JO-JO THE CLOWN - AN UNLIKELY HERO - MARGARET TANNER

 

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HEROES COME IN ALL SHAPES AND SIZES – Margaret Tanner

            Jo-Jo looked into the mirror and his eyes brimmed with tears.  His heart was shattered into a thousand fragments, and the bitterness of his loss was overwhelming. He was afraid.  The same sickening sensation of fear he had always felt even as a child, but the crowds were waiting for him to put on a show.

            A clown could not be sad or frightened.  He must laugh, joke and bounce around as if life was one big happy party. No one bothered to look beyond the large red nose or painted face.  If they did so, they would see a man overcome with fear, and slowly dying of grief because Maisie was no longer with him.

            A partnership of thirty years dissolved in a few cruel moments, under the wheels of a hit-run driver’s car. Poor Maisie didn’t stand a chance, not with some drunken maniac skidding around the corner with smoke belching from his wheels.  Lightening fast on his feet as always, he nimbly jumped out of the way, but Maisie, with her varicose veins and hip replacements, was ponderously slow.

            Jo-Jo once aspired to become a jockey.  He was small and wiry enough, but the grotesque lump growing out of his spine like a giant football, and his fear of failure, put paid to those ambitions. His early years were spent in a misery of fear and ridicule.  Children laughed and taunted him, but he was too afraid to stand up for himself. Finally, he decided if he was going to be the butt of jokes and taunts he might as well get paid for it.

            The bitter years of suffering took their toll, and his mind became almost as twisted as the body he so despised.  He longed for, prayed and pleaded with doctors and with God to make him normal, but they never listened.  The older he got the uglier and more fearful he became.

            One day he met Maisie.  She was a plump, darling woman who looked beyond the ugliness of the body and found the real man. She bolstered his confidence and allayed his fears. 

His savior had golden curls, baby blue eyes and fat rosy cheeks that wobbled when she laughed. She possessed melon like breasts, huge backside and fat stumpy legs, but there was not a mean bone in Maisie’s ample body.  Her smile was angelic, her soul that of a saint.  She was a guiding star of goodness, leading him out of the black tunnel of fear and self-loathing into the sunlight. Two fat tears dribbling down his painted cheeks, plopped on to his ruffled collar.

“Never let your audience down,” Maisie always said.

They were a class act, the skinny, sad sack clown and his chubby, pink haired fairy Godmother assistant. Stars of the circus, but how could he face the crowd without her strength and support?  He was terrified. The old cowardice had returned with a vengeance.

            Everyone thought them an odd couple, both on and off the stage. Maisie knew that beneath the clown suit, beat the heart of a sensitive man, and only he knew, the layers of tulle and flab hid a beautiful woman.

            He could hear the crowd chanting.  “We want Jo-Jo. We want Jo-Jo.”

            He scrubbed the tears away with the back of one hand and slapped some more powder over his makeup to hide the smears. With his heart weighed down with grief, he gritted his teeth, mounted his mini bicycle and with a large colorful beach ball balanced on his head, peddled out from behind the curtains.

            “Where’s the old fat fairy?” yelled a kid in the front row.  Jo-Jo felt like ramming the candy stick the boy was devouring down his throat.  He did nothing of the kind, just tossed the ball up in the air and somersaulted off his bike.

“Do it again, Jo-Jo, do it again.” The littlies squealed with delight, while the rest of the audience clapped and stamped their feet.  Jo-Jo continued his routine and his heavy heart lifted with the excitement of the crowd, as he gave the performance of his life.

“I’m doing this for you, Maisie love,” he whispered.  “I’m doing this for you.”

The laughter suddenly changed into shrieks of horror, as a lioness turned on the ringmaster and knocked him to the ground with one powerful leap.  The big cat’s ugly fangs were bared into a snarl as she prepared to attack.

It had been sheer stupidity separating her from her cubs and expecting her to perform so soon after their birth.  The trainers pleaded with the circus owners, but to no avail, they had no compassion for either man or beast working for them.  Money and profit was all they cared about.

Jo-Jo jumped on to his mini bike and rode between the lioness and the fallen ringmaster. The enraged animal turned her ferocity on to him.  He peddled furiously. This was the most important ride of his life and any mistake would cost him dearly. From the corner of one eye he saw the ringmaster crawling to safety, and even as the beast charged towards him, Jo-Jo somersaulted out of the way.

A net dropping down from the roof of the big-top imprisoned the lion, and the trainers dragged her away.  There was silence for a moment, then the crowds began cheering. 

Jo-Jo the frightened clown was a hero.

Margaret Tanner writes historical romance and western historical romance.
Her latest novel from Books We Love - Adam's Frontier Bride, is a Western.

_{Fear almost crushes Tommy Lindsay when she arrives in South Dakota to live on her uncle’s isolated ranch.  She will need all her courage and daring to survive the hard times ahead.}

 _{Adam Munro is a wealthy rancher who thought he only wanted a presentable wife who would give him heirs.   When he meets Tommy, he is smitten. Can he ever hope to capture the heart of this beautiful English rose?}

 
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AHTA5GM/ref=pe_385040_118058080_TE_M1T1DP

A REPUBLIC, IF YOU CAN KEEP IT, by Shirley Martin

Amazon

Have you ever watched those “man on the street” clips in which the host asks people questions about American history?  Jay Leno used to do his jaywalks in which he posed such questions at random to various people.

Here’s an example: “What did Paul Revere say when the British were coming?”

Silence.

Repeat: What did Paul Revere say WHEN THE BRITISH WERE COMING?”

Reply: “I don’t know.  What did he say?”

(The story of Paul Revere’s ride may be apocryphal, but it is–or should be–so deeply ingrained in the American psyche, that one should be able to answer the question without hesitation.)

Another question: “What country did we break away from during the American Revolution?”

Reply: “Greece?”

How about this question: “What do you think about Benghazi?”

“Ben, who?”

Here's another example, one that prompted this article. The host asked this question of a young man who appeared to be in his early twenties.

"Who was the first president?"

Answer:  A look of perplexity and no response.

It’s not only American history in which so many people are lacking knowledge.  One cable news host stood outside a movie theater where a Jurassic Park movie was being shown.

Here are a couple questions and replies.

“How many people do you think the dinosaurs killed?”

Reply: Two-hundred thousand.”

“When do you think the dinosaurs disappeared?”

Reply: “1940.”

It may be that these answers were meant as a joke, but the responders didn't give the impression that they were joking.

Decades ago, at a time of much discord in the United States, the Miami Herald hired a journalist from Australia. He obtained a copy of the Declaration of Independence and showed it randomly to people on the streets of Miami. When he showed it to an older couple, the wife said, "We don't go in for that sort of thing."  And a policeman's reply:"Just move along. We don't want any trouble here."

It’s obvious from these replies that many people have no concept of basic history or the passage of time.  One wonders what sort of history is taught–or isn’t taught–in American schools.

Years ago, Lynne Cheney, wife of the former Vice President, embarked on a program to

patriotize (my word) American history textbooks.  She failed.  One example of what she encountered was a history textbook that devoted six pages to Marilyn Monroe and three sentences to George Washington.

In contrast, my American history textbook from college spent nine pages on the Constitutional Convention, with no pictures except a map.  All the rest was pure text.  Granted, one example here was a high school textbook and the other a college book, but six pages on Marilyn Monroe is a bit much, and only three sentences on George Washington is a disgrace.

Just what sort of American history are we teaching–or not teaching-- in high school and college?  Many young people have no idea when the Civil War was fought.  They confuse the American Revolution with the French and Indian War.

Our Founding Fathers knew that a well-informed citizenry was necessary in order to maintain our democracy.  But today many Americans are ill-informed and have no idea of our history or our government.

In 1787, when the Constitutional Convention had completed its task and had created one of the greatest documents ever known to man, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin what sort of government the convention had devised.  The sage Founding Father replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

But can we keep it?

Please check out my website: www.shirleymartinauthor.com

My Amazon page is http://amzn.to/1zN7YAg

My books are sold at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, KOBO, The Apple IStore and other sites where ebooks are available online. Several of my books are in print.

A True Story of Time Travel by Eleanor Stem

The Gardens at Petit Trianon

Because I could not make it better, the following is almost verbatim from the source:

“On a hot summer’s afternoon in August of 1901, two respectable English schoolteachers, Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, decided to visit Versailles on a sight-seeing expedition. They had never been there before. After looking in on the Palace of Versailles, they started to walk toward the Petit Trianon.

“Suddenly, without realizing it, they walked backward in time. They crossed a garden that did not exist in 1901 but which had existed in 1789. They saw and spoke to people who had been dead for more than a century. Their incredible psychic adventure, fully supported by years of research, created a sensation when it was announced in 1911. 

Le Petit Trianon

“Annie Moberly, age 55, and Eleanor Jourdain, age 38, with a guidebook in hand... took a stroll through the gardens. Their destination was the Petit Trianon, a small private chateau at the far end of the grounds, which...” Marie Antoinette used to escape court life. 

“Trying to find the Petit Trianon, Moberly and Jourdain missed a right turn, kept going straight ahead, began wandering aimlessly—and thus, as they would later claim, they took leave of the 20^th century and reentered 18^th century. 

“From what they reconstructed afterward, here is what they saw and here is what they encountered:

“Moberly, alone, saw a woman shaking a white cloth out of the window of a building. Jourdain, alone, saw some old fashioned farm implements including a plow, lying on the grass. They both viewed two men wearing what appeared to be masquerade costumes—small tricorn hats and long grayish-green coats—and thought them to be gardeners. They asked these men the way to the Petit Trianon, and one man answered mechanically that they must continue ahead. Then, off to the right, Jourdain, alone, saw a cottage, with a woman passing a jug to a young girl standing in the open doorway. 

Garden Kiosk as seen today

“Jourdain remembered later how she felt as they had plodded onward. ‘I began to feel as though I were walking in my sleep; the heavy dreaminess was oppressive.’ Finally, they reached the edge of a wood, where they could see a man seated near the steps of a garden kiosk, its columns topped by a round roof. Moberly also recalled her reactions: ‘Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely still.’

“The two ladies had a closer glimpse of the man near the steps, and they were frightened. He was swarthy, pockmarked, and he wore a large hat and heavy black cloak. 

‘The man’s face was most repulsive—its expression odious,’ Moberly recalled. About to hasten away, the two women saw a younger man who apparently had come from behind some rocks that were in the path. He was handsome, his hairstyle resembling ‘an old picture’, and his face was flushed. He spoke to them eagerly in oddly accented French, trying to divert them from the path they had taken. They finally understood that he was giving them directions to the Petit Trianon. 

Marie Antoinette with her 2nd son in garden

“Following the young man’s directions, Moberly and Jourdain took another path to their right, crossed an attractive rustic bridge spanning a tiny ravine, skirted a narrow meadow, and at last came upon the Petit Trianon. On the lawn before the Trianon they stopped, and Annie Moberly watched an aristocratic lady—wearing a large white hat, and an old fashioned long-waisted green bodice above a full short skirt**—sitting and sketching the scenery. She was rather pretty, although not young, and she stared at Moberly. Then a uniformed official emerged from the Petit Trianon to escort the English ladies through the chateau before sending them away. 

“Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain left the palace grounds and took a carriage to the Hôtel des Réservoirs in Versailles to have tea before returning to Miss Jourdain’s apartment in Paris. Neither of them mentioned to the other [what they saw] at their visit to Versailles, at least not until a week later when Miss Moberly was recording impressions of her visit to France. As Miss Moberly came to the afternoon at Versailles, she began to feel a strange, dreamy, unnatural oppression. She stopped writing and turned to Miss Jourdain and asked, ‘Do you think that the Petit Trianon is haunted?’ Miss Jourdain nodded firmly. ‘Yes, I do.’ And for the 1^st time, each woman told the other how eerie an experience it had been for her.

“Three months later, when Annie Moberly was back in Oxford, Miss Jourdain came from Paris to be her house guest. Obsessively, they resumed their discussion of that afternoon at Versailles—and how it became apparent that while they had both seen certain things, each of them had seen something the other had not seen—or had been unable to see. 

Jourdain, alone, had seen the plow on the grass and the woman and girl in the cottage doorway. Moberly, alone, had seen the aristocratic lady sketching before the Petit Trianon. In those moments, both women perceived that something unusual, indeed something very unusual, had happened to them at Versailles—they had, inexplicably, stumbled backward through time into another age. They vowed to keep their experience secret, while each wrote up a separate and detailed account of the adventure and both agreed to do thorough research on the history of Versailles and the Petit Trianon. 

“For 9 years, Moberly and Jourdain did their detective work—digging into every archive available that had information on the background of Versailles. The two ladies visited Versailles again and again. When they had completed their sleuthing, they had learned that their afternoon in Versailles in 1901 had actually been in the afternoon in 1789.... The two ‘gardeners’ in greenish coats the women had met were actually two Swiss Guardsmen on duty that day. The girl in the cottage doorway was named Marion and she had lived with her mother on the palace grounds. The repulsive man in the black cloak seated near the kiosk steps was the Comte de Vaudreuil, a Creole friend of the Queen of France. And, the most exciting of all for Moberly and Jourdain, they discovered—from a portrait done by Wertmuller, and from the journal of Madame Eloffe, the Queen’s dressmaker (who had made her mistress two green bodices and several short white skirts** for that summer of 1789)—that they had come upon Queen Marie Antoinette herself as she sat sketching before her chateau. 

“The only sight Moberly and Jourdain did not identify was the rustic bridge spanning the ravine that they had to cross to reach the Trianon. The earliest map they could find—one copied in 1783 from the original plan for Marie Antoinette’s garden (which had been drawn by her architect but had subsequently been lost)—had not shown the rustic bridge or ravine. But no matter. Moberly and Jourdain were satisfied. They already had enough. 

“In 1911, Moberly and Jourdain published their findings pseudonymously in a little book entitled An Adventure.*** The book itself was a sensation, although critics did not take it seriously. Worst of all, the London Society for the Psychical Research, which collected facts on psychic experiences and had such prestigious members as Henri Bergson, John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, Lord Tennyson, rejected the adventure of the schoolteachers and announced that the experience was built on ‘the weakness of human memory’. 

“Defensively, Moberly and Jourdain began to reveal to friends, to faculty members, to their pupils, that they were the ones who had the adventure at Versailles. The families of their students were appalled. Faculty members were skeptical, and conflict grew. And generally, throughout England and France, the two schoolteachers were ridiculed by the majority of scholars, historians, and experts in psychic phenomena. The two women were regarded as romancers or hysterics—and the things they claimed to have seen were regarded as no more authentic than the rustic bridge and the ravine that they had been unable to prove had ever existed at Versailles. 

“But in the end, Moberly and Jourdain scored a stunning triumph. True—in 1901 there was no rustic bridge and no ravine, even though the women swore they had crossed such a bridge. True—De la Motte’s map of the gardens, done in 1783, showed neither the bridge nor the ravine. But suddenly, one day in 1912, Moberly and Jourdain learned that the long lost original map of the gardens drawn by Marie Antoinette’s architect Mique had been found—had been discovered, charred and crumpled, stuffed inside an old chimney in a house at Montmorency. And Mique’s original map was legible—and lo, it showed the ravine and the rustic bridge over it, which De la Motte had sloppily failed to copy down. Moberly and Jourdain were vindicated—and they published news of the great find in a 3^rd edition [unavailable in google books] which, for the 1^st time, bore their real names as the authors, for they were no longer ashamed but now were proud of their book. 

“How many other human beings had ever—since man has existed on earth—made such a journey as this one, backward through the time barrier into the distant past—and had returned with word of it?

“Miss Jourdain died in 1924 at the age of 61. Miss Moberly died in 1937 at the age of 91.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

** Skirts in 1901 were much longer than the styles in 1789 which were approx. ankle length.
*** The actual book An Adventure can be found [free download] in google books. My copy is dated 1913.

~~~~~~

Many thanks to:

Fully quoted from: The People’s Almanac by David Wallechinsky & Irving Wallace, Doubleday & Co., Inc., Garden City, NY, 1975.

Wikicommons, Public Domain 

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In Search of Language in Writing Historicals

by Kathy Fischer-Brown 

In setting historical novels for a contemporary audience, dialogue and voice are vital elements for bringing the past to life. Before I park myself in front of the computer to write, I need to hear the characters speak. I want to hear, not just the particular tone and quality of their voices—so if they were to call up on the phone, I’d know who they were—but its rhythms and word choices. Like other writers, I hear voices (too often at the most inconvenient times), and it’s the particular sound and rhythms I try to get right in their dialogue and inner monologues. Unfortunately there are complications in that we have only a vague idea what eighteenth century speech sounded like as it was spoken on a daily basis.

Unlike the barely-to-almost recognizable English of the early Medieval and into the Renaissance periods, the English language of “The Age of Enlightenment” closely approximates today’s written (and it is assumed, its spoken) word. This was also the time when punctuation rules were being formulated for the first time, so we can read along and hear in our minds how the author intended the words to sound, their pauses and full stops. We have a number of dictionaries from the period: Robert Crawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall, (1604), works by Elisha Coles, Thomas Blount, Edward Phillips, and Samuel Johnson’s monumental A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), to name a few. These dictionaries not only defined the words, but made an attempt to standardize their pronunciation. 
 

Obviously we have no recordings of our ancestors from the 1700s, but we have some idea of the accents that defined English speech in the thirteen original colonies, some of which are still with us (such as the Bostonian “pahk the cah” or Bernie Sanders’s Brooklyn “yuge”). It’s presumed these regionalisms were derived from the areas in Great Britain where the settlers of New England originated. These in turn acquired flavor in the melting pot, seasoned by smatterings from the Dutch, German, and French—both words and their pronunciations. (An excellent case for this theory can be found in The Story of English, by Robert McCrum. William Cran, and Robert MacNeil.)

A most important tool for the writer of historicals is the written word of the period, especially poetry, which is most helpful when rhyming words give an indication of how certain words were pronounced over two hundred years ago…except when the rhyme is strained. (By the way, is it “huzzah,” or “huzzay”? The battle rages on in this informative and entertaining article, by Norman Fuss). Letters, plays, novels, political treatises, newspaper articles all provide glimpses into the way people wrote, which was generally more formal than daily speech.

A pet peeve of mine is finding words in modern historicals—both in dialogue and narrative—that didn’t exist in the period. Even trickier are words which appear to be modern that were actually in use. The question for a writer attempting to recreate an accurate depiction of a far gone time is whether to use such words and expressions without jolting the reader out of the setting. I tend to avoid both cases.

 

Another quandary is: “How much period lingo is too much?” A pinch of Thees and thous, prithees, vouchsafes, and the like sprinkled in with dialogue that is easy on the modern eye and ear goes a long way toward establishing the era and the characters’ individual and societal idiosyncracies. Same goes for accents. A minor character in Courting the Devil, “Major” Fergus McKenna, is veteran of the French and Indian Wars. Without going into too much detail, I wanted to establish his Scottish roots with a word or a phrase here and there, without attempting to capture his accent on the page.  Accents are ‘tricksy little hobbitses’ and best approached with a light hand.

Some Cool Links

A Guide to Eighteenth-CenturyEnglish Vocabulary

A Digital Edition of the 1755 Classic by Samuel Johnson

A to Z Guide to Street Slang from the 1700S

~*~ 

Kathy Fischer Brown is a BWL author of historical novels, Winter Fire, Lord Esterleigh's Daughter, Courting the Devil, The Partisan's Wife and The Return of Tachlanad, her newly released epic fantasy adventure for young adult and adult readers. Check out her The Books We Love Author page or visit her website. All of her books are available in a variety of e-book formats and in paperback from Amazon and other online retailers, as well as a bookstore near you.