My first two years in college, I lived in the dorms. My third year, I lived with my parents. And my senior year, I lived “down the line”, which meant: down by the beach, in a rented house with a bunch of other people.<\/p>\n
I found a great situation (I thought) in a massive rambling house, which actually had a name: Breezy Corners. It had a huge yard, it was an old house, there were French doors, a fireplace, etc. The entire set-up ended up becoming a nightmare, and Breezy Corners turned into an unofficial halfway-house for every runaway teenager in the town. I would come home after rehearsal and there would be 10 drunk or stoned runaway high school students taking over the living room.<\/p>\n
And Beth’s boyfriend (now husband) Tom was one of my roommates. Which is so funny for me to think of, in retrospect. Breezy Corners was NOTORIOUS. It was a complete nut-house.<\/p>\n
Before it all went bad (I moved out after the first term, and found another great house to live in, down the line) – we threw a massive Halloween party.<\/p>\n
I cannot count how many people showed up. It was absolutely insane.<\/p>\n
My friend Mitchell and I dressed up together: he was Andy Warhol, and I dressed up as silver-haired Edie Sedgwick. We both had on white face makeup, so we looked totally pale and nocturnal, I had on huge fake eyelashes, I had spray-painted my hair silver, and, because Edie was a heroin addict, I put colorful Band-aids up and down my arms.<\/p>\n
My brother showed up as “Elvis in Blue Hawaii<\/i>” – only to be shocked to find out that someone else was also<\/i> there as “Elvis in Blue Hawaii<\/i>“. We took a picture of the two of them together, it was hilarious.<\/p>\n
My friend Beth came as a clown. Her boyfriend came as Indiana Jones. One of my favorite images of the party was the two of them, in costume, sitting on the couch, talking. As though nothing was off or different about their appearances. Indiana having a serious conversation with this little earnest clown.<\/p>\n
Beth had ponytails all over her head, she was wearing a kind of one-suit polka-dot pajama-type thing, and she had a full clown face – white makeup, big red smiling lips, the whole deal.<\/p>\n
At one point, as the night raged further and further and out of control, and basically the entire ‘down the line’ community started crashing the party (I knew only about 10 people there, and it was my house) – Beth and I were standing in the kitchen. Drinking beer, talking.<\/p>\n
And then, two guys, guys we did not know, knocked a beer over onto the kitchen floor.<\/p>\n
And they did not clean it up. They did not even make a move to clean it up. They just glanced down, didn’t care, and kept talking to each other.<\/p>\n
Well, this made the clown angry.<\/p>\n
She yelled at them. “This isn’t your house! This isn’t your kitchen! You are a GUEST here, and if you spill something – clean it up!” Furious, she grabbed some paper towels, and started to clean up the spill, still bitching out the two boys. “It’s ridiculous. You still need someone to clean up after you? Is that it? It’s not. your. house.<\/i> If you spill something – CLEAN IT UP.”<\/p>\n
By the time she finished with them, they were cowering in fear.<\/p>\n
It was only later that it occurred to us: Beth was a clown<\/i>. She was a clown<\/i>. She had a big shiny clown smile, but she was standing there, reading these guys their rights.<\/p>\n
We are still laughing about this today. We imagined the two guys who had made the spill kind of skulking away, and then later, when someone asked them how the party was, they would say, vaguely, a bit uneasy, “Oh … it was okay … until we got bitched out by an angry clown.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My first two years in college, I lived in the dorms. My third year, I lived with my parents. And my senior year, I lived “down the line”, which meant: down by the beach, in a rented house with a … Continue reading