Politics in Clown Alley

Prince Paul insisted on the latest New York Times being delivered to his trunk in clown alley, whether we were in Passaic New Jersey or Albuquerque New Mexico. He kept abreast of current events that way, and was known to suddenly burst into verbal flame over stories that exposed the venality of public officials or described the tumults of our overseas pawns.

Throughout the season a television set was brought into the alley from time to time to monitor world-shaking events. But either the reception was no good or the news became so controversial and absorbing that we began missing our cues for the production numbers. When that happened the formidable Charlie Baumann would silently stalk into the alley, unplug the boob tube, then carry it out under his arm, never to be seen again. His suite on the train must have been chock-a-block with Zeniths.

Murray Horowitz, otherwise known as Raccoon Face, loved to argue politics with anyone willing to engage him in debate, but he had no takers in clown alley. As Charlie Chaplin is alleged to have said, “The only competition I have as a clown is Congress.” So Racoon Face had to buttonhole hapless showgirls or complaisant horse groomers to exercise his jaws.

I personally had no politics when I joined clown alley nearly a half century ago. Both my parents voted the straight Farmer-Labor ticket back in Minnesota, and my dad had once gone out on a sympathy strike for the miners up on the Iron Range (although, being a bartender, my mother said he just wanted an excuse to drink more beer and play more pinochle with his cronies.) Of course, I was a union man myself, having had to join AGVA when I signed up as a clown. When the show hit Madison Square Garden our already flimsy paychecks were further decimated by an increase in union dues. Chris Bricker, who sported a jaunty straw boater and had a sort of barber pole whirl on his rubber nose, was our union rep; he hadn’t heard anything about it. I got so het up about the whole thing that I found the New York address for AGVA and went down to their next member meeting. Some of the other First of Mays came along for moral support. The veteran clowns all said it was a waste of time. Penny Singleton, who played Blondie in the movies for 20 years, was President of AGVA at that time. When she asked if there was any new business I gave a sharp dry cough and stood up.

She glanced at me blankly, obviously not recognizing who I was or where I came from in the least.

“Yes?” she said neutrally.

I had not prepared anything, so blurted out:

“How come we gotta pay more dues when we don’t get anything in return -- not even a newsletter!”

“Oh, you must be one of that Ringling crowd. The raise is to cover the rising cost of your health insurance. You people are in a very dangerous line of work.”

‘Ringling crowd?’ Well, that stuck in my craw. If I was going to be gouged by these people, I at least wanted enough respect from them to be called a performer, not part of a crowd.

“How do you know that?” I asked shrilly, my recently completed adolescence sneaking back up on me as my voice broke in indignation. “Have you ever been to the circus? I tell ya what, you come down to the Garden and I’ll get you a free pass as my guest!”

This raised a mild guffaw, and Ms. Singleton had the grace not to have me thrown out on my ear. She said my protest would be noted in the minutes of the meeting. But she never did come down to the see the show, nobody from AGVA ever came down to the see the show, and Baumann told us if we didn’t agree to the increased deduction we’d be fired. Ringling was a closed shop. So my politics got a jumpstart after that; I became virulently anti-union in the best GOP tradition.

But there’s just something about working as a buffoon that short circuits the ability to take politics too seriously for very long. Today, like Prince Paul, I have spent the morning perusing the New York Times, then decided to write a poem. I never know what I think about a subject until I write some verses about it. So, for better or worse, here goes:

The town of Turdley stood amongst a fertile river valley;

It counted schools and stores and shops almost without tally.

The citizens were decent sorts, of many diff’rent stripes;

Some went to the synagogue and some played on bagpipes.

Others liked to swim and ski, or look for geode stones;

A very few just lay around, gazing at Dow Jones.

Tho jobs were scarce and pensions failed, the people carried on.

Although they sorta kinda thought there was some hidden con.

And then one day their congressman appeared as if by magic,

And what the town experienced turned out to be quite tragic.

Milford Squiffins Bunting, known to one and all as “Squiff,”

Had been in Congress since the time of ancient hieroglyph.

Wise in all the ways a politician plays the game,

He had amassed a fortune and a slightly frowzy name.

He thought the people loved him, since they always put him in.

(Ignoring that by marriage he was ev’rybody’s kin.)

He thought a town hall meeting would let people see him shine,

He set it at the high school, with its floors of polished pine.

But like a broken spillway at a dam with too much rain

The crowd poured in all turbulent, bent on causing pain.

Just as Squiff got started someone threw their cell at him.

Another gave a Bronx cheer that was heard throughout the gym.

“I’ve come explaining health care” he began most cautiously,

But that just made the crowd begin to moan most nauseously.

“Environmental hazards will no longer plague your days!”

He tried a diff’rent topic to tamp down the coming blaze.

“Fraud!” the maddened hundreds cried, and echo answered ‘Fraud!”

And Bunting starting praying to his great GOP god.

“We do not have connections with the Russians” Bunting yelled,

But as one man the crowd arose and said such sham just smelled.

They pelted him with Tums and they asked what would a wall

Do to bring back jobs to town down at the local mall.

They got a rail to ride him, and some tar and feathers too.

They’d send him back to lobbyists who with the laws did screw!

Before they could enact this crime (though some would call it just)

A SWAT team from the CIA through the high school wall did bust.

They shot down all the ‘terrorists’ to save old Squiffy’s hide,

Then put him on a copter for a safe protected ride.

(And if you ask the CIA it all will be denied.)

There’s no one left in Turdley and the town has gone to seed.

Plastic bags move round like ghosts, in which cockroaches breed.

And Milford Squiffins Bunting just keeps rolling right along

Like a ripe and thoughtless parasitic scuppernong.

Trump Details Plans to Deport Millions of Immigrants

How quiet now the countryside, how still the urban dust,

As cabbages rot in the fields and Wendy’s turns to rust.

The gabled rooftops in DC, the pools throughout LA,

Decline and are neglected till they fall in grim decay.

The lawns become a jungle, full of bugs and randy weeds;

The trash is overflowing as the desolation breeds.

Across the land the factories that gave us beef and pork,

That render all those chicken parts, are silent as a cork.

Those small towns in the Midwest where new life had come again

Relapse into decrepitude with barely an ‘amen.’

The doctors and the scientists that have exotic roots

Decamp in indignation, and shake our dust off of their boots.

America at last is done with immigration woes;

We’ve cut their face off finally -- and just to spite our nose.

The News Clown

I married in 1981, after having been blacklisted from Ringling Brothers for my fight with Michu the World’s Smallest Man. After I attended Brown Institute of Broadcasting and obtained my FCC 3rd Class Engineer’s License, we settled down in the little town of Bottineau, amidst the pines and ponds of the Turtle Mountains in North Dakota. I did the news for KBTO Radio, and we bought our first house. When I dug up a garden in the backyard that spring I found half a dozen arrowheads. I became an expert bullhead fisherman. After I pulled their skins off with a pair of pliers and filleted them, Amy would fry them in butter and serve them with boiled new red potatoes and baked squash.

I was given carte blanche with the news department, as long as I delivered ten minutes of news at 6 am, noon, and 5pm. It wasn’t long before I started sprinkling my newscasts with non sequiturs and limericks.

“The broadest broadcasting in North Dakota” is how I pretentiously opened each newscast. I have no idea what that meant but the station manager liked it; he put the phrase up on a billboard on Highway 5 going east out of town.

When the city council debated adding a second traffic light on Main Street, I editorialized on-air:

We only need one traffic light.

There’s no need to get in a fight.

If driver’s want speed

Why should we impede

Their right to take split-second flight?

And when Grace Lutheran Brethren Church held their annual lutefisk dinner at Christmas, I did a live broadcast from their basement kitchen/social hall, asking participants such burning questions as:  “How can you eat that stuff?”

The station’s news/weather/sports department was housed in a mobile trailer set in a huge field of sunflowers. In the spring and summer there were days when we had to suspend newscasts and sportscasts until the large noisy tractors were done planting and ploughing. We just played country western songs. There was no place to put the large rattling AP machine, spewing out reams of yellow paper, except in the bathroom. I remember the triple bell alert going off on it when President Reagan was shot. I was shaving, and rushed into the studio with suds still on my face to break in with the shocking bulletin.

I was nostalgic for Ringling Brothers, so sometimes I would do my newscasts in full clown regalia, ending with a brief tune on my musical saw. Of course, being radio, no one but the staff could see my outrageous getup. But gradually word spread about the strange goings-on up at KBTO and we started to get crowds coming in to watch my newscasts on days when I was in makeup. The station manager put a popcorn machine in the lobby of the trailer.

Pretty soon I was doing all my broadcasts in clown makeup. The local newspaper, the Bottineau Courant, a venomous competitor with us for advertising dollars, actually ran a photographic essay on my bigtop broadcasts, mentioning that I handed out balloon animals to any child who came to see me. Several other newspapers in the area reprinted the story, and I was soon overwhelmed with grasping tykes and their parents.They even barged right into the studio during my broadcasts, interrupting me to demand a pink poodle dog or an elephant. When the local Dairy Queen reopened for business after adding indoor seating, I was naturally asked to cut the ribbon and throw a pie in the mayor’s face. When nearby Antler held a fundraiser for their Opera House, originally built along the lines of a National Guard Armory in 1905 during a railroad boom, they asked me to be the main attraction.

Continuing my annus mirabilis, our first child was born. We named her Madelaine. And my very first article appeared in print, in an LDS version of MAD Magazine called SunStone. It was called “Clinical Notes on the RM” and it detailed the pitfalls returning missionaries experienced when they tried to get married.  Even the Brussel sprouts in my garden, which the neighbors assured me would never prosper because we didn’t have the right kind of soil, outdid themselves in fecundity.  

I even learned how to drive. Up until then I had never been interested in driving. Why bother, when the circus train whisked me from city to city in comfort and convenience? I informed Amy that she would be lucky enough to be my instructor. She had gotten her bachelor’s degree in Education at BYU, and began teaching me with relish. Her enthusiasm quickly disappeared when I insisted on running down garbage cans and nicking telephone poles in astonishing numbers. By the time I was ready to take my driver’s test she was plucking grey strands out of her brunette hair.

That was my life without Ringling: A family. A house. A new career that didn’t require me to whip up soap suds every day.  Perhaps the blacklisting had been a blessing in disguise? But no, performing for a few dozen potato farmers at a time and announcing the daily pork belly prices from Chicago could not compare to the restless laughing crowds I had once cajoled in every major city in America.

God forgive me, but I was going to get back to that flamboyant and surreal world again -- no matter what it took. And, eventually, I did make it back there. And it did take everything I had.

Everything.   

Alex Jones

A demagogue by the name Jones

Spoke in such fiery tones

That presidents fell

For his hollow spell

And acted like one of his clones.

Egalite, Fraternite, and Liberte in Clown Alley

The Ringling clown alley in its heyday was an uninhibited bedlam, but with an underlying bedrock of showbiz professionalism. It really didn’t matter who you were, what you did or thought, or how often you sang “Ridi Pagliaccio” to no one in particular -- as long as you showed up fairly sober for each show and didn’t steal from a fellow clown. Just about everything else, in clown alley parlance, was ‘jake.’

When I first arrived at this roistering lounge for loonies nearly fifty years ago the members included Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Baptists, atheists, Republicans, Democrats, ex-cons, military veterans, hippies, grade school dropouts and college grads. Sexual orientation was as variegated as a kaleidoscope.  Nobody in the alley cared about skin color, not because they were saints or far in advance of their times, but because it had no bearing on getting a laugh. Clown alley existed for one thing, and one thing only -- to excavate belly laughs from the audience. Everybody’s equal when they get a pie in the face.

Early on in my first season Roofus T. Goofus fell deeply in love with one of the showgirls, Alice. Roofus was white, Alice was black. They bonded quickly and completely, forming a seamless couple. Clown alley thought nothing of it. Black, white, green, or purple, the big top had welcomed all races and nationalities since its inception if they had the talent and determination. The show traveled as a self contained village, and I never saw the least hint of segregation within it. Of course there was a caste system, as deeply imbedded as any in India, and the clowns were near the bottom of that caste system. But that only held true inside the circus itself; outside of the arena we mingled and socialized however we pleased.

Fifty years ago the deep South was a different world from the rest of America. Growing up in liberal Minnesota, I saw little of the ugliness of race hatred; so I was startled at the reactions that Roofus and Alice as a couple stirred up when the show played in places like Tallahassee and Birmingham. I went out with them one night after the last show to one of the ubiquitous waffle joints that dotted the South like crabgrass. The place was a dump, but we were hungry. Amidst the malty treacly fug there was no one to seat us, so we picked a booth ourselves. The waitress who finally came over had her grey hair up in a bun and wore teardrop-shaped glasses on a metal chain. She took one look at Alice and immediately marched away. Then a middle-aged man in a yellow shirt and brown necktie -- obviously the manager -- came up to our booth. He had a nametag on his shirt pocket, but whether it read “Bubba” or not I no longer recall.

“You folks from around here?” he asked, but not in a friendly manner.

Roofus told him we were with the circus, and craved a late night snack.

“Y’all cain’t eat here. We closed.”

I looked around at the active patrons all around us, busily dissecting waffles and sausage. There was no CLOSED sign in the front window or on the door.

“You guys look wide open to me.” I chirped brightly.

I have never seen a human face go from flabby white to molten red in such a short time.

“I said we closed. Now git!”

We gitted. None of us three felt like playing hero or heroine that particular night.

Alice did not seem too upset by the incident. She reminded Roofus on the way back to the train, where we hoped the pie car would still be open for indigestion, that she had warned him it would be like this sometimes when they were seen together out in public. The bigots ran things down here, she told him, and he’d better not take her to another redneck place like that again. Still smarting, Roofus was all for going back and heaving some rocks through their windows, but appetite trumped indignation, and we were able to get some burgers and fries at the pie car without further uproar. After that the couple ate all their meals at the pie car until we crossed the Mason Dixon line.

I was dumbstruck when we played the Barton Coliseum on the State Fairgrounds in Little Rock to find drinking fountains clearly marked “White” and “Colored.” But I had little time to ponder the rank injustice of this, since the size of the building precluded having clown alley inside. Instead we were assigned to an outbuilding -- the Swine Barn. The prize winning porkers were not in residence, thank goodness, but their memory lingered on. The distance between the Swine Barn and the back door of the arena was approximately 75 yards. We couldn’t hear our musical cues from the outer darkness, so Swede stationed himself near the back door, and when it was nearly time for one of our entrances he gave a piercing, two-fingered whistle and we had to come a-runnin’. This was in the middle of a torrid Arkansas summer, when the humidity reaches a fiendish stickiness unknown outside of Dante’s Inferno. I finished each show as limp as a string of boiled pasta. At the end of the day I just wanted to get back to my roomette, which thankfully had air conditioning, and pour myself into bed. The world and its problems could go hang.

Roofus and Alice remained together nearly two years. He met her parents in South Carolina, and she met his in Illinois. The times were in an upheaval as the Vietnam War finally came to its tortuous end and Nixon schemed his way out of the White House; an interracial cohabiting couple was not deemed much of a scandal anymore -- in most places. I left to go on a two year LDS mission to Thailand, and when I came back Roofus T. Goofus was still in clown alley but Alice had moved on to Georgetown University in Washington D.C. to pursue a nursing degree.

“She was always smarter than me, Tork” he told me. “And her parents didn’t like me. Not because I’m white -- but because I’m a clown. She told me herself there was no future with the circus. But I didn’t want to leave -- this place is gonna trap me forever.”

“Yeah, I know” I replied. "Me too."

Just then Dougie Ashton came into the alley and cried out:

“G’morning, mates. Buck ‘em all, is what I says!”

It was time for me to go whip up the shaving soap for the wedding cake gag, so I gave Roofus a sympathetic punch on the shoulder and went to find the galvanized steel garbage can we kept outside the alley for the purpose. I hoped no passersby had used it for their trash; then I would have to clean it out first.  

More newspapers is what I wish.

Not for the news that they dish.

But rather I clap

On them for to wrap

All of my leftover fish.

The Milkman of Venice: A Clown College Idyll

When I let it, the Ringling Clown College defines who I am. That’s why I write so often about it and its aftermath. I’m trying to exorcise a demon. The sudden juxtaposition of complete freedom from parental authority and the narcotic effect of the Gulf Coast, compared to my first 17 years growing up strictly in Minnesota, gave a shock to my system that remains hard to overcome.

I shared a rented apartment at the Venice Villas with three young men, not boys like me. How they tolerated my gawky ignorance and puerile anxieties I’ll never understand. My own parents came close to murdering me, if I’m any judge of their facial expressions at times, and my roommates should have finished the job for them. But instead they tolerated me the way a family tolerates a slobbery puppy who chews on everything and gets underfoot.

While our Clown College curriculum was hard, it still left plenty of time for me to observe the natives of Venice, Florida. Like any good anthropologist, I noted their language, dress, customs, and beliefs. Among the men knobby knees and Panama hats prevailed, while the women folk favored culottes and a blue tint to their silvering hair. Several Italian restaurants, which I was too poor to ever enter, catered to the villager’s taste for the exotic amidst the humdrum sea grapes and sand fleas. The village was for the most part elderly, conservative, built of coral, and combatively religious.

Every morning except Sunday the milkman drove up to our motel at 7:30.  He parked his boxy truck down by the Villa’s private beach and waited for sleepy Clown College students to come to him for their eggs, milk, and butter. The reason he did not deliver items to our doorsteps was because he hated us.

He hated us because we were young, flippant, and unconcerned about the afterlife. He was middle-aged, stuck in a dead-end job, and deadly serious about the status of his reservations at the Pearly Gates. Milkmen all wore pure white outfits fifty years ago, and they were starched (the uniforms, that is, not the milkmen.) Our milkman looked ready to either baptise the whole lot of us in one fell swoop, or damn us all to perdition with a single evangelical blast. The frowning creases in his sunburned face hinted that he would prefer to do the latter rather than the former.

Some mornings he would hold a sort of street meeting while passing out the milk and cream.

“Didja know” he would start, while handing over a pound of unsalted butter, “that that there Peace Sign you all is a-wearin’ is actually a say-tonic symbol? It shows a broken upside down cross. Bin used fer devil worship fer hunnerds of years.”  

“Lemme have a dozen eggs, pops.”

“Here you go; thas 55 cents please. Thank you kindly. There ain’t no peace in the devil’s kingdom, only tort-shure. And why ain’t you hippies doin’ yer dooty over in Vietnam ‘stead of here fixin’ to be clowns?”

“They should draft beer, not us!”

“My draft number was very high” I added helpfully. Sometimes listening to the milkman gave me uneasy thoughts when I walked over to the public fishing pier to puzzle over the sunset.

“Friend” he said, pointing directly at me, “you need to get yer draft number directly from the Lord! He’ll march you in the right die-rection.”

“I asked for unsalted butter; this is salted.”

“My apologies, missy. Here you go.”

Suddenly the wind through the saw palmetto fronds sounded like tongues clucking in disapproval at me. I went back to my apartment, uneasy and distracted. Did that crazy old Baptist have something?

As our graduation drew nearer we all started going into the rehearsal barn before the sun was up to work on props and rehearse clown routines. I was included, and then excluded, from several different routines. In one I was supposed to throw a plate of spaghetti (the pasta was made of red yarn but the plate was real) into the face of another clown -- somehow I managed to send it frisbee fashion into his forehead, opening an alarming gash which required stitches. After that I was considered a jinx and did only one gag in the graduation show.

The milkman left our orders at the Venice Villas front office, where Ruby the proprietor could put them in her refrigerator until we came back in the evening. Some days, if she’d been taking too much of her nerve tonic, which had a Russian label on it, she forgot to do so and left it all out on the veranda, so we came back to pools of butter and curdled milk. The eggs were half-cooked as well.

And eventually the seashore became more compelling to me than anything the milkman of Venice had said. One reason was because I was walking along it with one of the girl Clown College students who was almost as young as me. I remember that after half a dozen saltwater strolls I opened up to her while I held her hand, saying that I thought neither Lucille Ball or Carol Burnett were very good comedians and that only men could be any good at slapstick comedy.

After that I found myself walking on the beach by myself, wondering what it all meant -- life, love, milk, eggs, baggy pants, and Campbell’s tomato soup (which was about all I could afford that last week of school.) I did not yet know if there was a God, a real loving Heavenly Father, but I did know there was such a thing as infinity -- and that it was the ocean.

And by the way, that girl did not get a contract with the circus.

I, on the other hand, did get a contract with the Blue Unit for the 1972 season. It was a simple two-page document that I signed, stipulating, among other things, that I was responsible for my own makeup, costumes, and clown props. A roomette on the train was guaranteed, for ten dollars a week, which included a change of bedding once a week. I was obligated to join AGVA (American Guild of Variety Artists) and pay annual dues of 125 dollars, which gave me health insurance coverage.  My salary was set at 135 dollars, minus taxes, each week. I assumed my residence would automatically be changed to Florida (which has no personal income tax) from Minnesota (which has a hellacious personal income tax.) Thus it was that several years later I was hit with a tax bill that delayed my LDS proselyting mission to Thailand for over a year, until I could get it paid off.

Long years later I heard that the milkman of Venice died of a sudden stroke while doing inventory in the back of his refrigerated truck. His icy blue corpse was not discovered for two days. Today no one delivers milk, or salvation, to the residents of Venice; they have to go to the Tom Thumb or Winn Dixie to get milk and eggs themselves. I have no idea where they go for salvation.  At least that’s what I’ve been told when I asked someone from Sarasota who had no love for Venice, telling me it’s still a pretentious backwater town on the Gulf Coast.  

The Gulf Coast tantalized and disturbed me with its vast white clouds sailing above an endless blue turmoil. Since those youthful days in Venice I have sought the seashore, in  California, Mexico, and Thailand, and then fled from it. It becomes too vivid, too sensual, too magnificent for my Minnesota-bred sensibilities -- so I either must cheapen it to make it bearable or embrace it by shedding my old perceptions like a snake sloughs off its old skin. Today I live in Utah, in the desert, and dream of the ocean slowly and peacefully engulfing me one last time -- forever.

Jack Spratt said news was flat.

His wife said it was lean.

And so fake news they swallowed whole

Upon their laptop screen.

Clown Alley Collectibles

I have no hard medical proof, but over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that Ringling producing clown Mark Anthony contracted tuberculosis because of the amount of time he spent in the backroom of the rehearsal barn at Winter Quarters.

This area was a lumber room pumped up on Boomfood. (If you don’t know what that is, you have not read very much H.G. Wells. Hint: It’s in his novel “The Food of the Gods.”) Over the years it had been expanded and a lean-to was added out back in order to store the miscellaneous costumes, pillions, clown contraptions, scrimshaw banners, hawsers, giant hollow Mardi Gras heads made of asbestos, unsold programmes, superfluous pompons, chests of rhinestones, punctured elephant tubs awaiting repair by itinerant Roma tinkers, limelights, wagon wheels, contorted rigging, ring curb sections in need of a retread, widgets, gewgaws, kickshaws, and everything else a venerable and prosperous circus  no longer needed immediately but was loath to toss away. Some semblance of order existed in this neglected godown, but over the years people had pawed and pried and pilfered so much that locating a specific item was like panning for gold -- you might get lucky, or you might not. No inventory was kept, and all the security employed was a superannuated night watchman that made the rounds year in and year out who never poked his head inside that backroom. A panhandle cracker, he was heard to say the place was full of “hants.”

Climate control was an ancient wall unit that blew cool air feebly and ineffectively into the place. Plus the roof leaked. Combined with the steamy Florida climate, the fungus, mold, and rust prospered to a disheartening extent. Mark worked long hours in this insalubrious midden during rehearsals and the off season, and undoubtedly inhaled a variety of spores and asbestos fibers that eventually led to his TB. Or so I believe. To me the place always smelled like a cave full of bats afflicted with Montezuma’s Revenge.

He once came up to me, down in Winter Quarters, quivering with indignation, holding up a ball peen hammer smothered in rust.

“I bought this myself just last year” he said through gritted teeth. “I left it back in the storage room. Now look at it! Not worth a tinker’s dam!”

I myself rarely ventured back there, although I was very intrigued by three large Mardi Gras heads that were painted and sculpted to represent Larry, Moe, and Curly of the Three Stooges. Rumor had it that the hapless clowns who wore these asbestos laced heads back in the 50’s and 60’s had all developed mesothelioma. They were put out to pasture and spent the rest of their lives coughing out their lungs huddled on the public benches that lined the public beaches in Sarasota.

Just as boorish tourists always manage to snag a monogrammed towel from an expensive hotel when they’re on vacation, part of clown alley’s larcenous tradition was to swipe an inconspicuous item from that moldy backroom as a keepsake and talisman.

Prince Paul had a battered tin badge that read “Concessionaire No.112 Ringling Brothers” that he had abstracted from the backroom. He kept it in his clown trunk for good luck.

Sparky lifted a stack of old programmes, water-stained and black with mold, to cut out the few remaining unravaged photographs to frame and hang in his roomette.

Dougie Ashton possessed a purloined cork-tipped baton he insisted had once been wielded by Merle Evans.

My illicit trinket was a heavy wool tam o shanter from some distant production number celebrating the Scottish highlands. Unfortunately it was also the home of some nameless pathogen that gave me a terrific scalp itch when I began wearing it during come in. I had to shampoo with coal tar soap for a month to get rid of the blasted infection. I threw the cap away. It only goes to show that in my case Crime Doesn’t Pay.  

Naming no names, but there were other clowns, much more predatory, who did not wait for an item to be consigned to Winter Quarters Siberia. On closing night of the season it was their custom to simply stash several of their production costumes into their clown trunks to hang the booty up in their own closets back home. In the celebratory confusion of that last night the wardrobe people did not keep very careful track of returns. A few years ago I visited an old clown alley colleague living in Chicago. After reminiscing about the good old days until we were both sick of it, he showed me his elegant walk-in closet, where he kept several production costumes that must have cost a mint, since they were all handsewn back at the time. He’d had them dry cleaned and moth-proofed.

He’s had a few hard knocks recently, so I assume these one-of-a-kind outfits will be seen on eBay one of these days. If he’s smart he’ll wait until after the show closes for the last time this coming May. He should make a fortune off the nostalgia.  

The Questions of Jesus

But whereunto shall I liken this generation?

With algorithms vigilant and cloud technology,

This generation worships at the shrine of symmetry.  

But iron pyrite makes our calf of gold this time around,

With lunatics elected and then furiously crowned.

And will this generation like so many gone before

Reject the Savior of the world and ignorance adore?

Swede and Mabel: A Clown Alley Love Story

I was only 17 when I served my first hitch as a clown with Ringling. It was so much fun, and so physically demanding, that the normal romantic pursuits of an American adolescent were for the most part laid aside. Besides, I was socially awkward and usually broke. My idea of a good time was to hole up in my roomette on the train with a book and a bag of Bugles. Sensual experiences were pretty much limited to soaking my throbbing feet in cold water and epsom salts after a long day of pounding around on cement floors in the Capezio slippers Ringling provided for all their production numbers. My feet were going flat, but my heart was intact and unmolested.

I was an anomaly in clown alley, not having a steady girlfriend or a spouse. The veteran clowns, for the most part were married or between marriages, and the younger ones had steady girlfriends or were on the make for one. I prefered to sit back and observe the battle of the sexes from a safe distance.

Among the married clowns, Swede Johnson and his wife Mabel seemed the most comfortable with the venerable institution. Swede was a retired lion tamer who started clowning after the big cats turned on him one day, ripping his legs to bloody ribbons. His wife Mabel was the head of Women’s Wardrobe. He was a thin galoot and she was a fleshy barrel of a woman. Swede preferred to stay calm and quiet while Mabel was an excitable matron who brooked no nonsense from showgirl or circus star in her spangled realm. They reminded me of the old nursery rhyme:

Jack Sprat could eat no fat.

His wife could eat no lean.

And so between the two of them

They licked the platter clean.

When she wanted Swede for anything she ambled over to clown alley and gave vent to a piercing shriek that resembled a factory whistle at noontime:

“Sweeeeeeede!”

Swede would drop whatever he was doing and nimbly thread his way between trunks to hold a confab with his spouse. Since she made good money as Wardrobe Mistress, their discussions outside the walls of clown alley rarely involved financial wrangles. More often Mabel simply wanted to unload some of her vast indignation about snippy showgirls upon Swede’s uncomplaining shoulders. Swede rarely got a word in edgewise, but that didn’t seem to bother him. As Mabel complained about the way the showgirls left their tiaras all over the place or tore holes in their nylon sleeve length gloves or kept plucking the ostrich plumes out of their turbans to decorate their roomettes, he would nod like a bobblehead doll, with a patient grin on his painted face.

Swede and Mabel traveled in style. They lived on the circus train but drove between towns in a salmon colored Coupe Deville Cadillac. Swede did all the driving; when it came to piloting that big boat across the highways and byways he was completely and unashamedly misogynistic.

“I don’t mind if women want to vote” he said, puffing on his ever present Chesterfield, “but I’ll be damned if I let one drive my car. They dent up cars running over pedestrians like they was bowling pins!”

Swede also insisted on driving the clown car as well. This required some tricky maneuvering around guy wires and ring curbs in a Ford Pinto that was crammed to the gunwales with squirming clown bodies. Since I was one of the taller, lankier clowns, I got in first and had the  other clowns pile on top of me. I still have a lingering claustrophobia from that uncomfortable position.The interior of the vehicle was gutted to accommodate ten clowns, so Swede had to sit on a small wooden block, hunched over the wheel like a cathedral gargoyle. The one time he relinquished the wheel to producing clown Mark Anthony the car ran aground on a shoal of elephant tubs until a crew of roustabouts could push us back onto the track.   

Mabel packed a lunch for Swede each day, consisting of a liverwurst sandwich on dark rye bread and a banana. Swede loved liverwurst but hated bananas; Mabel made him take it in his lunch for the potassium it contained -- or, as she pronounced it, ‘protassimum.’

“Make sure he eats that banana!” she’d yell at us over the walls of clown alley as Swede came in each day and threw the banana to Prince Paul or Dougie Ashton. “He needs the vitamins and protassimum!”

Mabel refused to ever enter clown alley. The place was traditionally an exclusive male preserve, verboten to all women. That began to change the first season I was on the Ringling show; some of the more bold girlfriends and female reporters came barging in without so much as a by-your-leave, sending clowns scrambling for their bathrobes or jumping frantically behind their trunks. It was finally decided to attach an English handbell on a length of rope to the side of the entrance and insist that all visitors give it a good loud shake before entering. Any female who failed to observe this courtesy was roundly condemned with a chorus of “Ring the bell - Ring the bell!” until she retreated.

When the weather turned cold in the fall prior to the end of the season, Mabel would set up an electric heater in a secluded corner of the arena where Swede could rest between shows, lounging in a folding canvas beach chair and covered with a large sheepskin.  

Swede told me that he met Mabel when he was a young lion tamer. In constant need of raw horse meat to feed his animals, Swede haunted many a butcher shop. One dewy morning in Sheboygan Wisconsin he walked into a prosperous German butcher shop and deli, redolent of sour salami, Bismarck herring, and limburger cheese, to inquire about equestrian protein. The proprietor agreed to provide enough meat for the hungry cats and sent his daughter Mabel out to the lot later that day with several large bulky packages wrapped in brown paper rapidly deteriorating from the dripping blood. She stuck around, fascinated by Swede and his career, becoming part of the curious crowds in each town that circus folk refer to as ‘lot lice.’ When the show left town a week later Mabel came along, now married to Swede by a local Justice of the Peace. Her parents were not the usual small town bigots when it came to consorting with circus people, and they welcomed the hasty nuptials. Swede says that even as a young bride Mabel had an enormous appetite, so perhaps mom and dad were relieved to be shut of a daughter who probably threatened to eat so deeply into their inventory. They gifted the honeymooners with a barrel of pigs knuckles in brine and a large wheel of Emmentaler cheese. The well-fed couple remained together for forty-five years before the Grim Reaper came for Mabel, and then, a few months later, escorted Swede back to her in those Grassy Lots beyond.  

Prince Paul, an emphatic bachelor, once looked at the two of them quietly sitting together on the ring curb between shows, then turned to me with a thought:

“Y’know, Schmutz Finger, marriage is a sucker’s game -- but those two make it work somehow.”

Then Prince turned and stumped heavily back to clown alley, singing to himself an odd tune that began “I’ve got a customer for your face . . . “

Kyle Mazza

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