For May 24th, 2004
Rumour
Fatal Beauty supermodel Rumour's band was playing at the clown college again, and this time, the audience participation was getting out of hand. Squeaky red noses and inflatable mooing shoes ten sizes bigger than they stocked at Payless didn't blend well with the drums, guitars, or keyboard (though, admittedly, they did sound good with the theremin). The rap side project with her friend JLowe, DJ IZM, would've fared better, but this was an absolute cacophony!
The schnauzer in the little red tutu stopped humping the bassist's leg to run backstage. His owner, famed French clown Achile Chatouilleu, followed in lukewarm pursuit (taking a slug from his bottle of dimestore wine on the way). Rumour threw her microphone at him, but missed -- only just. She considered following it with her guitar, but it wasn't worth it. Chatouilleu had escaped, and she needed to return the guitar to the pawn shop after the show, anyway. From the way it was constantly going out of tune, she suspected it had been used to punish clowns (or mayhaps even mimes) in the past. No need for the poor stringed thing to suffer more.
Three rows back, Rumour was shocked to see a grinning dwarf in a paper hat juggling cats with sociopathic zeal. What the...were those her cats? No good! She grabbed a butterfly net from the stagehand and, in one quick motion, rescued her flailing felines from the maniacally gleeful little homunculus and, with another, bopped him on the noggin with the net's handle 'til his eyes crossed and he fell backwards into the clown crowd.
What would Spider do, she wondered to herself. She'd see him plenty this summer on one of her trips to Los Angeles where they would collaborate on new material, but that didn't help her in the here and now. Perhaps the only thing that would clear things up would be a cold bottle of agitated seltzer water or an oversized wiffle ball bat. Ah! Or a breakdancing goat! But she didn't have any of that. She'd worked together a new scarf for her design company, 333 EMPIRE (blurring the line between art/function), but there was no way she was going to risk tearing it on the bumper of some rusty clown car that undoubtedly lay hidden among the dance floor's throng. She'd seen them in action before, and she wasn't ready for that kind of mayhem. Rumour gnawed another strand of beef jerky and strummed a few chords on her guitar while she considered her next course of action.
The clowns surged forward -- a terrifying wave of garish makeup and bad fashion -- and Rumour suddenly knew what to do. She looped the microphone cord around her boot's toe and flung it upwards to come to rest in the stand before her. Like a supersonic Freddie Mercury, she sustained a note only audible to circus folk and she watched with relieved joy as they fell away in head-gripping terror. Her bandmates, safe by virtue of never having belonged to the freakshow world, quickly packed up their gear and beat feet for the van in the back alley. Thirty seconds and more than a few cracked clown skulls later, they were well on their way out of that three-ring hellscape. They drove...toward freedom.
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