Twirly Birds

As a Ringling clown I gathered tons of prestige, but not much mazumah. This was not really a problem as long as I remained a breezy bachelor, but once I married and the little nippers began appearing at regular intervals Ringling became less appealing to me. Shrine circuses were still going strong back then; they had a much shorter season than Ringling, but they paid a lot better and they gave the clowns a fifty-fifty split on concession sales if they wanted to do it.

That’s the reason I found myself up in the Yukon during the late spring of 1984, clowning with the Tarzan Zerbini Shrine Circus. The routing of the show was irregular, to say the least. We started in Whitehorse, the territorial capital, and then moved north towards Dawson, hitting every village with a quonset hut hockey rink on the way. We played Haines Junction, Carmacks, Faro, Mayo, and a dozen other spots that boasted nothing more than a gas station, a Hudson Bay Mail Order Center, and a native population that had nothing to spend their money on except our show. Those were long overnight trips between towns, with the road as straight and flat as a ruler, with the Northern Lights slithering through the sky above.

In most villages the population was not enough to warrant two shows, but we did two anyway because everyone not only came to the matinee but to the evening show as well. They applauded everything just as wildly the second time around. And the sale of tchotchkes was phenomenal.

I worked with a clown team called Tom and Jerry. Neither of them had any Ringling experience; they had come up the hard way with mud shows. They knew every angle a small tented show uses to ‘make the nut’ (turn a profit), and when we hit the Yukon they saw a huge opportunity to make a killing. And they were decent enough to cut me in on it.

The show carried one semi full of nothing but tchotchkes -- trinkets and baubles like kazoos and strings of metallic colored beads. If we sold them we got the fifty-fifty split. But the show owner had made what he called a ‘boneheaded mistake’ by ordering 30 thousand Chinese-made twirly birds. These were cheap handmade red cylinders with some imitation feathers pasted on one end, tied to a long thin bamboo splinter painted blood red. When they were twirled around they made a high piercing shriek. But they were so cheaply made that they fell apart after a hour or two of use. We couldn’t sell them in the States -- nobody wanted such shoddy stuff. But as soon as Tom and Jerry saw the lay of the land up in the Yukon they went to the show owner and offered to take all the twirly birds off his hands for three hundred dollars. The owner, thinking he was getting the best of the bargain, demanded cash on the barrelhead before turning the twirly birds over to Tom and Jerry. They in turn told me if I would give them a hundred bucks out of my future profits they’d cut me in on what promised to be a wonderful bonanza. I said sure why not.

And then the magic began. Starting in Whitehorse every blessed man, woman, and child wanted a twirly bird. We charged 2 Canadian dollars for each one. And when the twirly bird inevitably broke they did not come back to us to complain -- they came back to buy another one. We kept all the money on every sale.

After a few days of this Tom took Jerry and me to the gas station cafe, where we had poutine washed down with (I kid you not) Homo brand milk. Tom proposed that we cut down our clowning to just the bare minimum required by our contracts and concentrate on unloading every single twirly bird in the next few weeks before we headed out of the Yukon. Because once we got back to civilization, said Tom, those twirly birds wouldn’t be worth a dime. I don’t like admitting to whoring after the almighty dollar at the expense of bringing laughter into the world, but I had a hunch I would never be making so much money so easily again in my life, so I agreed. We did a hurried Bigger and Bigger during the show, and that was about it. Otherwise we went out into the audience to sell twirly birds. We sold them before the show and after the show, and if there had been any real houses around we would have gone door to door selling them.  

Oh, it felt good to wire that money home! I told Amy to take all the kids to the dentist; we could pay for it in cash. She bought a good used car, finally disposing of our old clunker which had all the earmarks of a deathtrap -- bald tires, sluggish brakes, whining fan belts, and piston rods ready to drop at a moment’s notice. She bought herself some new clothes, at a real department store, instead of haunting the Ladies section of the Goodwill Store. A new TV; a VCR; a new Frigidaire that dispensed water and ice from the door. She paid back a loan we took from her parents when the first baby came along during a period when I was “at liberty,” as the circus trade says of being out of work.

Tom turned out to be one hundred percent correct about the end of our El Dorado; as soon as we crossed over into British Columbia and started playing spots like Kamloops and Chilliwack we couldn’t give away our remaining twirly birds. Thank the bon Dieu we managed to sell all but a hundred or so before the market collapsed.

That winter was one of the happiest times of my life. Amy had wisely saved much of the money I’d sent her, and so there was no pressing urgency for me to work during those off months. I could play the pater familias to my heart’s content. One extravagance I allowed myself was the purchase of the complete works of Laurel and Hardy on video cassette. It cost a pretty penny, but soon I had the satisfaction of hearing my children repeat catch phrases such as “Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into” and “Hard boiled eggs and nuts, huh!”