20 clowns surprise BART riders and a train becomes a fun house
Red-nosed activists turn one trip into political theater
Saturday, February 7, 2004
 |
| |
Twenty clowns on a mission rode BART on Friday, which is usually not a funny thing to do.
Nobody told that to the clowns, however. They had a great time, and so did the perplexed passengers who made the mistake of asking what, exactly, they were doing.
"The world has become a circus,'' replied one clown. "Someone needs to pull the pants down on our leaders.''
Brenna Olivier, from underneath her red nose, said she was trying to "cultivate peace, harmony and throw the bums out of office.''
"Other forms of protest have been done to death,'' she said. "This is a way of energizing folks.''
The clowns were dressed as President Bush, as Attorney General John Ashcroft and as a porn star.
"Bush is giving clowning a bad name,'' said Lawrenzo the Clown.
The clowns, all members of a group called Clownarchy, boarded a westbound BART train at San Francisco's Embarcadero Station and rode to 16th Street. On the way, they passed out flyers urging non-clowns to put on a nose and join the troupe for a Million Clown March on Washington in October.
Passengers seemed amused, puzzled, overjoyed or bored by the display. Somewhere below Market Street, Ellie Kim, a student at the Boalt Hall School of Law, was trying to read a legal text while several clowns juggled around her.
"I think this is the First Amendment in action,'' Kim said, looking up from her book at last. "But I'm just a first-year student, so I could be wrong. ''
One-year-old Hazel Praught cried when she saw the deluge of clowns. Her mom, Michelle, said she hoped her daughter was not scarred for life.
"One clown is scary enough,'' she said.
The anarchist clowns were sufficiently law-abiding to realize that they could save the cost of a BART fare if they crossed the platform at 16th Street and returned on an eastbound train to Embarcadero without exiting the station. And that's what they did.
"We have to conserve our resources,'' said a clown.
E-mail Steve Rubenstein at srubenstein@sfchronicle.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment