Seeing Rico

We’d try to get there early to catch a game of dreidel with my grandfather and to hear him tell the latest adventures of Kiki and Lala. My mother and aunts would join my grandmother in the kitchen, while the teens would mill around, dissolving easily into laughter. Eventually we’d migrate to the table where conversations would splinter off according to age group. As the cousins chatted, the adult conversation drifted our way, punctuated by Hungarian phrases.

The party was most often at night, but for some reason no one remembers anymore, when I was 13, the party took place on Sunday afternoon. Because it was scheduled for daytime rather than night, the party was going to run a few hours longer than usual, and my grandmother was concerned that her toys wouldn’t sufficiently entertain the kids for such an extended period of time.

Cousin Mirca suggested she hire a clown.

She showed my grandmother the ad she’d seen in the Jewish Press, and Babby promptly hired Rico the Clown for our Chanukah party.

When Rico arrived, all of us followed him out of the dining room down to the family room where he was set to perform. In my memory, Rico was a young man in his twenties; my mind created a hazy backstory for him — a struggling student working as a clown as a side hustle to earn some extra cash. But my mother remembers him as older, maybe in his fifties or sixties. Definitely Jewish. Initially, I couldn’t recall the show at all; I was sure I’d chosen not to attend. But my sister Zisi confirmed I was there  (she’d sat on my lap) and she reminded me how four-year-old cousin Rivky told Rico she was 14. Rivky remembers Rico, too. She remembers his first trick of the day — telling Babby upon arrival that he was at the wrong house, and then walking away. She also remembers how he shaped a newspaper into a cone and told my sister Mindy he’d pour a cup of milk onto her head. But when he poured the milk, it never spilled out. As we shared details, a murky recollection arose in my mind, and I began to remember a clown twisting balloons into animal shapes.