The noted writer and illustrator Bill Ballantine was invited by Irvin Feld to run the Ringling Brothers Clown College in Venice, Florida, during its formative years. It was my good fortune to matriculate under “Uncle Bill,” as we students called him.
He was, for the most part, an easy-going and flexible administrator.
Except when it came to yoga and wheat germ. In those two areas he was an implacable fanatic.
Our curriculum under Uncle Bill consisted of makeup, acrobatics, juggling, pantomime, and a basic grounding in all the ‘schtick’ or ‘lazzi’ of staple clown gags. How to take a slap; do a pratfall; do a double take; drop your pants; and make your hat spring off your head (as done so often and so nimbly by Chaplin and Stan Laurel). There were optional courses in playing the musical saw, balloon sculpting, and clown prop construction (the last taught by the kindly George Schellenberger, whom I have written about elsewhere).
No one can dispute that these kinds of skills are essential for professional clowning. But to this intriguing smorgasbord Uncle Bill added an hour of yoga each day in the late afternoon, and mandatory evening lectures on the importance of yogurt, wheat germ, and other dietary curiosities.
I found the yoga class impossible to get through without falling asleep at the halfway mark. The hard physical work of practicing a human pyramid and wobbling around on a unicycle prior to class, the dozy Florida afternoon heat, and my own extreme boredom with the instructor’s chanted monotone of “Breath deeply, in and out, in and out” worked like hypnotism to put me under. I would spend the last half of the class sprawled on my bamboo yoga mat like a corpse, inanimate and senseless.
Uncle Bill kept an eagle eye out for yoga slackers; more than once I was awakened from my coma by the not-so-gentle tip of his sneaker against my rib cage -- “You going to sleep away your chance for a lifetime of serenity, Torkildson?”
Our instructor was a yoga teacher at the New College in Sarasota. Her age was indeterminate; like many other contemplative crackpots, she had an ageless aura of granola about her. She dressed all in black. I never heard her laugh, and her smile was a chilling whole grain rictus. She had us do breathing exercises and stretching exercises and sitting exercises and wanted us to stand on our heads. It was my opinion then, as it is now, that if God wanted man to stand on his head he would have put a large cushioned suction cup on top of it. I toppled over with depressing regularity when attempting this stunt.
Uncle Bill, on the other hand, spent an hour a day up in his office, standing on his head, dressed in nothing but a loin cloth that often failed in its duty. He regularly called students in for a chat while in this position, and invited them to join him in the topsy turvy position. As far as I know, none ever acceded to his invitation, and several of the younger girls bolted out the door a few moments after going in.
To this day I am not exactly sure why he insisted on having clown students learn yoga.
“It purifies the body” I remember him saying. He was also fond of intoning “Mens sana in corpore sano,’ which is Latin for ‘A sound mind in a sound body.’ Today there’s probably dozens of ‘boffo’ Buddhists out there doing stand-up, but forty-five years ago if you were pursuing a comedy career, inner peace was not a good motivation -- you needed those inner demons to be active to drive your sense of humor.
I think Uncle Bill, as a writer, felt that yoga helped him concentrate and focus, and that he thought this would be a good thing for embryo clowns to learn. But it wasn’t. The best clowns have always had the attention span of a mayfly.
As soon as we hit the road with the show we all pretty much forgot about deep breathing and the lotus position.
From day one at Clown College Uncle Bill insisted we eat lots of Kretschmer’s wheat germ. This is a sort of gravel that food faddists have been foisting upon the American public since 1936, when the Kellogs up in their sanitarium in Michigan began torturing patients with it. Uncle Bill kept us supplied with it, free of charge, and suggested we eat it with yogurt or sprinkle it over our eggs. Since I was still the complete Minnesota naif back then, I honestly tried to choke the stuff down every day for several weeks before giving it up as a bad job. Not only did it taste rotten, it made my bowels as frisky as a lamb in springtime. I had to keep a bathroom within a hundred yards of me at all times.
Uncle Bill was also big on bean sprouts. He force fed us bean sprout sandwiches on whole grain bread for several school picnics. Washed down with spinach and blueberry smoothies. As a stubborn Scandinavian raised on meat and potatoes and Wonder Bread, I found this dietary tyranny intolerable. I vowed that as soon as my clown salary kicked in I would glut on White Castle sliders until they came out my ears.
There were also raw carrots and radish leaves and a host of other unprocessed foodstuffs that Uncle Bill insisted would keep us funnier than the old veteran clowns, who, apparently, subsisted on canned chili, beer, and 7-11 hot dogs. They were not long for this world, prophesied Uncle Bill sadly; but when they had kicked the bucket it would be us, the Young Turks, who would take over the merrymaking and live to a ripe old age with our bones intact, our lungs clean, and our ‘sans corpore’ or whatever the heck it was running at full steam ahead!
There were other culinary outrages perpetrated on us during our two-month stay at the Clown College. Cider vinegar tonics. Dried apple peel chips. Lecithin wafers. Tofu butter. It was, if you’ll pardon the half-baked pun, a bitter pill to swallow. And swallow it we did; for it was hinted in no uncertain terms that those who followed the wheat germ trail with fervor would be rewarded with a circus contract, while those who continued their hedonistic dance with burgers and fries would soon be cast into outer darkness where they could gnash their greasy gums in despair.
I was never more than a lukewarm acolyte to Uncle Bill’s dietary philosophy. I could stand bean sprouts in egg foo young or chop suey, and yogurt wasn’t so bad if you slurped it down fast. But I harbored unholy dreams of msg-drenched tater tots. So it came to pass that the night diplomas and contracts were handed out I did not expect to be hired on as a First of May.
But I was. Years later I discovered that the main reason I got a contract was simply because I was so thin back then that I could fit into any of the expensive show costumes already created -- thus saving the circus the expense of having to make new costumes for their elaborate Opening, ‘Manage’, and ‘Spec’ displays.
As for Uncle Bill, he and I stayed in touch over the years. When I was around him I would dutifully order a tofu burger and swill wheat grass juice. This charade pleased him, I think, and when he wrote his magnum opus, entitled “Clown Alley,” published in 1982, he included a flattering drawing of my clown character and wrote that I was “one of the zaniest kids” he’d ever had to deal with. I felt that was high praise indeed, coming from such a distinguished and intelligent writer and illustrator. So what if he had some hobby horses he liked to ride? Who doesn’t? I’m still on a quest to find the perfect anchovy pizza!
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