Strangely, the clown business is no laughing matter these days.
The Concord Police Department wasn’t laughing last week when it sent two officers to investigate a bogus report about armed clowns in Rolfe Park.
And Simplicity the Clown of Laconia, who’s been clowning around professionally for 17 years, has seen her business suffer after a nationwide epidemic of scary clown sightings – some real, some not.
Once performing 150 gigs per year, Simplicity, whose real name is Mary Anne Ross, says her pool of clients has slipped to about 100.
“This is what I do for a living,” Simplicity told me this week by phone. “This has cut back on a lot of my income. People have switched off.”
How bad are things in the clown world? So bad that Simplicity’s young nieces called their aunt recently, freaking out, looking for reassurance, their childhood innocence shattered by this trend.
“They said, ‘Aunt May, Aunt May, the clowns are scaring us, they’re running out into the street, and I’m afraid of clowns now.’ ” Simplicity said. “I told them they didn’t have to be scared, that I was a real clown and you’re not afraid of me. They said that was because I was a nice clown and I told them that was because I wasn’t an imposter.”
The craze has grown to clown-feet proportions, hitting us like water from a trick flower. It started in South Carolina in late August on a serious note, an unsubstantiated report that clowns were seen trying to lure children into the woods.
Then it spread, to Alabama and North Carolina and Pennsylvania and New York and Ohio and beyond.
And here, too, in Berlin, Keene, Durham and right in our own backyard, so says Lt. Tim O’Malley of the Concord Police Department. He told me this week that a detective and an officer were dispatched Oct. 5 to Rolfe Park, down the street from Merrimack Valley High School, after what appeared to be a social media-generated report about gun-carrying clowns.
Police found a woman walking her dog at Rolfe, but no armed clowns. O’Malley wasn’t laughing when I spoke to him. Police, in fact, are looking for the person who posted the information. Making a false report is a crime.
“We used resources to include having to take one of my computer crimes detectives to use him to try to help research and obtain some of this stuff,” O’Malley told me. “And this is the same guy we use to try to apprehend child predators using the internet to stalk kids. We’re diverting that person from a pretty extensive case load to now have to try to get to the bottom of some hoax designed to scare people. That’s what this appears to be.”
In fact, actual prowling clowns aren’t always the problem. Many times it’s a worried parent who’s heard something second or third hand, or seen something online. Or a teen pulling a prank. Or a drunk college student doing the same.
The University of New Hampshire actually investigated a report of a clown screaming at students through a megaphone. Students said it happened, but the cops found nothing.
But, at a time when terrorism continues to haunt us, YouTube tells us that terrifying-looking clowns have been spotted wearing scary masks and makeup. This puts police in a tough position, since there’s nothing on the books about walking around dressed like a clown. And with Halloween on the horizon, the issue keeps growing.
Meanwhile, clowns like Simplicity are losing business. Clowning is how she puts food on the table. When asked if enough money was coming in, Simplicity said, “Just enough.”
This is a labor of love for a woman who once worked as a comptroller in New York City, earning $35 an hour. She moved here and decided to use her love for children to make a living.
“I started out as a simple clown, no intention of making this a business,” Simplicity said, explaining the origin of her name. “But I love kids, I love being a clown for the happiness of children.”
She’s good at it, too. She earned a craftsmen degree from the Northeast Clown Institute in Plymouth, Mass. She mentors and lectures others, focusing on the business aspects of clowning. She’s won awards for putting on her makeup the fastest, and in balloon twisting, costuming and character competitions.
She emailed me the “Professional Clown Code of Ethics, as posted on the Clowns of American International website.” She follows these eight clown commandments as though Moses had thrown them, written on stone tablets, from a mountainside.
It reads, in part: “I will keep my acts, performance and behavior in good taste while I am in costume and makeup.”
And: “I will carry out my appearance and assignments for the entertainment of others and not for personal gain or personal publicity.”
And: “I will not drink alcoholic beverages prior to any clown appearances.”
“We shouldn’t be walking out in public in clown unless we’re invited,” Simplicity told me. “We don’t walk into a public place without permission. These people who are running out into the streets and causing havoc are not professional clowns.”
Simplicity has had to change gears for business purposes, making the creation of another character a priority.
Mary Anne the Magnificent Maker of Marvelous Memories is now part of her act.
“I was putting it together for this year anyway,” Simplicity said. “But I made a rush on it after these incidents because I found that people were less likely to call me as Simplicity to do an event, when people could (say), ‘We don’t want a scary clown,’ and I’d have to tell them I’m not a scary clown.”
No, she’s not. She wears a red derby and draws with giant, colorful crayons. She follows the clown code of ethics religiously, and children mean the world to her (she has two adult kids).
These days, though, this clown wears a frown.
“It’s almost like the Tylenol scare,” Simplicity said. “It scared everyone and then it passed, and this will pass, too. This is the year for us, I guess.”