The girl who was scared of clowns

There once was a little girl, named Jemima, who was terribly afraid of clowns.

Her parents never took her to the circus because, whenever she saw the clowns enter the ring she would always get frightened and run out crying.

Her parents couldn’t even buy her clown dolls because the dolls would frighten her.

“They’re creepy and horrible”, she’d say to her mother, “I can’t stand them”.

One day, however, Jemima’s mother had an idea.

She bought her daughter a face painting kit and said to her, “Now I’m going to paint your face. What would you like to be, a tiger? Or, maybe, a ladybird?”.

Jemima said she would like to be a cat and so her mother told her to hold still and she would paint her face to look like a cat.

But when Jemima’s mother had finished painting her face, she handed Jemima a hand mirror and Jemima saw that her mother hadn’t painted a cat face on her at all; she’d painted her to look like a clown.

Jemima was upset at first and tears ran all over her face paint but her mother said, “You’re not afraid of yourself are you. You’re the clown, see, and you’re a very nice clown aren’t you? So you see not all clowns are bad”.

Then her mother gave her a red nose to wear and a hat with a pom-pom on the top and after that Jemima wasn’t so afraid of clowns anymore.

In fact, when that little girl grew up, can you guess what she became?

That’s right she became a professional clown in the circus and now she entertains lots of children by juggling and doing tricks and silly stunts but whenever a child in the audience cries or is afraid she takes off her make up to show them that there’s a nice, kind, friendly person underneath.