[Marion Shore]

This is from my teen years. I wrote it as a theme for a party, for which I made dummies out of stuffed clothing, and seated them around the room. (Yeah, I was pretty weird.)

It was actually a longer poem, which started out: "The laughing clown went home that night/as many nights before..." There were about two or three more stanzas, mercifully I've forgotten them. It was called--guess what?--"The Sad Clown."

Here's the last stanza:

For life is but a masquerade;
we wear the masks and gowns.
Reality will always fade,
and people will be clowns.

As Rocky the Flying Squirrel might say: "Badenuv?"

[Edited in: I hasten to add, the dummies weren't the only guests at the party--there were real people too! I wasn't that weird!]

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Bob, you're just too good with the tush humor for "Thank you I'll stand" to be bad. Sorry just being honest.