My flickr friend Mike Leigh, a Brit who’s a mail artist, collage artist and man with a nice sense of humor started a flickr pool to help support the BBC-related Comic Relief charity for Oxfam that’s culminating in Red Nose Day this Friday, March 16. The Red Nose website has some free video clips of comedy sketches that I can’t seem to access but one of them is by Ricky the Office guy, so check it out. Maybe you’ll get it to work.
Long ago, I was a volunteer clown and wore a red nose, so the Red Nose reverberates with me. The picture above is of two clown badges I wore while parading in Fourth of July parades in Milwaukee and Madison. Milwaukee had its own parade and some of us decided to “volunteer” and crashed the action. Next year we got invited to be “official” and thus the badge. In Madison, which had no Fourth of July parade at all, a group of us decided to give the city the parade it deserved so we dresssed in thrift store finery, painted our faces, and marched around the State Capitol and in one case straight through it. Steve played trombone specializing in the Marseillaise and Dixieland tunes, and the rest of us were the kazoo chorus. Early performance art that always ended in a great barbeque and lots of laughing.
I knew there was a reason I saved those badges.
