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THE TIME I DISLOCATED MY ELBOW AT CLOWN CAMP AND THEN SANG 'MEMORY' FROM CATS AT A MAN RECOVERING FROM A HEART ATTACK

June 22, 2026

A heroic 17-year-old clown sprawled dramatically on the floor of a Minnesota community center, one comically oversized size-17 red shoe pointing skyward, a juggling ball rolling sadly away from his outstretched hand, his left elbow bent at an angle that makes everyone in the room gasp and look up at the ceiling for guidance; in the background a moose in a sequined vest holds a tiny “MOOSECAMP 1997” pennant and looks deeply concerned, a confetti cannon still smoking from the finale, and a single spotlight catches the exact moment physics decided to file a complaint, warm nostalgic lens flare, the faint outline of a hospital gurney visible through the gymnasium doors like a foreshadowing

Here is a thing about me that I have made peace with: when you give me enough pain medication, I sing show tunes. Not quietly. Not to myself. I perform. This is not a choice I make. This is a thing that happens to me, the way weather happens to a town.

I learned this about myself in 1997, in an emergency room in Minnesota, at the age of seventeen, while still wearing clown makeup.

Let me back up.

There was a clown camp. I know how that sounds. It was called MOOSECAMP, it was in Maple Lake, Minnesota, and it was a glorious two-week affair that always ended with a big performance that everybody was in. Everybody. If you were at camp, you were in the show. That was the deal. That was the contract.

My bit that year was a boxing gag with a genuinely great clown who was my partner in the whole thing. I will not pretend it was high art. It was a boxing gag. But we sold it, and the show went off, and the crowd was happy, and I was seventeen and full of the specific brand of adrenaline that only comes from making a room full of strangers laugh on purpose.

And that, friends, is where I made my mistake. Because the show ended.

A theatrical “intermission” curtain in faded circus stripes, behind which a sign reads “WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE SHOW: a tragedy in one act,” a single dramatic spotlight illuminating an empty stage with one abandoned juggling pin and a banana peel that is somehow not even involved, the whole scene lit like a Renaissance painting of a man about to make a series of bad decisions

The show ended, but I did not. I was still running around. I was still juggling. I was, crucially, still wearing the size 17 clown shoes. If you have never tried to sprint and juggle in shoes built for a man twice your size, I cannot recommend it, and I have the medical record to prove it.

I tripped. Like you do. And I dislocated my left elbow.

Now, one of the adults — one of the camp instructors, an actual responsible person — comes over to assess the situation, looks at my arm pointing in a direction arms are not supposed to point, and asks me, with real sincerity, if this is normal for me.

Reader, it is not. It has never been normal. It was, at that moment, the least normal my arm had ever been. But I appreciated that she gave me the benefit of the doubt, like maybe I was just a kid whose elbows came loose on a schedule. She called an ambulance.

The ambulance is where my standards revealed themselves. Because I complained. The entire ride. About the ceiling. There was no poster on it. Nothing to look at. You’d think a vehicle designed to transport people who are lying flat on their backs in pain might consider, I don’t know, a nice landscape up there. A cat poster. Anything. I had opinions and I shared them generously with a captive audience of paramedics.

They also put me on oxygen, which is where the nose glue comes in.

See, I was still in clown makeup, which means I still had glue on my face from the prosthetic nose. So when they put the oxygen mask on, it stuck. Glued itself right to my nose. And these were gentle, kind paramedics, so they were being very careful about peeling it off, like they were defusing something.

I didn’t have the patience for gentle. I ripped it off myself.

Then we got to the hospital, and they gave me morphine, which is wild. Seventeen years old, clown makeup on, freshly dislocated elbow, and a hospital says, sure, here’s some morphine. And that is when the universe learned what I now know to be a permanent fact of my biology.

I started singing.

Specifically, I started belting “Memory.” From Cats. In an emergency room. A teenage clown, high as a kite, giving the performance of his life to a room of medical professionals who absolutely did not ask for it.

And here is the part that I think about more than I should: a nurse poked her head in and asked me — politely — to please stop. Not because I was bad. Not because I was loud, although I was. But because there was a gentle man recovering in the next room. From a heart event. And I was making him laugh too hard.

I had, in the span of one evening, dislocated my elbow, abused a paramedic about interior decorating, and become a cardiac risk to a stranger through the power of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

I’m a little older now, and I’ve had more than a few surgeries since — my ankle has been a whole saga — and I’ll let you in on a secret. The show tunes thing never went away. They still tell me about it afterward. I do not remember the concerts. But the reviews are consistent.

Anyway. That’s the story of how I learned the most important thing about myself, in a hospital, at seventeen, in greasepaint.

If you ever see me being wheeled into surgery, do us all a favor and warn the heart patients.

Stay safe, wear shoes that fit, and never let me near morphine without a setlist.