Playing Footsie in Clown Alley

PLAYING FOOTSIE IN CLOWN ALLEY

4:30 this morning finds me awake and marinating my feet in something called Orange Blossom & Neroli, with Honey Extract, Bath Soak -- from a company called The Orange Tree. This is by no means an endorsement of said product. Indeed, I have not yet decided if it's doing my complaining tootsies any good or not. The bag of bath soak was given to me by my daughter Sarah, along with a dozen French milled lavender scented soap balls, after cleaning out her linen closet recently.

 Being awakened so early this morning by my burning fiery feet serves to remind me, once again, of what a life of circus clowning has left me with -- namely, fallen arches and a tendency towards plantar fasciitis. 

The culprit in all this is not the oversized clown shoes I wore for so many years. Those babies were hand made by experts, just like a pair of regular custom-made boots or shoes from the finest gentlemen's shops in London. In those long ago times there were clown cobblers, artisans that specialized in sewing together massive footwear, made of the finest leather and stuffed with horsehair, for the discerning professional clown. Gamboling along in them was a pleasure. They cost me the equivalent of a month's salary, but they were well worth the price. My first pair lasted me for nearly ten years.

No, the guilty party in this case was Capezio, a dance shoe company out of Totowa, New Jersey. Ringling Brothers Circus contracted with them to provide each denizen of clown alley with a pair of flimsy satin ballet slippers for the half dozen production numbers we were obligated to cavort in. John Ringling North, a nephew of one of the original Ringling Brothers from Wisconsin, decreed in 1945 that circus dance numbers would henceforth be performed not in just any old clown shoe or comfortable old sneaker, but in pink satin Capezio ballet slippers -- in order to give the show some sorely-needed class, like a Broadway production. That ukase had never been rescinded, and so when I arrived on the scene in 1971 I had to pound out dance routines on the unforgiving cement floors of sports arenas across the U S of A with a mere gossamer covering to protect my feet. True, the show laid down a grooved green rubber mat around the entire arena track -- but it was not designed to cushion our frail feet but to provide traction for the elephants and horses so they wouldn't slip and stumble into a litigious member of the audience.    

Those cursed slippers had absolutely no arch support of any kind -- it was like jumping up and down on a block of concrete for hours at a time in nothing but a pair of thin socks. And they were so tight we could feel the blood being squeezed out of our feet. Soon enough all of us First of Mays began to develop shin splints and other Dr. Scholl's maladies. By the time the show hit Madison Square Garden in the spring fully half of clown alley was limping around like Civil War veterans who'd lost a foot to gangrene during Bull Run. 

And how did the seasoned clowns avoid this torture? They bribed the wardrobe department to glue arch supports into their Capezios -- something us newbies didn't have the wit, or ready money, to do.

Finally, after the show played two weeks at the Philadelphia Spectrum arena in June and then headed out west to Denver and beyond, we First of Mays staged a revolt. Arms akimbo, we refused point blank to put on the Capezios -- and defiantly mamboed and foxtrotted our way through Opening, Manage, and Spec, in our comfortable and sturdy clown shoes. Charlie Baumann, the formidable Performance Director, threatened us with salary cuts and banishment from the show, but we stuck to our guns, or, rather, our slap shoes, and dared him to do his worst. Anything was preferable to hammertoes and collapsed tarsal bones.

Baumann reported our insurrection to the owner of the show, Irvin Feld, and like the biblical Solomon he proposed a wise compromise -- if we would buy our own pink high top Keds we could wear those instead of the hated Capezios. But no clown shoes during the dance numbers -- that was O.U.T. 

We agreed, and soon my feet stopped throbbing very much. But alas, the damage had been done and I never actively did very much to reverse it. My feet started to really bother me again when I was an ESL teacher in Thailand twelve years ago -- but all I had to do was walk into the nearest foot massage parlor and have a lovely Thai maiden pummel my feet for a full hour for just five dollars. It was a delicious agony.

Today, of course, on my modest Social Security, foot massages here in the States are out of the question. So I soak my hoofs in whatever mishmash of mineral salts I can find on the cheap. And I invest in shoes with the maximum arch support. Still, walking is becoming more of a chore and less of a pleasure.

I hear that they used to soak sore feet in a mixture of water and Colman's Mustard powder back in Teddy Roosevelt's time . . . kinda like a mustard plaster for the feet. I just may have to try that. It'll probably make me hungry for a hot dog.

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