Getting Dressed with Clowns About Town

This is the story of four girls who crash parties with spontaneous bursts of sexy clowning. They all live together in a place they call Clown Cabana, which is apparently under clownstruction. They invited me to watch them transform from lady to clown, and share with me their origin story.

Hester Sunshine, aka Jester Funshine (not that she needed a self-invented clown name), the mastermind behind the troupe, explains it all began when she had an out-of-town lover with lightning bolts tattooed on his cock. This dashing fellow is in a band that used to perform in full clown make-up, and he could pass for a hobo. After a couple of “sweat soaked, greasepaint-smeared hookups,” she says, she wanted the painted lust to become a two-way street. So she began taking pics of herself as a sexy clown for her touring beau. Eventually her clowning took on a life of its own. Last year, a week before Halloween, she enlisted some very supportive friends to dress up too, and they all started crashing parties as Clowns About Town.

As she finishes her clown sex story, Hester stops and becomes momentarily self-conscious in front of me, an interloper interviewing them while they prepare for their roles in a music video for Madame Trashy. “I kinda want my mom to see this,” she says, “so I don’t know how slutty I want to be.”

“I kinda want to take my boobs out,” Handley (otherwise known as Miss Sticky Buns) counters, and out they come. Carefully, she paints each breast white in front of the mirror. With a pleased look on her face she proclaims, “They’re like having little marshmallows on my chest. See now it’s like I’m wearing a shirt.” Then softly she whispers to herself, “Clown tits.” She smiles at the magic.

Hester nods approvingly. “See, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell my mom—pasties equal shirt!” Then she turns to me and announces, “My goal in life is to be the most notoriously obnoxious human being ever!”

“Then why do you care what your mom thinks?” Handley asks.

“It’s like when I was a dominatrix for a year and my mom didn’t know,” Hester said in jest.

For someone whose goal is to be utterly obnoxious, Hester is quite charming. All the girls are. Each has her place in the clowniverse. Emily Lesser aka Ms Toffelees possesses a wealth of drag queen knowledge and is praised for her organizational prowess. Lara Quijones aka Colonel Watlington, the most petite of the clowns, is a trained performer who plans to take the clowns into a more choreographed performance art route. Handley is a PR whiz who is blessed with a spectacular rear.

Handley begins painting a pink heart over her nipple but laments that it keeps getting hard and changing size. Eventually she gives up and puts a real shirt on. Clown preparations are always total chaos, they tell me, with “every inch of every surface covered in neon shit, whiteface, and glitter everywhere, piles of Q-tips and dirty tissues.” They haven’t quite trashed their makeshift dressing room, but they are well on their way. With their faces covered in whiteout, their makeup taking shape, the voices start to meld together into a chorus of overlapping excitement.

“We each have one meltdown before we go out,” Emily tells me.

“Sometimes someone cries,” Hester says.

“Then everyone tells her she’s attractive,” another voice pipes in.

“You’ve got a Chola clown thing going on,” someone tells Lara as she lines her lips.

“Would you ever fuck an alien? Does that fall under beastiality?” a voice wonders.

“We wanna be Hasid clowns with rainbow payots. I wanted to do if for the Bar Mitzvah but I thought it would be a little much.”

Yes, that’s right, they do Bar Mitzvahs, or at least they have done one--in Scarsdale, no less. Its mention brings up traumatizing memories for the clowns. It’s supposed to be the clown’s job to frighten and bewilder the children, not the other way around:

“So many little boners!”

“I felt one thousand tiny penises on my legs!”

Back into the chaos of make-up: Lara is drawing triangles on her face and starting to look very Liquid Sky. She has a patch of purple eye shadow on the side of her tongue. She explains she keeps it there to keep it moist so she doesn’t have to keep wetting it when applying. (Tip for you, ladies!)

Emily is pretty much done with her exaggerated Joan Crawford drag mouth. She takes a final assessment in the mirror and bursts out laughing. The other girls follow suit. She looks ridiculous, which is to say, she looks perfect.

“Did I just make a fool out of myself facially?” Emily asks after putting red glitter on her cheeks. “Well… you look like a clown,” is the helpful reply.

“We also wish to do Fran Drescher clowns,” Hester tells me as the overlapping manic chatter resumes.

“Juggalettes definitely ruined clowning. They called us Jugalettes a thousand times the very first time we started clowning.”

“I think someone wearing jodhpurs is very fuckable, but then again, different strokes.”

“Ooh, I have the face itch! It’s like when black ladies’ braids are too tight and they have to hit them. I want to slap my face.”

“Do I look like I’m pooping?”

“You’re like John Waters meets Todd Solondz.”

Hester asks if her ruff looks silly with her bra top. I never knew looking silly was a concern amongst clowns. Emily asks me if I am ready for the coolest fucking hat I’ve ever seen. I nod excitedly as she puts a tiny bicycle atop her head. She reminds me of Lucille Ball, all polka dots and ruffles. I learn that Vivienne Westwood for Melissa make the best clown shoes. I also learn that it’s best to use a glue stick on your eyebrows before whiting them out, a trick that Emily tells me she learned from watching RuPaul’s Drag Race.

We get into a conversation about the most recent season and they tell me they weren’t allowed in the winner Raja’s most recent NYC appearance. That’s right, the queens threw shade at the clowns. This makes me sad. These girls worship drag queens, and in a way, drag is a contemporary version of clowning.

They take more than four hours to get ready, although admittedly they did have some interruption from a camera crew downstairs. No one has a meltdown, although Emily came close when she second-guessed the glitter she put on her cheeks.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this article did not make it clear that Hester Sunshine was joking when she mentioned she was once a dominatrix. It has been updated to clarify.