, I hope there's not a head in there. and then, even worse, Oh, God, I hope there's not a dead baby in there.

Daughter says, 'It's something really gross, isn't it, Mum? Oh, God, I hope there's not a dead puppy in there.'

'Don't be so ridiculous,' I say. 'Of course there's not a dead puppy in there.'

We stood there, looking apprehensively into our garbage bin until it became clear that, yes, there was definitely an unidentified canvass bag in there and, no, no knight in shining armour was going to come riding up, thrust us to safety behind him and deal heroically with the pesky damn thing for us.

So finally, I reach into the bin towards it, as if it's going reach right back at me and grab my arm. When I hold the zip fastener between my fingers, I breathe out heavily as if I have just cut the right wire while defusing a bomb on a TV cop show. I unzip it a little, wincing, certain I am going to see a dead eye staring back out at me through the hole.

Zip. Hmmm... Plastic. Ziip. A little further. Ziiip. Looks like DVDs.

Daughter, who is looking over my shoulder, goes, 'Oh fantastic! Movies! Look - Liar Liar!' The colours were basically the same as Liar Liar and she LOVES Jim Carrey.

Yay! It wasn't dead puppies or abandoned babies or decapitated mob boss heads! It was just movies! Neither of us stopped to ask ourselves why someone would throw Liar Liar away in someone else's bin in the dead of night. I know there are a lot of people out there who don't like Jim Carrey - but that seems extreme...

I zipped a little further and looked a little closer and, well, it wasn't Liar Liar at all. More like Stripper Stripper. Dicks and mouths and tits all over the shop.

Someone abandoned a great big bag of porn DVDs in my garbage bin! My daughter and I hung over that bin, laughing our guts out. It wasn't a dead baby. It wasn't a severed head. It wasn't dead puppies. It wasn't even Liar Liar. It was just a bunch of dirty old porn.

I told one friend and he thought I should go to the police. I thought that was a little extreme but he said, 'You know, there's a reason they're not putting that out in their own garbage bin. There could be anything on those DVDs.' Ew. Thanks for that one, bud.

I called another friend and she said, 'You should put it on ebay.' I must admit that was the first thought that crossed my mind as well. I don't know what that says about me.

When we'd had a good laugh and gone through all the things that it could be - a schoolkid who nearly got caught, a husband whose wife decided to clean out his shed for him - my friend said to me, 'Of course, the biggest question, Christine, is... Why do these bizarre things always happen to you? Out of all the bins in the entire city, whoever it was was ALWAYS going to abandon their bag of unwanted porn in your bin.'

I was going to bring the bag inside my house till I decided what to do with it, but what if it was just a temporary measure for some crazy pervert and he came back that night to get his Bin Porn back and found it gone?

I couldn't risk a crazy pervert banging on my door in the middle of the night shouting at the top of his lungs that he wanted his porn back! I left the bag right where it was and then in the morning when we checked, the bin was pleasingly empty, just as it should have been when Daughter brought it in from the street the day before.

Ah, all was right in our white bread, suburban world again!

So after all these years, what made me think about the case of Mysterious Bin Porn?

Daughter has grown up. She has made that necessary pilgrimage away to live in the big city and now returned to her home town - older, wiser, deeper in debt, more open about the shenanigans of her teenage years.

I mentioned the Bag in the Bin episode and we both had a new big laugh about it all.

'That was so funny,' she more or less says, 'this happened, that happened, blah blah blah...' She's a natural comedian and I laughed along at her recollection of the incident. '...and then my friends came and got it out of the bin in the middle of the night.'

Whaaa? I looked at her. 'Your who-sie what out of the wherefore in the when?'

'Oh. Didn't I tell you that part?'

'No! You didn't tell me that your friends were a bunch of perverted bin porn thieves!'

The story emerged: So hilarious did she think the story was at the time that of course she was immediately on her phone texting all her friends about our sinful bin full of porn.

Word got around and a few days later she learned that several of her male buddies had formed a deviant swat team, infiltrated our yard after all the lights were out and claimed the canvass bag full of dirty goodness as the spoils of war.

Never doubt the desperate hunger of the teenage male sexual appetite.

Dangerous Liaisons

I watched one of my top ten favourite films last night. Dangerous Liaisons. John Malkovich is the best villain on earth and Michelle Pfeiffer the most open-hearted beauty the world has ever known. 


My daughter, Gillian, said, during one of the glorious scenes where John and Michelle stroll down a path through a beautiful French garden, he, in his wig and hose, she, in her enormous panniers, 'She obviously never asked anyone for an honest opinion on whether her bum looked big in that or not.'

On storytelling and why the community funds the arts

I was debriefing my computer when I came across this. I was asked to give a talk to a community group a few years back on the value of art in society. This is what I said. I still believe it.


“ I must say I was a little surprised when I was asked to speak to you. I’m a writer. This means that primarily, I’m a storyteller and while I certainly have fixed and strong ideas about how story telling fits into society and helps to build community, I know that most people today don’t. Today, storytelling has been reduced, for the main part, to entertainment and news.


It wasn’t always so. Tribal cultures throughout history have had a tradition of passing vital information down from generation to generation by storytelling around the cooking fires at night. Australia’s indigenous culture, the Aborigines have an incredibly rich tradition of story telling, some of which has crossed cultural boundaries and entered into general understanding. We all know for example that Aboriginal culture talks about a beautiful concept of eternity called the Dreaming, another world which exists invisibly but eternally alongside this one. We have all heard of the Rainbow Snake and many of us are spooked by the curlews call at night because of stories we've heard from Indigenous neighbours.


These stories traditionally have three main purposes:
1) to educate.
2) to ventilate
3) to entertain.


The educational aspect is clear. The kids of the tribe learn not to go outside the fire’s circle of safety because they are frightened by the stories that are told there. Apart from being scary, these stories are often also deeply moral – the characters are almost always given some sort of natural justice. Heroes are rewarded and villains are punished. The Bible and other holy books are the best example of this, although most of the fairy tales that have been handed down to us serve the same purpose – to teach us how to live safely and productively in society. Don’t trust the wolf, Red Riding Hood. Work hard, Cinderella, and you’ll get the prize.


These stories were a way of shaping the next generation into good citizens…


...which makes me very afraid for today’s society sometimes! Where are our stories?
At the movies, of course. And on the television. And in the video game boxes. The stories told today serve the same purpose as stories have ever served – to educate the next generation about how to behave as a citizen of our society.


Have you seen some of the films they are watching before they're old enough to make informed decisions on right and wrong?


Mind you, with further thought, I have to admit that most of the kid’s stories on our screens today do have a strong moral base. The vast majority of films show that he who follows his conscience prospers while the villain gets his comeuppance. I may not always agree with the language they use but the stories they tell are most often sound. Personally, the thing I find most offensive, language wise, about what screen culture teaches our kids is the accent! Australian kids have been so drenched by American TV, film and popular music that they don’t even notice they speak with a U.S. accent!*


The second purpose of story was to ventilate. Story has always provided a safe way for individuals and the greater community to express strong emotions. Our greatest fears result in our best most popular stories. From Little Red Riding Hood to Psycho through to Silence of the Lambs, we have an enduring fear of the psychotic potential of strangers. Same with our greatest hopes. Look at the never ending popularity of a great love story - from Cinderella to Gone with the Wind through to Forrest Gump. The reality of life is that the majority of us will never have to endure the things that terrify us most and most of us will never have a love story quite as dramatic as Scarlett and Rhett. But these stories tell us what it’s like for those who do go through such extreme experiences and give us clues as to what to expect if these things should ever happen to us.


As I said earlier, the third purpose of storytelling is sheer entertainment and escape. It doesn’t matter how worthy the first two purposes are; if you don’t have the third, if your story is not entertainingly told, nobody is going to read, listen or watch it in order to get the message it contains.


Even in the best of times, life can be pretty dull, colourless and boring. Now try for a moment to really imagine what it would be like without stories. That is – no magazines. No novels. No TV. No DVDs. No jokes even.


Now try to really imagine what life would be like without any form of art at all. No paintings on any walls anywhere. No music. No songs. No dancing. No fountains or statues in the parks. It’s pretty grey, isn’t it?


Yes, we can live without art – but would we really want to?


The idea of the starving artist is as real today as it ever was. Most artists cannot make a living from their art. And yet we can’t imagine a life without their product. It’s something to think about next time you hear someone worrying about the arts being subsidised by government.


Everybody wants to be constantly surrounded by art. But nobody wants to pay the artist a living wage for the work that makes everyday life worth living!


So, how does the art of storytelling fit into everyday community life?


We are all storytellers. Take the three things I’ve already mentioned – education, ventilation and entertainment. It’s all in a day’s work for all of us!


For instance, when you get sick of nagging your child to put the garbage out, chances are you get creative and tell her a story about how some little kid whose house gets overrun with rubbish contracts some terrible disease which causes her limbs to fall off.


When your husband (pardon my sexism) continues to drop socks wherever he takes them off after 20 years of reasoned argument, you would probably feel justified in telling him that story about the woman who Just Gets Fed Up With It one day and her man comes home one day to find an empty house. Some might call it black mail… But it’s actually education: “If you do such and such, then so and so will happen as a consequence.”


Then there’s ventilation. The boss gives you a hard time. You get to the pub and you tell anyone who’ll listen the story of what he’s done to you and what a mongrel he is.
Teenagers spend most of their time phone, text or IMing each other stories of what’s happening to them at the moment and what they hope or fear will happen next.
And as for entertainment… You just have to think of the last time you said to someone, “You’ll never guess what happened to me today?” and had them breathless as you gave them the next exciting episode in your life.


Or the next exciting episode in someone else’s life…


That's called gossip.


Everything has both a positive and a negative side. The negative side of story telling is alive and well – as I’m sure it has been down through the ages. Today, they have entire magazines devoted to telling us things about other people that we have no right to know. It’s common knowledge that many of these stories are made up – and yet still these magazines flourish.


Personally, I believe it’s a perversion of the age old art of storytelling and I hope to see a swing back to people minding their own business and taking an interest in the stories that are all around them in their personal world. Our world here at the moment is made up of you, the people in this room.


There are as many important stories in this room as there are people. Some of those stories we can learn from, some can inspire us to do better in our own lives, some might just give us a good laugh or a good cry. Whatever! Every single one of them is more important to our lives than who Posh Spice’s husband is diddling in the broom closet. Besides which – that’s none of our business!


I encourage all of you to go home and write down your favourite story from your own life. You don’t have to write a whole book – just your favourite. Put it somewhere safe, preferably in plastic to preserve it as best you can. I guarantee someday it will mean something to someone.”



* To any of my American friends who read this - Hey! I LOVE your accent - just not coming out of the mouths of our babes.

Sweet Home Chicago...

Watching The Blues Brothers with my daughter, Gillian. 


When the Peter Gunn theme comes on, she says, 'Oh what's the name of that again? Ooh, I know it. I know it! Oh, right! It's Mack the Knife.' 


I said, 'No, it's Peter Gunn.' 


She says, 'Oh. Well, I knew it was some kind of weapon.'

Next Novel Cover Mark II...

What do you think?    Does it look like a book?