Bozo memories and this fetish

I've written about this before on other forums and Yahoo groups long vanished, but I've been thinking about it a lot lately so here is my latest recount of how this particular fetish emerged for me.  I find it worth recounting every once in a while, so I hope those of you who have seen it before won't mind. 

I was born in Detroit in the mid 1960s, and we had our local Bozo the Clown just like most cities, except that our Bozo (when I saw him, broadcast out of CKLW in Windsor, Ontario) was a renegade who didn't follow the tenets of the official Bozo franchise (I only found this out after more recent research on the topic of kids' TV shows of the time).  For one thing the games were better, like for instance (and the only one I care to remember) the pantaloon balloon stuffing game. 

This show was very popular and had a pretty large peanut gallery, it seemed to have at least 100 kids and their mothers, typically, set up like a small circus arena with tiered seating.  Bozo would pick a boy and a girl to be on each team, with six teams, maybe eight.  As I recall, it was always the boy who wore the pantaloons and the girl whose job it was to stuff them with balloons. 

So the boy on each team put on a pair of pantaloons, which looked like huge baggy high-waisted clown pants with elastic around the waistband and the ankles, and then circus music would start with what seemed like hundreds of balloons falling from the ceiling.  Each girl would grab as many balloons as she could and stuff them into her partner's pantaloons (I don't recall exactly, but I don't think the boys were allowed to help stuff the balloons).  This probably went on for a good minute (a *very* good minute :) ), and then the music stopped.  As soon as the music stopped, the stuffing had to stop too. 

So then you had these six or eight kids wearing these giant clown pantaloons crammed full of balloons, and then the fun really began.  Our Bozo must have had a particularly devious and cruel mind, for in at least one instance he made the kids do a silly dance contest while still stuffed with balloons, which the audience found pretty funny as I recall.  And at least once they did a variation called "pantaloons and jackets", where besides the pantaloons they also wore big jackets that they also stuffed with balloons. 

The object of the game was to have the most balloons stuffed into your pantaloons and whatever else they gave you to wear, and Bozo employed a pin to count them.  As he popped each balloon, the audience loudly counted in unison; I think the typical count was in the 20s with just the pantaloons, and more when they also stuffed jackets.  The team with the most balloons stuffed won pretty cool prizes, I don't recall exactly.  The "runners-up" typically got a case of Orange Crush or "Towne Club" pop.  Towne Club was a crappy local brand of soda pop that came in 35 different flavors or whatever, each in its own garish color and in returnable bottles in a wooden crate with an individual bin for each bottle.  I never tried it myself, but those who did said that it was pretty bad but that it was really cheap, like what you got when you went to a kid's birthday party who lived in the poor part of town. 

This game at once thrilled and terrified my five-year-old mind.  On the one hand, I wanted a pair of those huge pantaloons more than anything so that I could take them up to my room and secretly stuff them full of pillows, a thrill that I dreamed of and desired more than anything.  On the other hand, the idea of being discovered in such a state utterly terrified me. 

I'm sure that to the kids who did it, it was just a fun, silly game that got them on TV, and obviously it didn't bother them that they did it right in front of their parents and everyone else who they knew.  But then I was pretty shy, so aversion to that kind of attention comes as no surprise. 

This was about the time I started masturbating (yes, at the age of five), which as I can best recall I discovered accidentally by squirming around in bed one night and finding that rubbing my little wee-wee against my mattress or a pillow felt really really really good.  So I guess the two came together in my mind somehow, and I would think about the pantaloon stuffing game as I did that thing that I knew not the name of but knew must be a bad bad thing to do.   

The one thing I knew I didn't like about it was the balloon popping, because that meant the balloon stuffing game was over, and in my childhood mind I also felt sorry for the balloons and was sad that they all had to die so some stupid kids could get some crappy carcinogenic soda pop.  I still have an aversion to balloon popping to this day.