Just Open

Earlier this year, I took my first official clown class and it changed everything for me. Maybe 'changed' isn't the right word– more like, deepened. Or reconnected. Maybe even healed. All I know is that in the months since then, I've become incredibly comfortable using my authentic voice and showing my truest self which–for me– has been like feeling the gentlest sun warm on my face after decades of staying inside.

It hasn't all been easy, coming to terms with what authenticity can actually feel like as an embodied practice. I've definitely skinned my knees a few times over the last year, but the payoff of standing taller and truer has been worth it. So, I'm writing this essay to help shed light on how I've been challenged, how I've asked for help, and where I hope this path is leading to.

I've always been interested in clowning. As a young towheaded child, I'm sure I rented the same "Clown College" VHS from the gas station near my family's rural cottage more times than all the other renters combined. I can still remember the smell of honey-smoked pepperoni on the countertop in that ramshackle ESSO across the US border. In the tiny little shop, expired packages of Jiffy Pop crowded the shelves and the linoleum floor was always sticky. The VHS tapes smelled different too, a sort of earthy musk that I can now identify as mould. Back then, it just smelled the way things did that came from before I was born, before I knew what year I was born in, or what that really meant.

Looking back, the "Clown College" tape was low budget and rudimentary at best, but to my young and as-yet-undomesticated eyes, it offered a glimpse of how a person might make their living by bringing joy and connection to others. I guess there was an unnamed queerness about the clowns too, with all their makeup and fanciful expression, their lightness of humour, the fleeting moments of depth and connection.

After my parents split up when I was six, we stopped going to that dusty old store, but the spark it lit in my heart would continue to grow, mostly shielded from outside view, for the years that followed. As I grew up in a religiously conservative, sports-obsessed suburb, I was coached to hold my body in a different way than it naturally sat, to pitch my voice a little lower, to dress a little straighter, to hold my wrists a little firmer. The list of commandments I grew up under far surpassed ten, and felt cleaved in stone too dense to recarve or even consider adjusting.

In sixth grade, inspired by Baz Lurhmann's notorious "Wear Sunscreen" valedictory address having made it onto the Billboard Top 40, my classmates and I were given the assignment to write and perform our own renditions. I chose an Alvin & the Chipmunks cover of "I'm too Sexy" as the backing track for my speech, but feeling cowed by my classmates preteen groupthink, asked my teacher if a private recitation was possible. That teacher would go on to become 'Mr Gay Canada' some years after he taught my class, but in the mid-nineties he was still closeted. To my request, he replied with a warm and supportive "of course."

I'll never forget the feeling of glee and self-realization, pressing the play button on the stereo and hearing that song's bassline ring out to meet my teacher's surprised and supportive laughter. I had set myself up in the cloakroom and had asked my young-seeming teacher to sit on the other side of the cubbies, out of view. It's a complicated feeling, to notice that I needed privacy to tap into my unfiltered voice back then. I don't remember much else from that day, aside from how proud I felt to do my own thing, and to be celebrated for it.

A couple years later, fresh in a new highschool with wider hallways and higher ceilings, my drama classmates and I were assigned a lip-sync. "Any song, any style, any choreography, just peform it start to finish," were Ms. Beeman's words. At our discretion we were invited to band together in groups to perform our numbers. Understandably, in the midst of so much normative pressure at home and at school, I wasn't ready to share my creative vision with my peers.

Again, I asked my teacher if a private performance would suffice and she graciously agreed. I'll never forget her dazzled eyes as I performed a campy rendition of "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch", complete with santa hat striptease and shredded toilet paper snow. "You've got a gift," I remember Ms. Beeman telling me after the track ended. Not too loud, and in the complete privacy of her portable classroom, I cried and thanked her. I got an A in that class, but dropped drama the next year because of some feedback about the optics: how straight would it look for a young man to be interested in creative expression?

Later on, my family moved to a more progressive suburb on the coast, and my classmates became more supportive and interested in the arts. I registered at a school without any siblings in attendance, and I was free to explore my gifts more earnestly. My drama teacher, Mr Engstrom, noticed and cultivated my yearning for self-expression from my first day in his classroom.

It was 2002, and baggy pants and caesar haircuts were in. While my classmates performed monologues from yellow-paged softcovers, I wrote my own material using a penname. Only Mr Engstrom knew it was my own work that I was performing: a dramatic monologue about watching my brother fall into a frozen lake, running to save him, and the ice freezing over too soon for me to pull him out. "I need to free you!" I screamed into the black-box theatre floor, pretending to be calling to a younger brother I never had, trapped below the ice. Looking back, it gives me goosebumps to imagine how much I yearned for those same words to be shouted to me by those in my own family.

It's humbling to admit that it took almost twenty years for me to realize that if anybody was going to free me, it was going to be me. Through later teenagehood and into early adulthood, I continued to grow my inner capacity for expression and my outer capacity for self-constraint.

My early career was centred on graphic design, a craft that allowed me to hide behind my portfolio, to identify as shy, and to throw my expressive voice into the register of whatever client or boss was paying the bills. Eventually I began putting my name in the hat to speak at design conferences which was a meaningful step towards visibility, but even then I felt that it was my job to dazzle the audience– to prop up a version of myself that was happy in his own skin, that wasn't still wounded by the bullies that had jeered him off so many makeshift stages in the past. Even within the context of a conference, those nodes where each attendee has a central interest in common, I very much felt on the outside, praying against all odds that they'd believe I was part of their community.

And then all at once, my understanding of what visibility meant shifted forever. I'd grown up alongside Fernanda, from meeting her in preschool at age 3 to signing her elementary school yearbook at the end of seventh grade. She was the girl I slow-skated with at Stardust, our tiny hairless hands clutched in platonic companionship, both of us cut from more creative cloth than our peers. In the summer of 2023, just last year, Fernanda took her own life. She'd been an actor her whole adulthood, and her sister Paula passionately produced a posthumous revue of Fernanda's audition tapes and dramatic readings at the York Thatre so that her friends and family might mourn the indelible loss in the company of Fernanda's own voice.

When Paula asked me to emcee that celebration, an almost three hour foray into Fernanda's passion and fierce talent, I began preparing immediately. I researched ritual and grief at UBC library, found resources to share with the attendees to support their own mental health after the celebration, and even prepared a few light jokes to stitch the whole thing together. Between each of the videos, I had seven introductions to make, and I was ready, so I thought.

That morning, at the historic York Theatre on commercial drive, almost three hundred people took their red fold-down seats and chatted softly before the lights went down and stagelights came up. I took to the podium, and began my remarks. Fernanda was a force, her voice was unmistakeable, I missed her already, if anybody felt in-crisis themselves, call 9-8-8. All was going according to plan– I'd gotten a couple laughs out of the sombre crowd, and I took my front-row seat while the first video rolled: a montage of Fernanda's early childhood, her severe haircuts and sweet yet commanding temperment all on home video. I, along with the entire auditorium, wept and wept.

And then, with tears streaming down my cheeks and my voice hoarse, it was time to go up and introduce the next video. I'll never forget the rawness and vulnerability I felt that day, as I made my shaky way up the stairs to retake the podium. With suddenly cold fingers I fumbled my cue cards and my breath caught. Everything that I'd prepared, all the ways I'd imagined making the audience comfortable by charming them, melted away. I was just a thirty-five-year-old man, mourning one of his childhood best friends. With stage-lights beating down into my glistening eyes, I took a moment to breathe deep, to find my centre, and to ask Fernanda's spirit to guide me.

I'll never forget how clearly her words came, or how deeply they shattered my understanding of what the audience needed from me in that moment. "Just open," she whispered through the curtain. In front of three hundred mourning people, with easter lilies unfurling their staining stamens on either side of me, I realized all at once that there was only one way forward, in that service and in my life: to achieve my goals, to touch peoples' hearts, and to connect with others in unimaginable ways, it was time I got real.

I went off-script and shared with those gathered at the service how I was feeling, how scary it felt to be witnessed in grief, and how much Fernanda had inspired me to open that up and keep going. All of a sudden, all the times I'd ever performed, either literally out-of-view or figuratively out-of-criticism, seemed like data points leading up to that moment: the moment where I chose to leave dazzling behind.

Just a few weeks after that, I checked out a show at a new Improv Theatre in town, Tightrope Impro, and immediately fell in love with the friendly and queer-inclusive space. For my entire life I'd sat in theatre audiences in a complete trance, imagining what I would do in the performer's shoes, and I finally had the chance and confidence to find out for myself.

Shortly after, in March, I began a Foundations in Clowning class, taught by the incredibly supportive and nuanced Chloe Payne. For four hours every Sunday, my classmates and I learned about how much the audience loves when a performer leaves their pre-conceived ideas offstage and instead leans into where the humans in the audience find joy. Each week, after games and exercises aimed at tapping into our receptivity and impulse, we took turns filling an obligatory three minutes on stage. It doesn't seem so bad, reading the words 'three minutes', but for an amateur clown who isn't getting any laughs, three minutes can feel like eons.

"Parker, I want you do DO less," Chloe offered after one of my first experiences bombing, as I sat breathless and impossibly warm on the stage in front of my supportive and kind classmates. I'd come onstage with a flimsy idea that my hands would be trumpets, and that I'd honk around aimlessly while they all laughed– as you can probably predict, that wasn't how it had gone. "We all already love the clown you are," she went on. "Just let us."

On reflection, I notice how many incredibly intuitive and supportive teachers I've had along the way, but Chloe's words felt like a culmination of all that had come before. If I was going to shine, I had to be open and stand still long enough to be seen.

After loving my first class at Tightrope, I immediately registered for Improv Level 1 over the summer and this fall, Level 2. In both classes, my peers and I learned about the tenets of Theatresports, and the distinctions between founding director Keith Johnstone's concept of improvisation versus mainstream "Improv" (oftentimes shorthand for Improv Comedy). In Johnstone's school-of-theatre, each performer is encouraged to let go of the expectation of being extraordinary or funny. In fact, the hardest part of these classes was learning to bore the audience, to risk seeming normal, or, as he put it, "Being Average."

After a few months of classes, I was enjoying my newly reclaimed sense of ease and stature onstage and was relishing the feeling of creative wind in my hair. My classmates were incredible, and everything was going great, and then, suddenly and without warning, I hit another speedbump.

The exercise that afternoon, deep into the second level class taught by the luminary Toronto-based improviser Lindsay Mullan, was to guess the physical environment our classmate had just mimed, and then to enter the scene with a single line of dialogue that would establish a relationship between the two of us on stage. Sounds easy, right? My kind and energetic classmate Peggy had mimed arriving at a hair salon, I'd thought, so I confidently trotted on stage with a vibrant "Hey honey, same as last time?" while checking out her pretend split-ends and massaging her scalp as the greatest hairstylists do. The class and our teacher applauded, and that was that. But actually, it wasn't.

"Where were you, Peggy?" Lindsay asked. "In the bathroom, I thought, but I liked where Parker went with it," Peggy replied.

With a warm and encouraging smile on her face, Lindsay directed, "Let's try it again, but this time in a bathroom. Parker, who could you be that enters Peggy's bathroom?" All at once, like a cueball getting lined up to knock an eightball in the deep left pocket, I felt exposed and an indescribable pressure at what I knew was coming next. I took a moment to collect myself and to sift through all the possibilities that sprang up, and in that brief moment one of our classmates shouted "You could be her partner!"

It wasn't until hours later, deep in thought in a cooling bathtub with candles flickering beside me and cucumber slices on my eyes that I realized what had happened, and why it made me so uncomfortable. That classmate, the one who suggested I perform as Peggy's partner, was just being helpful. He could never have guessed what the suggestion to portray a heterosexual man would mean to me in that moment, or what "being average" felt like for a queer person to hear. Nobody in class that day meant any harm, but the sting felt just as real.

In so many moments in my life, when times have gotten tough in a class or in a group or even at home, I've alienated myself from others' scrutiny by either hiding, isolating, or shifting my true experience to fit into a more cohesive narrative. In the days that followed that impro class and that led up to the next week's, I struggled against my impulse to share what I'd been through with the class. I didn't want to take too much space, or to centre myself, or to make others uncomfortable, especially if nobody meant anything by what had happened. But, as the next class loomed closer, it became evident that at this point in my life, after I'd worked so hard to liberate myself from inauthentic conformity so that my honest voice might be heard, I had to say something.

And so I did. Inspired by Sasha Velour's memoir "The Big Reveal" in which she impels queer creatives to share their moments of pain without any self-filtering because in those vulnerable expressions hearts are touched, I opened up and shared what had happened in my heart the previous class. Seated in a knee-to-knee circle at that week's check-in, I shared that I'd experienced something painful in the previous class. My peers leaned in, and I shared how authenticity feels like survival for me these days, and how my identity had a hard time receiving a suggestion to shift away from my queerness, however small and meaningless the exercise was.

To my surprise, my classmates and teacher were so gracious and thankful for my vulnerability. The next person after me opened up about his own experiences in class as a gay man. The person after him shared how his disabilities made improvization feel vulnerable and out-of-reach. With each person's story, the group leaned closer, and for the rest of that class our creative synergy was manifest.

In some ways, having experienced the supportive and encouraging embrace of a room full of diversely-identified classmates, I grieve all the chances I didn't take, all the dots that went unconnected. Until I learned to just open, to let myself be seen, and to trust those around me to love me for taking the chance at vulnerability, I don't think I was ready for what community really means or feels like. But sitting in that theatre, with all their eyes and hearts glowing back at me, I realized that I've arrived in my skin, in my voice, and in my own story just in time.

As I look toward the future, it's with a happy heart and encouraged stature. I've worked hard with Jarren to refocus our business away from introverted desk-work toward connective human-to-human engagements with clients looking to hone their own stories. I've joined a queer community choir where my voice is uplifted and my heart is drawn outward. I've said no to invitations that don't align with my values, and trust my intuition to say yes to the ones that do. And, it brings tears to my eyes to write, I'm finally at work on the stageplay that I've been holding inside for years, and am loving the process of pulling it out, strand by strand, line by line, voice by voice.

It's been a long, winding road to find my way back to the inner child in my heart that's begging me to re-rent that same VHS, devoting every one of his four-year-old minutes to "Clown College," but the journey has been worth it. I never could have believed that being seen, supported and celebrated by others for just being 'me' would mean so much, but here I am. Writing this essay to all of you with tears in my eyes, a smile on my face, a clown-nose on standby just beside my keyboard, and a post-it with "Just Open" above my desk, guiding me forward into whatever comes next.