The first time I met Terry Parsons in the Ringling clown alley, he gave me a lopsided grin and said “Call me Spikeawopski!”
But I’ll just call him Spike in this, a memorandum of my friendship with this Appalachian Till Eulenspiegel.
He liked to project an aura of the tough guy who went his own way, impervious to flattery and threats alike. He sneered openly at my LDS faith, but often had me over for his wife Danuta’s ambrosial pickle soup. In fact, it was his very disdain for any and all organized religions that led to our first clown gag together.
Spike had constructed a life-size female foam rubber dummy, which clown alley nicknamed Ruby. She had yellow yarn hair and a ditzy smile stenciled onto her canvas face. She was the butt of many a crude and lascivious joke, naturally enough; when I expressed my disgust about this lewd behavior to Spike he immediately became Ruby’s super-zealous protector, beating off would-be ravishers with his trombone – which had a boxing glove attached to the slide end and could deliver a near knockout blow. Spike jokingly suggested I start preaching sermons to her to get her to mend her evil ways; I, in turn, suggested we do a gag together, wherein Spike is devilishly trying to tempt Ruby off the strait and narrow path and then I show up as an angel to beat the crap out of him.
That was how clown gags were born and bred on the Blue Unit back in the mid-70’s!
Spike made me a pair of foam rubber wings and I rustled up a high school graduation robe from a thrift store and made myself a halo out of tin foil and a coat hanger. Then we launched the gag on the track, disregarding whatever hoary old gag we had been assigned by the boss clown.
Through trial and error we found out that what the audience wanted more than anything else was to see me knock the stuffing, not only out of Spike, but also out of Ruby. So I obliged, with an oversized foam rubber hammer, a bucket of water, a shotgun that fired blanks, and, finally, picking up poor Ruby and tossing her bodily into the audience. With hysterical shrieks of laughter the crowd would pass her around like a mosh pit before tossing her back to Spike and I. The blow-off had Spike becoming extremely contrite, begging my forgiveness, and then slinking off in shame – at which point, finding myself alone with this alluring creature, I, an angel, began making passes at her. Enter Spike, who did a big take, and then chased me off while I hung on to Ruby with an unrepentant grin pasted on my angelic features.
This was not a circus classic, by any means – but it stirred the wrath of most of the older and traditional clowns in the alley, which suited both Spike and I just fine.
“What the hell is that all about?” Mark Anthony, the famous tramp clown, asked me several times.
“You two are #%&**&# meshuganah, you know that?” Prince Paul told us severely.
When the boss clown told us we had to go back to our original gags, we blithely ignored him. This led to Charlie Baumann, the fearsome Performance Director, becoming involved.
“I vill watch dis ting und decide vat to do” he told us, with a glare that suggested he would welcome the opportunity to send us both to a clown concentration camp.
With Baumann impassively staring at us, we pulled out all the stops, and not only threw Ruby into the audience but also hooked her up to a handy Spanish Web rope and hauled her to the top of the arena.
By the end of our performance Baumann could barely keep a straight face, going several shades past beet red in his efforts to suppress an unbecoming grin.
We never heard any more about it.
