Tama Filipas is a wonderful lady. This is what she has to say about herself. I hope you enjoy her writing.  --- Jon


Tama's Bio-
As a mostly mild-mannered library clerk, Tama lives to tell people what to read. It's an addiction really. Mother of a 15-year-old daughter, she wonders why she seems to be channeling her own mother's voice more and more as the years go by. Married for almost 17 years to the love of her life, she lives simply and happily in Portland, Oregon.


There's Got to be Clowns
by Tama Filipas

All thru school--kindergarten, elementary, middle, high school, and college, I was a sucker for the class clown. I put the blame squarely on my brother Doug, master of potty humor, able to make milk shoot out my nose with a single glance. But I digress....in school I'd snort at the most inappropriate times on seeing the clowns' otherwise unseen antics. My chair would tip backwards, dumping me to the floor as I tried to smother giggles. The older I got, the worse it became. By the time I was in high school the clowns knew that once they got me going, it was almost certain I'd work myself into one of those uncontrollable fits of semi-supressed guffaws--you know, the ones where you almost lose control of bodily functions, and maybe even do just a little. There were extra points if I lost it in Sunday morning religious instruction class. Even more if a nun was present. I was an easy mark and the clowns knew it.

I still idolize the best of the clowns--let's call him Charlie. In elementary school he was the kid that won the cracker-eating contest to loud cheers and then threw up in the lunchroom. He was six feet tall in middle school, skinny, with the widest bell-bottom pants in our small town. He had a white-boy afro that was easily 18" wide and bounced as he loped through the halls with his three foot stride. In our freshman year of high school he was at his peak. We had an awesome algebra teacher, young, handsome, and also with a wicked sense of humor. He and Charlie would play off each other like the greatest of comedy teams--twin George Carlins with a touch of Richard Prior.

Being a teenager was probably pure hell for most of us. Everyone trying to figure out where they fit in the grand scheme of things, going thru phases of one nature or another, wanting to be noticed, wanting to be left alone, anonymous. As the years of high school ticked by, Charlie seemed to edge more toward the "hoods" and their activities. He was still funny but the humor had an edge to it when it emerged, which wasn't as often. As a self-centered, bookish teenager I was oblivious.

I saw Charlie last summer at our 25-year high school reunion. He met me at the door and enveloped me in a huge hug. We talked for a long while, going down the expected checklist: job, marriage, kids. Then he said something quite unexpected. "I've been sober for twelve years now." My jaw dropped. "I didn't even know you had a drinking problem," I stuttered. "You must be kidding," he laughed, "Don't you remember all the times Mr. C threw me out of first period calculus for coming to school drunk?"

Today I crave that uncontrollable laugh that makes me gasp for air, the one that makes my stomach muscles ache with tiredness, even just a good joke between friends. I've found it recently in some of my favorite reads. The first few Janet Evanovich mysteries had that perfect sense of timing with just a dash of raunch added--girls' locker-room humor. Anne Lamott's non-fiction made me laugh so hard
that I farted while reading on the treadmill at the gym. Bill Richardson's sweetly hilarious stories of twin brothers running a fictional bed and breakfast together. He made it so real that every year he has dozens of people writing to him to find out where it's located so they can go visit the Bachelor Brothers. People crave humor, we seek it out, we'll pay good money for it.

It's hard to come by, humor is. I'm in awe of the authors who are able to make it so genuine in book after book. Yet just when they seem to have the formula down, critics who loved the last book say the new one is formulaic. They've lost it. They're too commercial. They're over. So what am I trying to say here? Humor is hard. It takes a toll. It may come naturally, easily, for a short time or even many years, but it will change because that's what happens to us in life. We change. And though my brother Doug is now a 40-something divorced dad, I will be forever grateful for his whacky facial expressions and unmistakable sound effects. He's still got the stuff, it's just different stuff. Charlie is a recovering alcoholic, but man he sure did keep me laughing from first grade to high school graduation, and even thru the 25-year reunion last summer. And Janet, Anne, and Bill all do the same. Their humor has changed thru the years and that's ok with me. I'll keep reading them because, in my book, I owe them. They gave me that glorious, uncontrollable, fart-at-gym laugh that I so crave.