Calling All Freaks! Where Are You?

The date is set. The cause is just.

Only one thing threatens to download a bucket of cold oatmeal over the AD2 Freak Show competition.

This will sound impossible to anyone who has ever faced humanity in an 8-mile Costco checkout line, but Spokane may be suffering from a shortage of freaks.

The AD2 Freak Show is scheduled for 8:13 p.m. (cute, huh?) on Sept. 25 at Club London, behind the Subway at the corner of Sprague and Freya. AD2, if you haven’t heard of it, is an association designed to give experience to young advertising executives.

Sort of a “mice-training-to-be-rats” concept.

Tickets are 8 bucks, but the loot benefits Crosswalk, a downtown crisis shelter for youth. Sorry, kids, you must be at least 21 years old to attend.

The Freak Show will pit a variety of oddballs against each other.

Sure, that pretty much sounds like a typical rancor-filled City Council meeting. Unlike those gatherings, however, the Freak Show winner won’t be sued by Steve Eugster.

But if Friday’s audition was any indicator, this charity event could be one freakin’ disaster.

Only Tanner Emerson showed up to display his, for lack of a better word, talent. Before we sink to the bottom of that Honey Bucket, let’s define our terms: This is not about “freaks” as in Col. Hoppy the Frog Boy, who I saw as a kid in a midway sideshow years ago at the Spokane Interstate Fair.

I bought a ticket out of curiosity and was aghast to discover that Col. Hoppy was actually an armless man who played the violin and rolled cigarettes with his feet.

Fortunately we live in more sensitive and enlightened times. Col. Hoppy is no longer part of our fair.

Commissioner John Roskelley would have probably kicked him out for smoking, anyway.

But I digress.

The “freak” of today’s nomenclature refers to attention-starved, yet otherwise normal, human beings. We’re talking about people whose idea of success is doing something weird enough to get them on Dave Letterman’s Stupid Human Tricks.

Which brings us back to Tanner Emerson. Before my popping eyes, the young man opened up a bag of wooden clothespins and began to clamp them all over the sensitive areas of his face.

Eyebrows. Ears. Chinny-chin-chin.

“Doesn’t that hurt like the blazes?” I wondered.

“You get used to it,” muttered Tanner.

Tanner plans to cover his entire upper torso with pins Saturday night.

As a finale, he says he will dislocate his shoulders, causing the clothespins on his chest to fly off in a festive aerial display.

Definitely a freak.

But where oh where are the others?

Despite advertisements in an area shopper, the AD2 members came up hurting for freaks.

They supposedly have a guy named Paul who can bury his entire pinky finger up his nose.

That’s probably not as rare as you think, based on my observations of Spokane drivers stopped at red lights.

The ad guys say another contender, Ron, can squirt milk out of the tear ducts in his eyes.

Talk about every middle school teacher’s worst nightmare.

I was able to call and confirm that two women - Turquoise and Butterfly - are competing with some kind of bizarre dance.

“We do things with fire,” says Butterfly, 29.

“If you go back to our roots, we all come from fire.”

Promising as these characters sound, as Yoda would say, “four or five freaks do not a Freak Show make.”

Which is why I have been enlisted, like Paul Revere, to put out the call. Rally round all ye tattooed and body pierced wonders, ye human regurgitators, ye eyeball-poppers, ye glass eaters and ye contortionists.

Call 326-8818 to register. Top freak wins $100.

There. If this doesn’t work, I’m headed to Costco.