Diary of a Clown/Cheating Customers
By Susan Zwirn aka Polkadots the Clown

When working for “Western Onion” in the 1980’s, they had me doubling as a regular balloon messenger when I wasn’t doing singing telegrams. This was prior to the stock market crash, so people had money to throw around for silly things. With that said, I was pretty busy, delivering as many as 8 singing Telegrams and balloon deliveries a day, which is a lot without a car. The combination of helium balloons and costumes to carry didn’t help matters. On one such day, I was working like a dog trying to get to all of my jobs on time, so I would pretty much would just take my list of jobs as they came in and read the instructions on what the jobs entailed when I got to my destinations.

I can’t remember what the costume for this particular job was, but it was a telegram for a man in a big office who had focused all of there attention on my recipient and I. After singing my song, I read the card to my wedding band attired recipient. The card read something like this….”Thank you so much for last weekend, my body is still tingling” “May it be repeated over and over again!”
Love xxoo Marissa

After reading it aloud, the room filled with shocking gasps from the co workers not to mention the recipient who was as red as a beet! I started reading the rest of the page which read…”Do not read aloud”! Uh Oh! Needless to say, I caught flack when I got back to my office. Of course, the woman wanted her money back, which meant, I didn’t get paid either. Something tells me, Marissa wasn’t his wife!