Day 195: Send In The Clowns

Paris, Day 24. On Tuesday afternoon, I got on a train and headed south. I got off in a little town called Sceaux and became immediately lost.

I had a street address for where I was going, but when I got there, something seemed wrong. The sign read France Telecom, decidedly NOT the sort of operation I was looking for. I ran frantically up and down the street, asking several people if they knew of this place. No one did.

I went back to France Telecom and pressed my forehead to the door. I took a breath and looked up. There was a tiny silver button next to a tiny printed label: École Philipe Gaulier. I pressed the button and went inside.

Inside there was a big staircase and several unlabeled doors. I walked up and up and up wondering about the aversion to adequate signage. It felt like a secret society, and in many ways I think it is.

I heard a door creak on the top level. I was greeted by a small Asian man with bright eyes and crooked teeth. His name was Alvin, which seemed somehow appropriate. He's in his second year of studies and works at the school in order to pay for his classes.

He swooned when I asked him how he liked working with Philipe. "That man," he said, clutching his chest. "That man." He went on to describe how he got 'killed' in clowning class. How Philipe told him he was shit. How he thought he was funny when he arrived, but it turns out he's really not. All the while, his smile never faltered.

I started to get nervous. I steered the conversation to safer ground.

"What about the summer workshop?" I asked. "The three-week one?" Alvin shrugged and shook his head. "If you take the summer workshop, you'll end up staying for a year," he said. I swallowed and nodded.

"Why are you here?" Alvin asked, a good question. "I don't know," I said. "I was led here, I guess." He nodded. "You should join us," he said. "Start with Le Jeu." A shirtless man with a pregnant belly walked by. He was accompanied by another man in a tuxedo. "Bon soir," they said in unison.

A door opened and a mob of people ran noisily down the hallway. Their faces were glowing and as they disbursed, they revealed a lone figure ambling slowly down the hallway. He looked just like a clown – shortish and rounded, frizzy white hair spilling out from under a black beret, a bulbous nose balancing a cartoon-like pair of round red-framed glasses.

He looked up at me from under his bushy eyebrows. "Bon soir," he said and shook my hand. I followed him into his office. "You are canadienne?" he asked. I nodded.

"Philipe finds us Canadians boring," piped up an older woman who had tagged along. I told him I knew Karen Hines, another Canadian and a former student of his. He looked at Alvin. "Karen?" he shrugged. "We get a lot of Karens."

"How old are you?" he asked. I told him. "Ah, you are still young," he said and I felt the tears spring up immediately. Again, I grappled for safer ground: the summer workshop. "If you come to the workshop, you will understand," he said. "If you come for the year, you will transform. That is the difference."

He told me to join the other students in the café to find out what it's really like studying with him. "I like to say very nice things about myself. Ask them if you want the truth. Where is she?" he asked of the now-absent Canadian woman.

"She's changing," Alvin volunteered. Philipe raised his massive eyebrows and pursed his lips. "Is taking a long time, no? Maybe because she's so fat."

He moved toward the door. I pointed behind him.

"Your iPhone," I said.
"My phone?" he said.
"Yes, you left your iPhone...iTouch."
"You touch?" he said.
"No, your phone."
"You touch my phone?"

His eyes twinkled as ambled off to class.

I joined a group in the café. They all told me to come for the year. "Start with Le Jeu," they said. They said it again and again. Le Jeu. Le Jeu. The Game. The Game. They told me how they all got slaughtered in Clowning. How they get slaughtered almost daily and mostly what they do is "shit." But they love him. And they love the work.

They kept telling me to join them and I kept wondering why I'd come. Would I have gone all that way just to learn about a 3-week workshop? I doubt it. I mean, what's to know: you pay your fee, you do it, you go home.

I started to wonder if I really had been led there. By something larger than me and larger than what I had conceived of for myself. Something Larger said three weeks is not enough. You don't want to merely understand, Something Larger goaded. You want to transform.

Back in Paris, I got off the train in a daze. I stumbled into a café and ordered the biggest glass of wine they had. I pulled out the brochure, thinking it would be some advertising copywriter's gussied-up version of things. Instead, I saw photographs of children, crazily written stories, fictional interviews, randomness. There was a letter from Sacha Baron Cohen (he was shit, too) and one from Emma Thomson.

I saw a page about Le Jeu:

"An actor is beautiful when he doesn't hide his soul beneath the personality of his character. When he allows us to perceive, behind the character, the face he had when he was seven.

You can't revive the face of a child. You remove the layers of bad make-up piled on by adulthood, messily, by landing punches and tearing at them with your fingers."

I started to cry in recognition. That child of seven is someone I've been searching for since I felt my creative life start to slip through my fingers almost ten years ago. That child is the true artist. The brave, fearless creator who painted, drew, sang, danced, wrote and performed. She's the person I'm trying to get back to.

I had a glimpse of her on Monday – my day of colour and dance and play. I even dressed like a child that morning, putting on all the colourful clothing I brought, layer after layer of improbable combinations and clashing hues. I was like Drea's daughter whose favourite outfit includes a pink dress, purple pants, rubber boots and a tiara.

The next day I met a man whose life's work is recovering these hidden children. I do not believe this is coincidence.

I sat weeping in Café Coeur Couronne faced with the notion of coming to Paris for a year to study with a man who looks like a clown and who will tell me I'm shit and make me cry. Of uprooting my life at an age when most people I know are settling down and settling in. Of mobilizing one hell of a lot of money in one hell of a short amount of time. Of taking a sharp left instead of a gradual right. Of living in Paris for a year...of studying with a master...of finding my true voice...of living my true life. This wasn't what I signed up for, was it? Oh, yes. Yes, it was.