A Clown in Mexico

I was in the mood for a wanderjahr after my first season as a clown with Ringling. My pantomime skills were still rudimentary, so when the Little Guy, Steve Smith, told me he was going to Mexico for further studies with our Clown College pantomime teacher I decided I’d go there too.

I’ve always believed that comedy should be seen but not heard. While I relish the quips of Groucho, my true affection is for silent Harpo -- who brought forth a world of meaning with just his ‘gookie.’ To look upon the faces of the great silent clowns is to read an open book that never ends.

So I got off the bus in Patzcuaro, Michoacan, expecting our instructor Sigfrido Aguilar to meet me. But there was nobody there. After waiting an hour I started dragging my luggage around the town square, inquiring about the location of the pantomime school -- Estudió Búsqueda de Pantomimo. The school, a former nunnery, was two miles out of town. When I got there I piled my baggage next to the plain Jesuit fountain that bubbled in the patio and lay down to take a siesta.

I awoke to the beaming face of Sigfrido, who escorted me to the hacienda where I and the other students lived during our apprenticeship. I was assigned a room with Smith. He immediately set up his stereo and started playing excerpts from “The Night They Raided Minsky’s.” I got out my used copy of Prescott’s “The History of the Conquest of Mexico” and stretched out on my bed for a good long read.   

The next morning we six students started classes with the maestro in the courtyard of the nunnery. We began with warmup and stretching exercises, then progressed to some simple pantomime moves and classic poses. Sigfrido was an admirable teacher. His Tarascan face, with luminous brown eyes, blunt nose, and perpetual smile, patiently encouraged us to work through the tedium of rote movements to discover the beauty of silent action.

Afternoons were devoted to siestas, Spanish lessons, gorging on pesca blanca (a dried white fish that came exclusively from Lake Patzcuaro and went extremely well with refried beans and several bottles of Jarritos) or sightseeing in Sigfrido’s indomitable Volkswagen bus. Once a week we were assigned to sit in the little town square to observe passersby and then work up two-minute impressions of them to show Sigfrido. I watched dyspeptic Carmelite nuns shepherding their little girl charges, all uniformed in white blouses, blue skirts, and red bows in their hair. The peanut vendor and the ice cream vendor continually circled the square, hoarsely calling out “Tan bueno!” Their tin carts rattled in a way that reminded me of the corrugated tin roofs back in Winter Quarters in Florida. Sleepy old men sat on the stone benches, whittling grotesque little statues of peasants with long noses and drooping cheeks from driftwood. They sold these for a few pesos to the local tourista shops, who in turn sold them to the touristas for many pesos.

When Montezuma’s Revenge swept through the student body, as it did on a regular basis, the Little Guy acted as an angel of mercy, dispensing Kaopectate from a large bottle he brought with him from Nithercott’s Drug Store in Zanesville, Ohio, where he made his home. During these down times I learned to play Besame Mucho on my musical saw.

Our Mexican idyll began to shatter when the four other students in class decided simultaneously to go back to the States in pursuit of other interests. They had considered Sigfrido’s school an intellectual lark unlike Smith and I, who considered it sound vocational training for our careers as clowns. Plus the nightlife in Patzcuaro was nonexistent. After six pm they rolled up the sidewalks. That didn’t bother Smith and me; we spent our evenings recording a series of cheap cassette tapes about life in Mexico and sent them to Tim Holst back on the Ringling show, where he was now ringmaster. They were extremely insensitive, brash, and as far from politically correct as you could get. From the bucolic little town of ‘Fartzalotto’ Smith and I interviewed imaginary citizens who worked in the tortilla mines or stomped out the vintage refried bean wine, playing all the parts ourselves. Holst told me years later that he would play these cassettes for a select group of the veteran clowns and that the consensus, as expressed by the eloquent Prince Paul, was that we were “meshuge vi genem.”   

Sigfrido was at a loss as to what to do now that he only had two students, but Smith saved the day by suggesting Sigfrido get some kind of grant from the Mexican government to do pantomime/clown shows up and down Mexico. No sooner said than done -- as a native Tarascan, Sigfrido had an in with the Ministry of Culture. He simply neglected to tell them that his ‘culturally significant’ show included two gringos. Now there was money for a tour.

The three of us spent a few weeks rehearsing some standard mime routines, spliced together with traditional clown gags like ‘Dead and Alive.’ We billed ourselves as ‘Los Payasos Educados’ (The Educated Clowns.) Opening night was in Guadalajara, and it was well received. Sigfrido’s character came across as winsome and innocent; Smith’s character was impudent and cocky; and I came across as just plain nuts, trying to run into the audience with a bouquet of bedraggled flowers whenever I spotted a charming senorita and being restrained by the other two. Smith and I kept our traditional circus clown makeups, even though Sigfrido begged us to use the classical mime white face like he did.

We played a dozen other towns in Mexico before the grant money finally ran out. Then we holed up back in Patzcuaro while Sigfrido made a play for the Ministry of Culture to subsidize a tour of South America. Pemex was making obscene profits at the time, and the Mexican government tapped into that gravy train to sponsor a legion of cultural exports. We figured Sigfrido was a natural for some of that mazumah.

But as the captain of the Titanic once said to Robert Burns, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.”

First, Smith’s girlfriend Robin showed up, driving all the way from Ohio in a battered Chevy held together with hair bands and nylons. It was an intrepid journey, I’ll give her that. She thought it was time to talk about marriage. Her unexpected presence shifted the subtle dynamics between Smith and I that had led to some great comic timing onstage. Now his mind was on Robin, and how to respond to her request. When Sigfrido came back with a swingeing great check from the Ministry to finance our South American tour, he immediately sensed the lapse in our esprit de corps. When he refused to pay for Robin’s travels with the tour, it looked like the end. But somehow Sigfrido and Smith came to a private understanding. We began rehearsing again.

Then I came down with something called pseudo-dysentery. I was bedridden for several weeks before I could get up, nearly a skeleton. I would need months to recuperate. My parents flew me back to Minneapolis so I could stay with them. Smith and Robin drove back to Zanesville to look for curtains. Los Payasos Educados was kaput. Sigfrido toured South America as a solo mime, to great acclaim.  

In latter years I worked with many Latino clowns, some of them from Mexico. On Ringling there was Zapato, who could keep a half dozen ping pong balls in the air simultaneously by spitting them out of his mouth. He also had a hilarious elephant walkaround, making the creature first squirt water out of its trunk . . . and then out of its backside.

I miss that kind of humor.