Oz rests in a bleak city that only pulses late at night when gunshots, drugs, and crime rule. That said, it’s also an oasis - a refuge from the snarling engines that zoom past after midnight. The famous thirty-five acre clinic features verdant, fragrant grounds and is enclosed by a stately eight-foot redbrick wall. The flowering bushes, bur oak, elm, gingko, magnolia, sour gum, and Kentucky coffeetrees are beginning to color at the edges. 

It’s a late summer day - a strange one filled with sunshine, clowns, and cotton candy—when I find myself behind the brick wall. The drained pool around which people are tie-dying t-shirts, eating hot dogs, cheeseburgers, ice cream, and admiring balloons, still contains some dank water, fermenting leaves, and the aura of an adolescent girl who drowned in the deep end five months ago. Was it Alexandra or Alicia? Or Annabelle? I’m still not sure – April? Started with an A, I know that much – or at least, that’s what I overheard at a nurse’s station on the day I was admitted. 

Today’s gathering is a test for Oz - they’ve dubbed it Festival of Hope and it’s designed to put the anguish of the girl’s death far behind them. Three circus clowns juggle rainbow-colored bowling pins in an attempt to incite exuberance, while clients do their best to avoid eye contact. Whomever invited the clowns is panicking, though, because clients are turning away, freaked out by the presence of orange wigs.  Some had read Stephen King’s 1986 Bestseller “It,” while millions more saw the tv movie starring Tim Curry as Pennywise the bloodthirsty jester almost a decade later. The clients today have no interest in revisiting the disturbed clown at a mental hospital, even if it is on a sunny and relatively harmless looking day.