Edinburgh — The Royal Mile

Yesterday was our first real day flyering on the Royal Mile. Let me paint a picture for you: a beautiful cobblestone street, gray and glistening from a morning rain. At the top of the street is a majestic stone castle, at the bottom is a royal palace, all of it steeped in history. In between the two are a mile of desperately needy theater students acting out their childhood traumas in shitty fairy clown make up.

The more time I spend around clowns, the more I hate clowns. Apparently they don’t find idiots irritating — they make a career of acting like them. One of them followed me around this morning — crawling — staring and pointing at my shoes, saying “oooh! Pretty!” That clown has no idea how close she got to being kicked in the face. I mean, is there another appropriate reaction? When someone in face paint follows you, crawling, are you NOT supposed to try to get the fuck away from that nightmare? It was like having a retarded kid take his pants off and try to kiss me with a sandwich in his mouth. Awful.

The worst, though, are the childlike lady clowns. They think they are ADORABLE — I disagree. My like/dislike scale of things goes like this: Bits of Fudge and Skateboarding Dinosaurs on one end — Weeping Face Wounds and Adult Performers Acting Like Children on the other. Just past that is LadyClowns acting like children. I know some kids, and none of them toddle up to strangers and say “Penny wants a sweetie in my mouth! WAH! Give Penny a sweetie!” LadyClown children do, though! What is so appealing about acting helpless? They may as well wear t-shirts that say “waiting to get raped…again!”

The clowns get even more specific — there are fairy clowns and vampire clowns, victorian clowns and space clowns. Even some burlesque lesbian clowns seem to be getting a lot of buzz. But more than anything, what they all have in common is that I would love to hear their bones crunching in the jaws of a skateboarding dinosaur.