Taking It Off in Clown Alley

The common toadfish, to which I bear a passing resemblance first thing in the morning.

Upon awaking each morning nowadays I drag myself first thing to the bathroom to look in the mirror, in case the Good Fairy has come by in the night to restore my supple rosy skin, sparkling blue eyes, and insouciant laughing smile. No such luck so far. What I am faced with is an unnerving reflection of the common toadfish after a groggy night out on the town. One of these days I'm going to pull down that medicine cabinet with its mirrored door and be done with the insult for good.

Working as a professional circus clown for most of my adult life, I have spent an inordinate amount of time in front of mirrors putting on the clown white. And then taking it off again at the end of the day. 

Clowns in the Ringling Blue Unit alley used a variety of looking glasses when I was a First of May back there in 1972. 

Mark Anthony, the happy tramp, used the circular bottom of an old metal lard pail that he had cut out and polished until it gleamed like silver. Since he was forever dropping things, or sitting on them, this saved him a substantial amount in replacement fees -- not to mention all that bad luck he avoided.

Prince Paul, the dwarf clown, had a thick shard of silvered glass, irregularly shaped and covered around the edges with duct tape so he would not slit his fingers on it. He could barely see a few inches of his face at a time in it, but since he'd been putting on the same simple whiteface for the past fifty years he could do it in the dark -- the shard was more a paper weight than anything else to him. 

Sparky, who boasted of having the world's largest pair of clown shoes (each one about a yard long and two feet across -- he had to shuffle in them like a cross country skier) invested in a Max Factor Hollywood Professional Mirror Ensemble. It boasted not one, but three mirrors on hinges, so he could catch his profile, and had a dozen light bulbs around it like a movie marquee. Turned on full power, it could be seen from outer space -- and nearly blinded anyone foolish enough to sit close to him. I guess he needed all that light so he could place his half dozen zircons just exactly right under each eye. With the vivid blue eyeliner he also used I think he could have given Cleopatra a run for her money.

All the other veteran clowns used small round compact mirrors, the kind that women used to carry in their purses. They knew their own faces well enough to put on the makeup in the dark if they had to -- and sometimes clown alley was set up under a dim dark bleacher where there wasn't enough light to read a newspaper, let alone put on makeup. 

There were about a dozen of us First of Mays, and we all used the economical plastic hand mirrors you could get at Woolworth's for seventy-five cents. When the alley was sequestered in a dimly lit spot we all trooped to the nearest Men's Room to carefully apply the warpaint. We hadn't gotten to the point where we knew how to do it by rote, although we quickly learned to slap it on with a minimum of fuss on a Saturday morning, when the first show started at 10 in the ever-loving morning. Nobody in their right mind was going to come in an hour early just to get their makeup on perfect. Except Sparky -- he was always the first one in the alley, cleaning and polishing his zircons and adjusting his mirrors for maximum effect. He was never fazed when the alley lacked electrical outlets -- he simply brought along a Coleman battery-powered lantern. 

A typical circus day had me in heavy greasepaint for about twelve hours -- so when the time came to take it off, I did so with a gusty sigh of relief. I couldn't scratch my face once the makeup was applied and powdered; that would risk smearing the colors together -- so anytime I got an itch anywhere on my mug I had to twitch and pucker my skin much like a horse does with its backside when tormented by flies. 

In the movies you always see theatrical types removing their makeup in front of a big glamorous mirror, loaded with congratulatory telegrams and autographed photographs from John Barrymore, Sarah Bernhardt, and the like. They daintily open a small container of obviously expensive cold cream and dab it on their face, then have the maid or butler genteelly rub it off with a cashmere shawl.

But that ain't how we get the warpaint off in clown alley. You squirt a big pool of Johnson's Baby Oil into the palm of your hand and then rub it into your face like you were trying to remove your lips and nose with sandpaper. Blinded by the oil, you grope for a bunch of paper napkins (usually swiped from the arena Men's Room) and wipe off as much as you can -- then throw the greasy damp paper towels into the nearest corner, where they accumulate into a huge fragrant rat's nest by the end of the week. Sparky, of course, used a huge container of Pond's Cold Cream -- but he apparently had a passel of oil wells gushing somewhere in South America and could afford such luxury. Another clown, who I dubbed Saint Terry because his delicately shaded and outlined pastel makeup reminded me of the stained glass windows back at St. Lawrence Catholic Church in Minneapolis, insisted that baby oil drained the skin of vitamins and minerals -- so he used olive oil to take off his makeup. Made him smell like an Olive Garden on a hot day. 

Back then a bottle of Johnson's Baby Oil cost one dollar (I checked on the price of a bottle today at the supermarket -- a cool five-dollars-and-twenty-nine-cents.) And that was a lot of money to a First of May; we only got paid one-twenty-five a week, out of which we had to provide our own food, costumes, makeup, and twenty-five a week for our roomette on the Ringling train. I went through a bottle of baby oil every other week, and that troubled my wallet. My good old pal Tim Holst also thought it was a crime to have to expend so much of our hard-earned kopeks, and was always on the lookout for a cheaper way of taking off the makeup. 

One day Mark Anthony, the happy tramp, began reminiscing about the good old days under the canvas big top.

"Yessir" he rambled, "we only got one bucket of water for the whole day -- and we didn't use no fancy baby oil to wipe off the greasepaint, neither. Got a can of Crisco and smeared that on; it took the makeup off faster than -- (here he used a pornographic phrase involving greased barnyard animals that I won't repeat.)"

Holst was all ears. He calculated the cost of a can of Crisco against a quart bottle of Johnson's Baby Oil -- the savings would be significant. So in the next town he bought a big can of Crisco shortening and that evening after the last show he snapped off the key and unwound the lid. For those of you who haven't reached geezerhood yet, let me explain that long ago a can of Crisco didn't have a pop top or tab -- you pulled a slotted key off the top of the lid and used it to carefully unwind the soldered sealing strip around the top of the can -- which left a murderously sharp edge on the metal lid. Inevitably, Holst cut his right thumb right down to the bone on it -- so he wrapped his flowing digit in a towel and a few of us rushed him to the nearest hospital, where they stitched him up good as new. For fifty bucks. (Can you imagine? A visit to the hospital ER cost a measly fifty dollars back then!)

I couldn't help but remind him the next day, as he gingerly removed his makeup with the standard Johnson's Baby Oil, with his thumb bandaged up like a mummy, that for what he had paid the hospital he could have bought fifty bottles of baby oil. He gave me a dirty look in return and said:

"Tork, that big mouth of yours is gonna get you in trouble one of these days."

And he was absolutely right. But that is a tale for another day . . . 

 

It usually took me two handfuls of baby oil to get my clown white completely off. Cuz I made up my ears and the back of my neck as well, which a lot of clowns never did.