Mingus "Bozo" McNorman's Questionnaire

Mingus lives in Chicago, Illinois. His home is nothing special - not even really a home, just a box in a warm alley next to a restaurant where they won't kick him out and the nightshift workers are kind enough to let him eat the stuff they're going to toss out at the end of the day. He lives there mostly because it's where he landed when he ran out of money - his life completely collapsed around him, and he simply wandered until he ran out of ability to wander. His spot isn't a bad one - the manager of the Chilis he lives next to is nice enough to bend the rules and let him sit inside and pretend he's going to order fries when its too cold out, and one of the local traffic cops knew him from his professional clowning days and helps him out whenever he really needs a hand. At the very least, it's a good street corner to do tricks on.

Money? Mingus doesn't really have money. What money he does have is gotten in a mix of three ways: combing the gutters for cash, begging on the corner, and begging on the corner while doing professional clowning tricks. When he does get money, it's spent mostly very, very unwisely: principally on alcohol. It's easier to ignore the way his wonderful life completely collapsed in his face while he's staring at the bottom of a bottle, and it's easier still to ignore the fact that nobody had any respect for him even before he hit rock bottom. It's easier, while drunk, to not feel like an idiot for thinking that he could make a difference in the world by making people laugh, because nobody respects a clown.

At this point, the only thing keeping Mingus going is the dream that someday, he'll be able to get revenge. At first, it was just the specific people who ruined him - particularly the family who started it all with their false accusations against him - but then it grew. He started to get angrier, more bitter, more jaded the more he experienced life as a homeless person: he's seen so much pointless cruelty in the world. So many examples of people who get a laugh not by visiting a comedian or sharing laughter with others, but by taking it out of someone else's hide. So many bullies who only exist to make life miserable for everyone around them, just so that they feel a little bit better about their own shitty lives.

He hates them, those bullies.

He's going to die with his fingers around a bully's throat someday.

The Cedars were a wealthy family made rich via real estate development (primarily buying up aging low-rent housing and converting it into profitable commercial centers) and overprotective by the still-birth of their first and third children, only the second having survived. The invitation came when Caroline and Carlyle Cedar realized they had accidentally double booked their beloved daughter Carmine's 17th birthday with an important business affair they could not miss, and needed to hire both entertainment and supervision for her and her friends. It wasn't the sort of job Mingus would normally do - he couldn't stand those sorts of people and 17 was a bit old for a birthday clown anyways - but with Daniel facing college tuition and Delilah not far behind, the Cedars' money - and what they could do for his reputation - was too good to ignore.

This, it turned out, was a mistake.

At the party, Mingus caught Carmine and her friends red handed partaking of illegal drugs; not just Marijuana, which he would have ignored, but the harder stuff too: in particular, cocaine. He didn't want to ruin the girl's life, but he also knew that the congenital heart defect that had killed her siblings in the womb hadn't skipped Carmine entirely, and he knew from his own college days that it only took one slip for stimulants to become sayonara. When the Cedars returned, he informed them privately and gently of their daughter's behavior; like any doting parents, they went to ask her side of the story and took it entirely at face value.

Carmine and her friends used Mingus as their scapegoat - they claimed he had brought the drugs, that he had been drunk on the job, that he had even made advances on the teenage girls, and they used generative AI to fabricate all the evidence they needed. When Mingus tried to defend himself to the Cedars, Carmine and her friends took the material to social media and waged a ruthless and unending campaign of humiliation and defamation against Bozo the Clown. The case never went to court, but the constant harassment made the McNormans' lives hell, until one night when Mingus came home from an appearance at the children's hospital he'd been informed was canceled upon arriving at the venue, he found the house empty, with Debbie and the kids gone, and divorce paperwork on the kitchen table.

He signed it, and tried to remember his mother's mantra, but it was too much for poor Mingus to bear, and something broke inside him that day.

Brock - the manager at the Chilis Mingus lives next to. He's a great guy, and is always trying to get Mingus to go and actually seek proper help, but it never works. In the meantime, Brock does his best to help the poor old clown out - gives him leftover meals at the end of the day so he doesn't starve, make sure he gets himself somewhere warm when it gets proper cold out, takes his booze away when he's really too deep in his cups. When asked why he gives a shit, Brock just shrugged and said he'd seen rock bottom himself before and someone helped him out, so he figures he should pay the favor forward.

Officer Desmond - the parking cop who enforces on Mingus' street. They met when she brought him off the streets for drunk and disorderly conduct, and - during the arrest - Mingus couldn't stop bawling about his kids. Since then, Desmond has had a bit of a soft spot for Mingus - he's as old as her dad would be now if he were still around, and when he started talking about his kids (and forcing her to look at ratty old pictures of them he still has in his empty wallet) she stopped being able to see him as a disturbance and had to see him as a really unlucky guy instead. She's one of the main reasons he's still alive through the Chicago winters - nothing like a cop to give you a warm place to stay at night.

Debbie Doesley - Mingus' ex-wife. She's not really in his life anymore, but he dreams about her (and their kids) on those nights where he has any good dreams at all. The memories are painful - it would be easier to forget what he's lost - but at the same time, cherished. Despite everything, those years were the best of his life, and he would do almost anything just for the chance to spend one more day in them.

Mingus McNorman was born to Mary and Michael McNorman, a modest offshoot branch of the prestigious Missouri McNorman clan. Ever since he was a young boy, Mingus was committed to bettering the world - he took language classes for all the humanitarian work he was sure he would someday do, dabbled in developing computer technologies, and spent many hours in his local library and school computer lab as his parents couldn't afford to support his various studies in the home. He was often the subject of mockery at school, both for his unusual name (which was perfectly normal for a McNorman) and for his impressively feeble constitution, but he did not let this bother him, repeating his mother's mantra that "people who choose cruelty over kindness are cruel most of all to themselves". He responded to the frequent bullying with good-spirited humor and became an unusual example of a high performing student who was also the class clown, taking on a variety of comedic acts to entertain and delight his classmates. During his junior year of high school, he attended a charity event put on by a traveling circus to raise money for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital and, while there, saw a clown whose stage name was "Doctor Ludicross Pagliaci" perform. He was captivated by the spectacle - Pagliaci was there putting all the japes and jests Mingus had practiced to use healing the world's sick children, and the experience changed his life. 

While he couldn't find work on the big circuit anymore, he was able to find stable employment as a party clown, performing at children's parties, hospitals, and schools to educate and delight his new young audiences. It was in this line of work that he met the love of his life - a single mother of two named Debbie Doesley who got canceled on by another clown working for Mingus' agency. Mingus took over for the other clown at no charge, citing that he had nothing to do that afternoon anyways and it was a terrible thing to let a kid turn 7 without a proper party. He and Debbie hit it off immediately, and before Debbie's son was 8, she had become Mrs. McNorman.

The McNormans lived a modest life - Debbie brought in most of the income with her job working as a test engineer for an aeronautics company, while Mingus played the part of stay at home dad for his three children (Daniel, Delilah, and baby Maxie) when he wasn't on a gig or doing charity work for the local children's hospital. He was quite happy like this for about twelve years, watching Daniel grow into an adult, coaching Delilah through the trials of school, and preparing Maxie for what his teenage years might hold, until the fateful day he was hired by the Cedars.