Advance Clowns in Mexico

Smith and I were known as 'Dusty & TJ'

I was partnered with the effervescent Steve Smith as Advance Clown for the Ringling Blue Unit in 1973.  We played many a curious venue under the direction of various advertising agencies across the US that were frantic to use us to full effect to boost circus ticket sales. Back then the Ringling account was considered a plum assignment for local marketing companies -- it paid very well and brought both prestige and a certain ‘show biz’ cachet to those who handled the account. So Smith and I wound up exploited in many remarkable ways.

We were booked into a seafood restaurant in New Jersey to perform thirty minutes for the patrons. The place was nearly pitch black, with only candle light from the tables to give our comic business a vague form. They didn’t have a stage -- just a cleared area in the middle of the dining area. We bombed magnificently -- bumping into tables and jostling lobster thermidor onto the laps of assorted wise guys and their ladies. We cut the show short in order to avoid a pair of cement overshoes and a plunge into the Atlantic.

In Tampa we were scheduled to do a show at an alligator farm. I don’t know how the local marketing agency figured that clowns and alligators went together, but when Smith and I saw that they had set up a stage for us in the middle of a large green pond full of smiling gators we adamantly refused to go on. There were no reporters present, anyways. Instead, we sullenly did  meet-n-greet for an hour by the ticket office, shaking hands with incoming tourists and reminding them that the Greatest Show on Earth would be in town the next week.

Then there was the incident at the Tijuana-San Diego border. The local agency in San Diego scheduled us for a radio interview with Wolfman Jack at XERB Radio in Rosarito Beach over in Mexico -- this rogue station broadcast with over 250 thousand watts. It reached everything west of Chicago and Houston. The station specialized in cheap advertising for pentecostal storefront churches, and sex drive nostrums. We had no trouble crossing into Mexico in our clown makeup. The Wolfman proved to be a gracious radio host, for the most part. He asked us some intelligent questions about circus life and let us give our prepackaged spiel about date, time, and place for the show in San Diego. But inevitably, like most media personalities, he had to end the interview by asking us to ‘do something funny.’ How the hell can a circus clown ‘do something funny’ on radio? Clowns are strictly visual humor. But we had been asked this so many times already that we came prepared. Smith blew on a duck call, I blew on a siren whistle, we both chanted “A little song, a little dance -- a little seltzer down the pants!” Then we both blew simultaneously on slide whistles and announced “We gotta go -- our elephant is double-parked!” That usually satisfied radio interviewers. The Wolfman seemed happy with it, anyways. He gave us each a complimentary bottle of Florex Masculine Reviver pills as we went out the studio door.

Ten minutes later, as our local agency rep drove us up to the border, Smith and I were eagerly discussing where to have dinner that night. I plumped for tamales and refried beans at a dingy cantina near where our motorhome was parked -- it was filling and cheap. But Smith wanted to find a place that served meatloaf and mashed potatoes because he was feeling nostalgic for his girlfriend back in Zanesville, Ohio -- and that is the kind of food she liked to fix him.

Alas, we never got dinner of any kind that day. Because once the Mexican border guards saw us in our clown makeups they decided we were drug runners. They had us pull over and began a rigorous search of the ad agency’s car. Back in those days you didn’t need a passport to get into or out of Mexico. But the guards grew ever more suspicious when they found out we didn’t carry our wallets with us when in clown garb.

“Don’t worry, fellahs” said the local agency guy smoothly. “This happens all the time. We’ll be across the border in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

A thousand shakes later we were inside a Mexican border patrol office, that reeked of roasting coffee from a nearby open air market, being questioned by an officer whose grasp of the English language was fragile and inconclusive. The guards had found our makeup kits in the trunk of the car. Convinced the tins of Stein’s Clown White were a new type of heroin, they had sent them to a laboratorio for analyses -- and we had been invited to cool our heels at the adjacent policia station.

“You have a confession to make here, no?” the capitan asked us severely.

“No!” we both shouted together. “We’re clowns -- payasos -- not criminals!”

Smith was all for contacting the American embassy at this point, but the local agency rep begged us not to do that.

“Think of the negative publicity, guys!” he pleaded. “We can’t afford a story about Ringling clowns being detained as drug smugglers to get into the papers for godsake!”

So we sat and waited and glowered, as our stomachs growled and contracted. Those Mexican martinets didn’t even offer us a glass of agua.

Finally, around midnight, the test results on our clown makeup came back negative and we were free to go. We got back to our motorhome around two in the morning. We were scheduled for an early morning TV show the next day, so we took off our makeup, showered, and sat in our bathrobes playing Uno and eating Cap’n Crunch cereal until it was time to get made up again.

Such was the glamor of our Advance Clown tour . . .  

Wolfman Jack was a pretty decent interviewer