The Jester on the Other Side of the Glass

By Aurora Spellweaver

On a bright Sunday at the Embarcadero, I walked into a street performer festival the way I walk into most rooms: looking for the joke. A brass band was playing somewhere behind the food stalls, marionettes were dancing on a folding table, and a woman in silver face paint was balancing on a crate. I had been photographing the waterfront all morning and had exactly one thing on my mind, which was whether any of it was funny enough to borrow. I am fifty-seven years old. I own a small historic theater in North Beach that I spent most of a year turning into a home for clown arts, and on Tuesday mornings I teach a laughter yoga class in that same room. Everything I do is built to hold a room: to keep it warm, keep its attention, keep it laughing. I am very good at it. That Sunday I found out what it costs. Because about ten feet away from me, a mime had started doing my own act back at me. And

he was not being kind about it. ## The Room That Laughed at Me Instead of With Me I did what I always do. I stepped into the open patch of pavement, borrowed three lemons from a fruit vendor, and started a small juggling bit with a running commentary on the fog. A crowd assembled the way it always does, in that loose half circle of people pretending they were only stopping for a second. It was going well. I was maybe ninety seconds into being loved. Then the laugh changed direction. For most of my life, when a crowd laughs during one of my bits, I feel the laugh land on the character. It lands on the nose, on the timing, on the tilt of the head. That day it landed on me. The mime had stripped the costume off the performance and left the person standing there, holding three lemons, being copied. You cannot win a fight with a mirror. You can only keep standing in front of it. I tried a few

jokes, and each one came back at me as a gesture a half second late. I could not out-funny someone who was not speaking. So I did the only thing left, which was to stop, and the crowd laughed harder, and I understood that the funniest thing I had done all morning was run out of material. Eventually he bowed, walked over, and pressed a folded dollar bill into my hand. The crowd applauded, delighted. I took the dollar the way you take a diagnosis from someone who is smiling at you. There was something in my chest that I did not have a joke for, and I could feel it waiting to be dealt with later. ## A Costume I Had Forgotten I Was Wearing I walked away along the water and replayed the grand opening of the theater, which had been a few weeks earlier. I remember it the way I remember all my best nights: as a blur of motion. I refilled glasses. I introduced strangers to each other. I did a bit

roughly every six minutes for four hours. I never sat down. I never ate. People told me afterward that it was the most joyful party they had been to in years, and I believed them, and I also noticed that I could not remember a single conversation from it. The same pattern lives inside the laughter yoga class. I lead it. I walk between the mats, I demonstrate the clown breathing, I keep the energy up. It is a genuinely good class, and I say that without humility because I have worked at it. It has also been running weekly for months and I have never once lain down on a mat and just breathed with everybody else. I called that leading. Some part of me has always known it is hiding. Here is the shadow that comes with wearing a jester's face, and I say this as someone who has worn it for thirty years. My humor is a door I open for other people and hold shut for myself. I can make a room feel

safe in about ninety seconds. I have a much harder time letting a room make me feel safe. Those are not the same skill, and only one of them is a gift. The mime did not teach me anything I had not already suspected about myself. He just did it in public, with witnesses, in silver face paint. There is a particular humiliation available only to people who entertain for a living, and it is being given a taste of your own hospitality. ## What a Mirror Does to Someone Who Only Ever Points I have been turning the mechanics of it over all week, because the mechanics are the interesting part. When someone copies you, you cannot perform an intention. You can only move. Every trick I know depends on a gap between what I am doing and what I am thinking, and the mirror closed that gap. It did not expose a liar. It exposed a man who had forgotten which of his faces was his. In the contemplative

traditions I care about, there is always the witness. The one who watches the breath, the thought, the story. I have spent a long time being the watcher in the room, the one who notices everyone's mood, everyone's drink, everyone's small sadness. What I had forgotten is that something in me has also been watching me this whole time, and it has been waiting patiently for me to stop performing long enough to be noticed. Being seen is not the same as being watched. Watching is what an audience does. Being seen is what a friend does, and it asks for something an audience never asks for, which is that you be reachable. That is why I found it so uncomfortable. A performance cannot be reached. That is the point of a performance. I did not have a profound revelation on the pier. I had a small, embarrassed one. Given the choice, I would rather be funny than be known, because funny is a thing I

can control and known is a thing that happens to you. That is the whole confession. It took a stranger with a painted face and no lines to get it out of me. ## Turning the Nose Around So I changed three small things this week, and none of them are dramatic. At Tuesday's laughter yoga class I took a mat in the back row and asked one of the regulars to lead the first ten minutes of breathing. She was nervous and a little awkward, and it was the most connected I have felt in that room since I opened the doors. I lay there and laughed with everyone instead of at the front of them. I called Sam, the friend I met juggling in Golden Gate Park, and asked him to teach me a trick I am genuinely bad at. Then I let him watch me fail at it for an hour. He laughed at me. I let him. Nothing bad happened, and I learned that being the least skilled person in a room is survivable, which I had apparently

not fully believed at fifty-seven. I also made a rule for the Wanderlaugh tour, the van I have been fitting out for a slow trip across the country. At least one stop in every city where I am not the show. No nose, no bit, no crowd work. Just a person in the audience. I suspect it will be the most useful part of the trip and the hardest part of it. If you are the entertainer in your family or your friend group, the fix is small and specific. Sit down at the party. Be slightly bad at something in front of someone who loves you. Let someone else hand you the coin once in a while, and do not make it funny when they do. ## Closing Reflection I finished the evening back at the theater, in the house lights, with the silver paint off and the dollar bill taped next to the light board. The old stage still tilts a little, which I have decided not to fix, because it is the most honest floor I have

ever performed on. Gravity does not care about your timing. The mime gave me a dollar and took something far more valuable in trade. He took the idea that I was the only person in the room who got to stay hidden. It is not true of anyone, but a performance can make it feel true for years, and I had let it feel true for decades. So if you come to a Tuesday morning class, I will hand you a mat and a bottle of water. For the first ten minutes I will not be the one leading. Look for the man in the back row breathing badly and laughing at the ceiling, and sit next to him. That is where the good material is anyway.