1. Introduction
Hello, and welcome to the weekly Clown-Ministry mailing list. This is just a short note to let everyone who’s interested know about new additions to the site, and related information.
First, let me be the last to wish everyone a Happy New Year!
Second, let me take a moment to reflect and say “thank you” on the last year. Over the last year, the web site has grown dramatically, to the point where we’re now serving between 4,000 and 5,000 pages daily – my thanks to you all. In addition, my special thanks to everyone who’s purchased items that we’ve reviewed or linked to on the web site – the commission from those purchases, as well as the donations we’ve received, have helped my family personally very much, on more than 1 occasion making paying my mortgage possible 🙂 Thanks again to you all — as always, if there’s something that you don’t see that you would like, let me know; also, if you would like to contribute your own skits, articles, etc. I would gladly publish them on the clown-ministry.com site (as long as their suitable, etc.)
2. New skits on-line
None – although I’ll be posting a new, ‘silent’ skit in the next day or two, based on something that happened at my ‘day job’ recently.
3. New Articles
Beginning a series of articles on clown props, the Playchute Parachute (something I’ve mentioned before), as well as a poem – a clown version of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, contributed by Pastor J. “Fishbucket” Phillips. Both are linked from the home page (http://www.clown-ministry.com/)
4. Questions
Q: (from Jeanenne Clark) Hello! I have been looking over the Clown Ministry website and am fascinated with all the skits! I help the teens at our church develop drama ministry and we are so hard pressed for good material. I try desperately to write scripts for them to use but it’s so hard. I love the things I see on the website and most is very usable for drama teams too. How can I receive permission to use the material for the kids’ presentations and maybe some of their competitions as well?
A: The good news is, all of the skits are free to use *for performance* as is — you need to do nothing special to get performance to use them. However, some of them, such as the ones kindly donated by Steve Conley, cannot be published – he reserves that copyright, and in fact publishes them himself. But to use them for a performance is perfectly fine (and the reason that they’re out there in the first place).
5. Web Site of the Week
A touch self-serving this week – it’s a place to publish calendars over the internet for *free* (as opposed to my old .mac account, which expired when I didn’t pay the $100 annual fee 🙁 — for the clowning calendar (which, by the way is back online now 🙂 or http://www.icalx.com/ for the main site – it supports Apple’s iCal calendar, as well as phpCalendar .ics files as well
6. Outroduction
This is a weekly e-mailing from http://www.clown-ministry.com/ — if you received this by mistake, or you just don’t want to receive it any more then simply reply to this message with ‘unsubscribe’ as the subject of your message, and I’ll gladly remove you from any future mailings. As always, feel free to submit your own skits, articles, ideas for articles, etc.
Thanks for listening, and bump a nose!
Tom Raymond
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http://www.clown-ministry.com/
“Clowns work like aspirin, only faster” — Groucho Marx