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

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…