An old guy struggled to make something out of those thin balloons hired clowns use to corrupt our youth. He hadn’t shaved for the party. Sipped out of a tall can of Schlitz. Less than a year after that, he’d be gone. Someone I never knew, but encountered briefly as a guest at the house of someone else I hardly knew. But I see that concentrated effort to have fun, for the kids sake, often enough. And like the conductor who urged his symphony to play more “yellow,” this is a color. Only, I see it not as one emblematic swath of the spectrum, but as oxidization, that melange of color in retreat, brown and orange and dully determining an end of use.
by Hank Cherry
