I first would deny it because I wasn’t intentionally making clowns. After a span of time I sounded like I was in denial. I finally explored the cliché of clowns and unearthed a lot of interesting ways of thinking. After, in choosing to now explore figures with long noses, people would say to me, “Oh you’re making Pinocchio’s”. I then would say that I wasn’t and realized that I should explore the origins of Pinocchio or risk looking like I was in denial again!

In exploring the original story by Carlo Collodi, who was an Italian writer of children’s stories in the 1800’s, I found that this is not your Walt Disney ‘s Pinocchio. In fact, this is less of a story between Geppetto and Pinocchio, (Father/ Son relationship) and more of a story between Pinocchio and the Blue-Haired Fairy, (Male/Female relationship). The Adventures of Pinocchio as it was originally titled, was extreme in its unnecessary violence and mature undertones. This was not uncommon at the time because people of the nineteenth century had a different understanding of children.

In the original story, Pinocchio makes one stupid (not naïve) mistake after another. He starts by killing the Magic Cricket, gets his feet burned off while heating them by a fire, he gets mugged by thieves that he obviously should have noticed were guys he had met earlier, and he gets hung around the neck from a tree! Each time he gets in trouble he is saved by The Blue Haired Fairy who appears to him in three different incarnations. First, as a young girl, then a sexual and voluptuous young woman, and finally as a mother figure.

After reading this, I realized that I too make a lot of mistakes. Stupid mistakes. In fact, when I made a mistake, I remembered how my last mistake wasn’t that long ago, and that the mistakes were as constant as a drum beat, creating a cadence. Thus, this was the reason for the title of the series, The Cadence of Stupidity.