How Tim Tegge managed to keep his wardrobe spotless in the Canadian wilderness I'll never know!
Up in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, in the year 1987, I witnessed second-generation clown Tim Tegge dye his hair purple at a beauty salon to celebrate a new romance. Despite my years associating with clowns of all stripes of eccentricity and psychosis, I had never seen a man go into a beauty parlor for any reason except to pick up his wife or girlfriend. Men got their hair clipped at a barbershop -- women got theirs done at a beauty parlor. And never the twain shall meet. But then, I should have suspected that Tegge was destined to outrage tonsorial propriety when he had me help him film a homemade music video in a local Ukrainian cemetery. He thought the Byzantine architecture of the crypts in the background showed off his willowy physique to good advantage.
He and his partner Jerry Bisbee had been brought in during the Canadian leg of our circus tour when all the other clowns except me quit the show. It was not so much a pay dispute as a contretemps over the mileage. The show was scheduled to make some fantastic leaps between towns in the western provinces of Canada, where hockey arenas are few and far between. Some of the overnight jumps were close to four hundred miles -- that meant packing up and driving all night and then setting up in the next burg without an hour of sleep. And the roads held no charm for an overnight drive. They were as buckled and potholed as a lunar landscape. After doing the math, clown alley figured out that they would barely break even after paying for gas at Canadian prices. So they walked out, en masse. All except me. I had a wife and kids to feed back home in Minnesota, and I was bunking in back of one of the show trucks -- so mileage was not a concern to me. Neither was sleep, since I could lay down and snooze while the show driver wended his weary way over the washboard wastes.
Tim and Jerry did not seem to mind the long hauls. They drove a beat up old Pontiac Brougham, navigating it onto the lot in the wee hours of the morning and sleeping comfortably in it until brunch each day. The show did not offer a cook tent, so I joined them each morning to hunt down a suitable hashery for desayuno. Foolish dreamer that I was, I had imagined a Canadian breakfast to be one of feathery light flapjacks drowning in maple syrup, with hearty slabs of Canadian bacon on the side. The reality was porridge -- a thick gruel that would be more at home in a cement mixer. This was served with watery poached eggs. And the bacon was barely cooked or else burnt to cinders. Lunch and dinner were not much better. Everything was boiled to a sponge-like consistency, or fried in axle grease. This is because Canadians believe that eating out should be a penance for past misdeeds, not a pleasurable holiday from the home kitchen.
Tegge did a classic white face and Jerry did an Auguste. And when I say classic white face I mean lots of elegant costuming, right down to the immaculate white gloves he wore during the entire show. To this day I don’t know how he managed to keep his wardrobe so clean and crisp while we traversed the wilds of Alberta and British Columbia. We ran into nothing but rain and mud, and most towns offered only hand laundries where you gave them your dirty things and got them back in three or four days -- an impossibility for us, as we only spent one day in each town. I wound up washing everything in a galvanized tub full of cold water and Oxidal. Then hanging it over the engine hood of the truck I lived in to dry off when the motor was left running. This left my costumes dull-looking and smelling of diesel.
As a producing clown Tim Tegge has few equals. His knowledge of clown gags is encyclopedic. When he and Jerry joined up with me in Canada he got out the props for a doctor’s gag and a convict chase from the trunk of their Pontiac in the twinkling of an eye. We did simple, basic slapstick routines -- no fancy juggling or musical malarky. And the crowds ate it up.
At first I was a bit stand-offish with the two of them, because I was afraid they were brought in to replace me -- that I would be redlighted in some dismal jerkwater village on the Canadian prairie, left to fend for myself. And I found out years later that the show owner would indeed have abandoned me in the middle of nowhere when Tim and Jerry showed up but for the fact that Tegge threatened to turn around and go back to the States if the owner did such a dastardly deed.
As we worked together in a professional way I came to enjoy their company away from the show immensely. We commiserated with each other over Bisbee’s search for a decent cup of Canadian coffee, Tegge’s quest for a cheap Canadian beer, and my growing nostalgia for my family back in the States. I had picked up a head cold while in Yorkton, which held on with the tenacity of a lamprey eel -- it drained me of energy and ambition. Without the companionship of Tim and Jerry that season I doubt I would have stuck it out.
When we finally crossed the border back into the States we had to part ways -- they were contracted for ten weeks with a show in California, while our show was playing the hinterlands of Montana. As it turned out, I left the show in Minot, North Dakota, after getting word that Amy, my wife, had suffered a miscarriage.
After I was back home and saw Amy nursed back to health I asked her if I could get my hair dyed purple as a way to celebrate her recovery and our love for each other. Absolutely not, she replied immediately. -- just think of the uproar it would cause in church the next Sunday, and the weird example it would set for our kids. So I went to the local barber and got a crew cut instead. That showed her who wore the baggy pants in the family!
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