Get me to the circus on time!

As I was investigating The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints during rehearsals of the Ringling Bros Circus Blue Unit in 1971, I felt an intense desire to attend one of their Sunday meetings.  But we had full-day rehearsals on Sunday, so I was never able to attend services up in Sarasota, Florida.

After I was baptized, Tim Holst and I, as the only two Mormons on the show at that time, made a pact with each other that we would faithfully attend morning services each Sunday, no matter where we were or how tired we felt.

And we felt mighty tired after three shows on a Saturday; we never seemed to get to bed before one or two in the morning.  And Sunday was usually move out night, when we had to pack everything up so it could be put on the train for the next town.  Holst also helped roll up the two miles of green rubber matting for an extra $25.00 per week.

  Services generally started at seven in the morning on Sunday.  So the routine was either I would be banging at Bear’s door at 6am or he would be banging on my door at 6am, so we could get shaved, find some breakfast, and either call the local Mormon chapel to see if we could get a ride, or call a taxi to take us to services.

I remember in Baltimore, Maryland, we couldn’t raise anyone at the local chapel and we were too broke to afford a taxi.  I was all for giving up and going back to bed, but Bear (Tim Holst’s affectionate nickname in clown alley) insisted we board a local bus and see if it took us near the chapel.  The surly bus driver was of no help, so we sat, the only two on the bus, scanning each side of the street for the familiar LDS chapel outline.  Miraculously, we DID pass right by the chapel, and got off the bus just in time to attend Sacrament Meeting.  Afterwards I asked Bear if he had had a ‘revelation’ about taking the bus.  He thought a moment and then replied that no, not a revelation, but rather just a feeling that the chapel would be on a major bus line and if we just took the bus we stood a fair chance of finding it.  He was always that way – pragmatic and unemotional; he thought that if he could figure out a sensible plan, it stood a fair chance of working.  That’s why he never felt completely comfortable in clown alley.  The majority of clowns, like me, didn’t believe in a structured, sane universe; we felt in our bones that total chaos was only a stone’s throw away, and acted accordingly.  I guess that’s why Bear went up the corporate ladder so easily at Ringling.  He had a serene sense of the basic rightness of things, while I stayed a clown, which is the only thing I ever wanted, because I believed that there was very little to plan for beyond the next pie in the face.

Once we got to church it was no problem getting a ride back to the show in time to get made up for come in.  There was always an LDS family delighted to drive us right up to the back door of the arena, where Charlie Baumann would inevitably be waiting for us.  How he hungered to see us late, so he could fine us!  He did not approve of clowns going to church, and I suspect he had already guessed that Bear had his sights on Charlie’s job as Performance Director.  We got the better of him each week, and he would glance at his watch, then glare at us balefully while intoning:  “Okay, funnymen, be funny.”

The only time we came close to being late was up in Montreal, Canada.  We were there late in the fall.  Too late, as it turned out.  That icy Sunday morning Bear and I managed to get a ride to church from a local member who only spoke French.  Services were in French.  I started to get worried while the service was going on, because huge snowflakes were coming down thick and fast outside the chapel window.  By the time our new French friend was ready to take us to the arena there was a full-blown blizzard going on.  Being a true Quebecois, this did not bother our driver.  He got us back to the building in time for the matinee.

But no one else was at the arena!  The show bus, and all private transportation at the circus train, was snowed in.  But the Quebecois audience showed up on time for the matinee, which meant that Bear and I had to slap on our makeup and do an hour-long come in, playing for time until some of the other clowns and cast could dig out and get to the arena.  We must have done Bigger and Bigger, and the Broom Jump, about twenty times.  Plus I got to try out my musical saw for the first time.

The show finally got started about an hour late.

By hook or by crook Tim Holst and I managed to make it to church every Sunday that season.  It’s a record I still look back on with pride, and amazement. 

The very last day of that season, as the clowns were shaking hands with each other after the last show, Swede Johnson, one of the oldest clowns, sidled up to me with a wad of bills in his hand that would choke a goat.  With a lopsided grin the old reprobate explained to me that at the beginning of that season the word had gone out that two First of Mays (Holst and I) had decided to go to church every Sunday, without fail.  No one believed we’d do it, except Swede.  So he started a betting pool, with odds three to one against us, and began taking in money.  We had been watched with keen interest every Sunday that season, to see if we would sluff off.

Since we never did, Swede had collected a handsome bundle of mazooma.  In gratitude, Swede had already offered Tim Holst a slice of the winnings, but Bear had imperiously told him to take his filthy lucre and begone; he had not struggled all season just to satisfy some lurid betting instinct.  Swede had then come to me, offering me a sheaf of greenbacks as a way to say thanks for the killing he had made off of our piety. 

I glared at Swede; did he think I would stoop to taking his tainted cash, which looked to be about three-hundred bucks . . . ?

You bet I would!

Restaurant Review: Street Tacos!

At the corner of 100 North and 500 West in downtown Provo is a food truck serving street tacos. Only beef. No chicken and no pork. But you get a wide variety of cuts from the cow: there's tongue, head cheese, tripe, heart, liver, calf's foot gelatin, and something called 'underbelly.' I had a regular beef soft taco, a tongue taco, and a head cheese taco. The head cheese was superlative; soft and flavorful. The tongue was good, too -- not tough or stringy. And the regular beef was okay. They just give it to you in small chunks, laying naked in the soft shell taco. I'm too much of a gringo, I guess -- I expect my tacos to be gussied up with lettuce and sauces. The three tacos set me back $5.75, and I was very full when I finished.

They have a wide variety of condiments to put on your tacos. There is no seating -- it is strictly take-away, or eat crouching at the curb (which about a half dozen customers were doing while I got my order.)  Good luck if you want to take some condiments away with you -- the damn plastic lids don't fit the damn plastic cups. I crushed a half dozen cups vainly trying to get them to seal.

The truck is clean and the two guys running it are wide-awake fellows. I give this place my maximum rating -- four burps. I can see myself strolling over on a hot summer day when I don't want to mess in the kitchen for a couple of beef tacos -- it's good value for money. I think I overdid it with 3 tacos. Two tacos will be plenty from now on.

arizona clown antics

Ah, Arizona at last, and the long, wet, cold spring, was behind us!  The Ringling Blue Unit had at last left the gray smog of the East behind and was in the West – where a man’s a man, and a clown’s a moocher, at least when the a/c goes out on the Iron Lung in the middle of a July heat wave in Phoenix, Arizona.  We baked at night like Idaho spuds, waking in the morning drowning in our own perspiration.  The plexiglass windows in our roomettes were sealed so they could not be opened.  We asked the train master when the air conditioning would be fixed; he merely glanced off into the middle distance and began whistling “Oh Danny Boy” while he wandered away.  We tried sleeping outside the train in cheap little Army surplus tents, only to be deafened and nearly flattened by the rushing freight trains that zipped by on nearby tracks all night.  We tried sleeping at the arena, only to be kicked out by persnickety ushers.

We never thought to ask the management to pay for motel rooms until the a/c was fixed; we had been trained and broken in; we knew our place, and knew not to ask for any favors that involved money – the answer was always to “Take it to AGVA”, our union.  They never replied to our questions or requests; we might as well have been in Outer Mongolia for all the union cared.

So some desperate, slightly questionable, action was called for.

Across from the arena was an oasis, a motel with a large kidney-shaped pool, and neon signs advertising air conditioning that mimicked, if it didn’t exceed, conditions in the Arctic.  Their rates were also on the neon sign, and they were beyond our meager resources.  Unless . . .

I forget who had the original brainstorm, but it sounded pretty good under that broiling Arizona sun.  Bear, as the oldest, most respectable-looking of us, would saunter into the motel lobby and reserve a room for the rest of the week, a room for one.  Five of us went in on the payment; me, Roofus T. Goofus, Chico, Rubberneck, and Anchorface. It amounted to just a few dollars apiece.  Each night, after Bear had gotten the key from the night clerk and gone upstairs, each one of us, one by one, would sneak past the distracted clerk, who was engrossed in studying necromancy or something from a big, thick textbook and paid no attention to anything that did not walk up and ring the bell.  We then would make ourselves comfortable either on the bed or on the couch or the floor, and wallow in the frigid breezes from the a/c. 

The first two nights, all went well; we tiptoed past the clerk, who never stirred from his seat and book.  We could have snuck an elephant upstairs without his knowledge.  Our second floor room looked out  over the pool.  We were discrete in leaving in the morning, of course, and always went out the back way, through the kitchen, where the vigilant day clerk could scarcely catch a glimpse of us.

But I made the mistake of boasting about our little escapade to Stanley and Lester Janus, twin brothers, midgets, and notable cheapskates.  Even though their train car still had functioning air conditioning, the little pishers couldn’t resist the thought of staying basically for free in a nice motel room right by the arena, so they blackmailed us; either we let them in to sleep at night or they would blow the whistle.  The Janus brothers could not keep their big traps shut, and so we soon had a slew of other clowns clamoring to be let in to our Antarctic retreat.  We finally stood firm at an even dozen for the night.

The consequences, as you may guess, were not happy.  That very night, after everyone was safely in the room and the a/c was cranked up to Ice Age, a few of the more rambunctious clowns wanted to have a little party, put on some music, drink some beer, howl at the moon.  Our original chaste intention to use the room as a demure sanctuary from the heat and humidity of Arizona went out the window, along with several pillows and an ashtray.  Thundering up the stairs came the night clerk.  He knocked on our door, demanding to know what all the hubbub was, when there was only supposed to be a single, solitary human being in the room!  We were all dressed in pajamas, or briefs, and so could not very well explain our presence as a social visit.  Roofus T. Goofus panicked.  He opened the sliding glass door out onto the balcony and took a heroic leap over the side, clutching all his clothes, to land safely in the pool.  Several more clowns followed suit, until it must have appeared to the residents on the first floor that it was raining bodies.  (Stanley and Lester wisely hid in the closet – when the excitement was over, they snuck out without a word to anyone.) When Bear was all alone in the room he opened up to the furious night clerk, who had been pulverizing his knuckles on the door for ten minutes.  Although threatened with arrest, Bear stuck to his guns, insisting that he was the only one to be sleeping in the room that night, so the night clerk allowed him to stay, but he’d have to leave the first thing in the morning.

The rest of us, sopping wet, trudged back to the circus train, a good two miles away, and bedded down in our sauna for the rest of the night. 

The air conditioning stayed broken until we residents of the ‘Iron Lung’ realized that some baksheesh was expected by the train master to fix the problem.  We each kicked in five bucks, and lo and behold the next day the Iron Lung was as cool as iced tea.

And, as far as I can recall, I have never had to jump out of a second story window again.

Who Does God Help?

These hand-lettered signs are plastered all over the two blocks between the Provo Rec Center and the Provo Public Library.

They are recent, not having been there last Friday when I walked through the area. My question to the person or persons who taped these up to lamp posts and on trees is "What if you're poor yourself?" Seems kinda self evident to me.

The rich, of course, are always helping themselves to the best of everything -- or so I've heard. Since I'm one of the bona fide poor, and have been from the day I was born and paid for on the installment plan, I have no actual knowledge of how rich people act. And to me, anyone who owns their own house and drives their own car and has health insurance and life insurance and works a full-time job is RICH. Maybe they also have mountains of debt that is weighing them down, but so what? They can cash in and flee to Thailand, which has no extradition treaty with the USA, and live even more like kings -- since a plate of shrimp fried rice in Thailand costs only 75 cents and you can rent a condo on the beach for about 400 dollars a month.

IF we could eliminate both greed and hard work from the world, then there would be no poor people -- or rather, everyone would be merely subsisting. I think that would make a great bestseller: 'THE ART OF SUBSISTING.'  I may have to write it myself one of these day, if I can ever take time off from my busy panhandling schedule.

Folding Chairs in Clown Alley

My dad knew quite a few questionable characters when he tended bar at Aarones in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  I got to know them vicariously, when dad would narrate their exploits at the dinner table, much to the disgust of my mother, who strived in vain for high tone and gentility in our lives.  There was Pickle Joe, who made a tenuous living selling bottled preserves that he processed in a shed under a bridge on the Mississippi.  An incautious wielder of knives, Pickle Joe kept losing a finger here and a finger there over the years, according to my dad, which would invariably turn up in one of his jars of pickles.  Needless to say, my mother forbade any of Pickle Joe’s products to cross the threshold of our home, much to my disappointment; I rather fancied a jar with a human thumb swimming amidst the dill weed and cucumbers.  Jelly Bean was a frequent visitor at the bar; he got his nickname not for his sweet tooth but because his fingers were so sticky, as if he kept jelly beans in them when not rifling the till or picking a pocket.  Mr. Skeets sold hot watches and jewelry, which turned your skin green on contact.  Father Prolasch liked to come in after Mass on Sunday for a prolonged tipple that usually ended with him napping on the pool table (this last character sketch was always thrown in gratuitously by my father simply because my mother was trying to be a good practicing Catholic).

And so when I joined Ringling Brothers as a clown in 1971, the raffish characters, that abounded like the Mississippi carp I angled for near the sewage drain, did not necessarily upset me.  Life was full of interesting people, and I was fortunate enough to now be surrounded by them.  They were honest and hardworking, for the most part.  There were two new clowns, however, who came into the alley at the  same time I did, who thought the world owed them a living and didn’t scruple to confiscate whatever they could lay their hands on.  I will not name them, as they both left the show after one season, never to return.  They were definitely Bad Hats. 

I would have nothing to do with them.  That is, not until the show got to the Convention Center, in Anaheim, California.  The Convention Center supplied clown alley with sensually soft, plush, red folding chairs, which, in turn, led to my first participation in a crime wave.  I’m sorry to say that almost all of the new clowns that season participated in this caper.  Common decency, to say nothing of our aching derrieres, demanded it

You see, we clowns never knew what kind of chair would be available in each building.  And clowns do a lot of sitting between numbers and between shows.  Mark Anthony, Swede Johnson, and Prince Paul, all had their own special chairs to sit in, which were carried by the show as a kind of perk for their long years of service with the show.  Otto Griebling kept a camp stool in his trunk.  The rest of us had to make do with whatever the arena could provide us with, which often was nothing.  With nothing to sit on we had to improvise with splintery crates or go hunting for dilapidated and rusty folding chairs that threatened to collapse the moment we sat in one.

But in Anaheim we were supplied with wonderfully soft and forgiving folding chairs that were a pleasure to sit in.  I could even snuggle down and take a nap in one!  And, I’m ashamed to admit, that is how our two Bad Hats got so many of us to participate in a chair heist.  They intimated, on close out night, as we were bidding a fond farewell to those wonderful chairs, that there was no need leave them behind; we could each grab a chair and take it back to the train with us.  After all, the Convention Center would not miss a dozen or so chairs . . .

Ah, but they would!  And to prevent anything of the kind from happening, security guards were placed at the Convention Center exit ramp.  None of us would be allowed to leave the building until we had been frisked!  This heavy handed attempt was a miscalculation on the part of the building.  Having affronted us with their suspicion of our dishonesty, we decided, as a matter of honor, that clown alley HAD to steal those chairs!

We emptied the blue prop boxes of all their rubber chickens, foam rubber dragons, turkey basters, and other sundry clown props, and loaded the beautiful plush folding chairs into them, locked them up for the Bulgarian baggage smashers to load onto the train, and then carried our own clown props back to the train with us.  Those lousy guards couldn’t grouse about that!

And so it came to pass that for the rest of that season we had great chairs to sit in.  Charlie Baumann, the German Performance Director, growled at us that he would inform the Anaheim police and have us all thrown in the hoosegow, but in this case his umlaut-sodden bark was worse than his bite – especially after he was bribed with two of the plush chairs for his own dressing room.

The statute of limitations has run out on this crime, I’m sure, so I can now print the story without fear of repercussion.  Most of us went on to unblemished careers in show biz and other pursuits, but we are all  united by the taint we still feel when a nice red plush folding chair is encountered.

In the long run, crime doesn't pay -- but the hours are good.

Want to Learn an Easy Foreign Language? Try Thai!

I have spent five years living in Thailand, working as an English teacher. I found the Thai people to be gracious, vivacious and intelligent. But I knew they’d be like that before I went there, because I had friends who had lived there for many years, and they told me to expect nothing but politeness and pleasure from the Thais. Their Buddhist upbringing teaches them that every good action receives a good reward, so they are wonderful hosts when you live among them.

Their language, however, was another matter. I was warned by these same friends that I would soon go insane trying to learn to speak Thai, what with its tones and inflections and skewed grammar and Pali and Sanskrit root words from ancient India. Beyond a simple greeting and farewell, I would never, ever, be able to speak the Thai language well enough to have an intelligent conversation with an adult Thai.

So said my friends.

And initially, I believed them!

Beyond learning to say “Hello” and “Good-bye”, or “Where is the bathroom?” and “What time is it?”, I didn’t dare pursue my language studies any further, afraid I would make a fool of myself and be laughed out of the country.

What changed my outlook finally was Joom, a sprightly Thai lady, approximately my age, who wanted to take private English lessons. She was raised on a farm in Northeastern Thailand, had come to Bangkok at sixteen to work as a maid in a hotel, and now she was getting ready to retire, and thought that it would be nice to learn the language she had heard spoken in hotel rooms for most of her adult life. After a few formal lessons we were on a bantering, first-name basis.

“Why you no speak Thai?” she demanded of me. “You get Thai girlfriend fast, you speak Thai – sure!”

“Oh, I dunno” I waffled. “Thai is a hard language for foreigners to learn.”

Joom snorted.

“Not hard, if not lazy” she replied. “I teach.”

So our roles were reversed; after every English lesson I gave her, she gave me a Thai lesson. Here are the main points she drummed into me, and which I found very helpful in overcoming my diffidence with learning to speak Thai:

• Don’t worry about the tones! The Thai language has five formal tones, rising, falling, middle, dipping, and inverted. It is almost a musical language, like Chinese. In fact, many root words come from Mandarin. But, as Joom pointed out to me, when you put a Thai from Bangkok with a Thai from Chiang Mai, the tones go right out the window! The Bangkok Thai is speaking the ‘correct’ patois, while the Chiang Mai person is speaking the hill country dialect, and the tones are completely different; yet they understand each other completely, because of the context. In a nutshell, for Thai, context is more important than tones.
• Thai is a great language to make mistakes in! The reason being that the Thais have such a robust sense of humor, and do not take anything about their own country seriously (except the Royal family!) that if you murder their language by trying to speak it, they will just laugh and then love you for it. The Thais truly admire foreigners for making the attempt to speak their language. So they will encourage you at every turn. Can you say that about the French or Germans?
• Beware the lazy ‘R’! In the last twenty-five years the Thai language, like all living languages, has evolved. The Thais have gotten away from rolling their r’s, unless they’re reciting a Buddhist text. Instead, they have turned most of their r’s into L’s. So when a Thai wishes to say 100, he or she will say ‘loy’, even though it is spelled ‘roy’. You’ll pick up on it quickly, once you realize it’s happening.
• Finally, please remember that you, as a foreigner, are a guest in Thailand. You will always be treated with respect and affection, but in return, you must give the Thais the respect their language provides. Always use the polite particles ‘khrab’ and ‘kha’ when addressing a Thai person. A foreign man should never ask a question or make a direct request of a Thai without adding the word ‘khrab’ at the end of the question or request. A foreign woman should do likewise, using ‘kha’. There is no direct translation into English of these two polite particles; just accept that you need to use them frequently, and that doing so will impress your Thai friends with your courtesy and knowledge of their language!

It was just a simple clown vest . . .

When I left home to attend the Ringling Clown College in Venice, Florida, in 1971, my parents gave me a particularly Norwegian blessing:  "You’ll be back." Their faith in my talent and ability was, to say the least, tepid. And I've had to work hard all my life to overcome that handicap.

As the weeks went by in Venice, as I struggled, and failed, to find a decent clown makeup or learn to ride a unicycle, I spiraled down into deep discouragement.  After all, I was just a 17-year-old kid who had never been anywhere or done anything.  I was up against older, more mature, and certainly more talented individuals.  They understood the world, and how to prosper in it.  I barely understood how to brush my teeth in the morning.

My breaking point came during acrobatics class one day, when we were learning to make a human pyramid.  As one of the larger specimens, I was placed on the bottom row.  As the number of bodies on top of me grew, my arms began to quiver uncontrollably.  Finally, just as the last person vaulted to the top of the pyramid, my arms gave out and I collapsed.  And so did the pyramid.  The instructor was kind; he suggested that from now on I just observe the proceedings of his class from the sidelines.  But some of my fellow students were more blunt, referring to me, with no attempt at subterfuge or secrecy, as an uncoordinated nincompoop, and other, more colorful, epithets. 

That afternoon I rode my rented bicycle into town to the bank. I was going to withdraw my meager savings, quit Clown College, and go back home.  In those days a bank was staffed by human beings, not by machines and fees.  The teller was a little old lady, with whom I had had dealings with before; she had helped me open a checking account when I had arrived in town, full of enthusiasm and purpose, and was fascinated to hear I was going to study to be a circus clown.  As I stepped up to her window she beamed at me, pulled up the chain her bifocals were dangling on so she could get a better look at me, and gave me a warm Southern greeting:  “Hello, young feller!  I was hoping you’d show up here soon.  I’ve made something for you.”

She ducked down below the teller window, then came bobbing back up with what turned out to be a green stripped vest.  “I had some leftover material from my drapes, and I thought it might be comical enough for you to wear as a vest.”  She handed it to me.  “Good luck, young man.  I think you’ll do a bang up job with the circus!”

The pattern was hideously contrived and confused; it would never match anything but a patch of duckweed on a pond.  And I loved it.  This little old woman, a stranger, believed in me enough to sew me up a bizarre-looking vest.  Suddenly I didn’t want to quit Clown College anymore.  Suddenly I felt like getting back on that unicycle to give it one more stinking try.

“How can I help you?”  She was patiently waiting for my reply.  I simply thanked her for the vest, and ran out of the bank.  I hopped back on my rented bike, which was rusty and stunted and sclerotic, and made it back to Winter Quarters just in time for makeup class.  My makeup wasn’t any better that day than it had been before; when done, I looked like a witch doctor’s mask.  But I felt better, much better.

And I stuck with it, ignoring the slurs and set-backs.  And out of thirty students, I was one of twelve who was awarded a contract with Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows.

I wore that ugly green vest in every clown gag for years, until it literally fell apart. It served as a great reminder that it's the little things that count in life.

Pinocchio in Clown Alley

I told whoppers as a child. I continued to invent them as an adolescent. And when I entered the fabled portals of Ringling clown alley over forty-five years ago I did not mend my ways, but spread disinformation and gasconades far and wide with a great deal of dedication and glee.

Why? Because of a lifelong sense of boredom and inadequacy -- the hallmarks of any true slapstick jongleur. On long and simmering summer days when my chums and I parked our keisters on the street curb in front of our homes I told them that it was getting so hot that the cars that came down the asphalt neighborhood street would sink into the road, never to be heard from again. To back up my tall tale I pinched a piece of bitumen patching goo right from the road itself and played with it like Silly Putty. This convinced the more gullible of my pals that they’d better tell mom to warn dad before he tried to pull into our quiet little street, only to become another dismal statistic of the Minneapolis Tar Pits. Their parents, of course, pooh-poohed the whole thing, but several of them nervously waited out on the front lawn at dinner time to make sure the family Ford did not do a Titanic. That experience of almost being believed egged me on to more fantastic stories.

In high school I boasted to anyone who would listen, teachers and students alike, that my dad had prudently invested in a moonshine well in Kentucky -- which was now gushing bourbon at the rate of ten gallons per hour. I also claimed that my Grandmother was the last Albanian princess from the royal House of Fonebone (Don Martin fans will recognize that moniker.) For proof I spouted a rumbling gibberish that I explained was the Albanian national anthem -- to the tune of Turkey in the Straw.

I lied through my teeth on the Ringling Clown College application. For ‘age’ I put “24 next St Swithin's Day.”  Under ‘acting experience’ I penned “I have assisted at every Shakespeare production at the Guthrie Theater for the past two summers.” Which was really true -- as an usher.

My first fabulous fib in clown alley occurred during our run at Madison Square Garden. I had been down with the runs for the past week and was feeling discontented and contentious -- I wanted to stir up some trouble, just because I felt mean-spirited and was getting bored with the routine inside the grimey building. So I casually mentioned to a few of the clowns that I had just heard on the radio that Fidel Castro was putting in nuclear warheads in Cuba again. This was just a few years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and people were still on edge about how close the whole world had come to an atomic holocaust.

“Great God in heaven!” said Swede Johnson when I told him. “And to think I never got to sleep with Greta Garbo! Dammit!” Nevertheless, he went and found his wife Mable and they started filling up plastic water jugs just in case.

There was a general exodus out of clown alley to find a radio or TV set to learn how close Armageddon was going to be this time. When nothing appeared on the news, I was surrounded by a hostile mob of joeys demanding to know what the hell I was up to, scaring the beezus out of them like that. They had called sweethearts and parents far away to say their last good-byes -- and long distance telephone rates back in those days were astronomical.

Only my sang-froid saved me from a lynching. I coolly shrugged my shoulders and said “I must have heard it wrong. Sorry, guys.” Like a true sociopath, I glibly denied any culpability.

“It’s all that Mormon stuff he reads” Chico said to Roofus T. Goofus. “It gives him hallucinations.”

I never told a lie in clown alley for personal gain or to get back at somebody. Let me make that clear. My fabrications were merely for my own amusement.

A few weeks later I sidled up to Murray Horowitz, the biggest loudmouth in the alley, and told him in strictest confidence that Charlie Chaplin, THE Charlie Chaplin, had just flown in from Switzerland and was going to be in the audience that evening. As I planned, he couldn’t bear to keep that juicy bit of information to himself. That evening clown alley got out their best outfits, polished their clown shoes until they could see their own grotesque reflection in them, and nearly fractured their necks craning them to look for the great cinema clown out in the swirling audience.

Only Tim Holst was not taken in by the rumor. Eyeing me placidly going about my business without so much as a shiver of excitement, he pointedly asked “How come you aren’t all over goose pimples about this?”

“Oh, I dunno” I replied, pretending to file my fingernails with a rubber chicken. “You can’t believe everything you hear around here, ya know.”

Holst just shook his head and went back to repairing his clown wig, which was basically a latex bathing cap with red yarn glued onto it in wild disarray. The asking price for a Bob Kelly or Zauder professional clown wig was several hundred dollars. A little too pricey for most of us First of Mays.   

When the show reached California in the late summer I began yipping in a piercing high-pitched voice every time I powdered down my greasepaint with talcum.

“What in the sam hill is a matter witch you?” Chico finally asked. “You sound like leaky pipes ina radiator!”

“Well, if you must know” I replied diffidently, “I’ve got Rimsky-Korsakov Syndrome. I just went to the doctor and he told me if I keep using talcum powder I’ll break out into wattles and never recover.”

“Oh jeez, Tork. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize . . . “ Chico began.

“Never mind” I told him bravely. “I’ll manage. I’m switching to potato starch.”

Chico spread the word that Tork was suffering from a very grave condition called, he thought it was, Rinky-Kordacop disease. There was suddenly a lot of gruff sympathy for me in the alley. The boss clown, LeVoi Hipps, excused me from holding a rope for one on the showgirls during the Spanish Web number.

“Yew git a little rest in, y’hear? I kin find some other booger tew do that there number” he told me as he patted me on my shoulder consolingly. Who was I to refuse his kind offer?

I am happy to say that I finally outgrew my need to tell outrageous whoppers, and I haven’t told a taradiddle of any kind since that first season with Ringling Brothers. Not a single one. By the way, have you heard the latest about those Russian hackers . . . ?

Memories of Thailand: Opening a Sushi Bar

In 2008 I lived in Thailand. 

  I found that all the upscale restaurants featured sushi, usually as a buffet.  Help yourself to all you could eat, was the motto; and the farang (foreigner) tourists did just that – gobbling it up like potato chips and onion dip back home in Texarkana.  Whether it was uni wrapped in nori or futomaki with squid, they slathered it with wasabi and sent it down the hatch. Eating in excess is part of the tourist experience in Thailand.  And never a bottle of Pepto Bismol to be found!

I noticed that the Thais, though, didn’t eat sushi.  This puzzled me, as they are great lovers of seafood, and will grill just about anything they catch from the ocean – including old boots and waterlogged coconuts. 

When I became proficient enough in Thai to ask my girlchum Joom why the Thais didn’t like sushi, her explanation rambled over historical fact and fiction like a bitter melon vine.  The Japanese fishing fleet was ruining the fishing banks along the Gulf of Thailand, plus, during World War Two, when the Thai army was beating back the Japanese advance, the wily Nipponese left poisoned fish behind for the brave but hungry Thai soldiers – so Thais don’t trust any kind of seafood dish from Japan – especially since they like to chop up fugu and put it in their soy sauce! 

Her explanation did not deter me from my dream of opening a sushi bar on the beach in Rayong.  I had been teaching English, which provided a steady but modest income, so I thought a sushi bar right on a tourist beach would be my ticket to the big time.  Of course, I would need the help of my girlchum, Joom.  A girlchum, in Thailand, is a fiancé that’s not paid for yet.  You pay the parents a dowry on the installment plan. 

Joom explained how easy it was to open a restaurant in Thailand.  We’d find a spot outside the city limits of Rayong; that way there’d be no license needed to sell beer – as long as we gave the local cop five-hundred baht a month as “tea money”.  Rent for a beachfront open-air shack that seated twenty would be around seven-thousand baht per month.  Utilities would be another thousand baht per month.  And the boats brought in the catch early each morning to the fish market in Rayong, where we could buy all we needed for a few hundred baht per day.  The only challenge would be to find the right kind of seaweed, like nori, to wrap the sushi in.  I could only find nori imported from Japan, at a frightful price.  We settled on wrapping the sushi in klong weed – an endemic green that grows along the banks of every canal in Thailand. Cement chairs and tables (the only kind that can withstand the tropical heat & bugs) would set me back another thousand baht.  And the restaurant-style refrigerator would cost about twenty-thousand baht.  All together, we were looking at start-up costs of around thirty- thousand baht – the rate of exchange being thirty baht to one dollar, so I needed to pony up one-thousand dollars. 

But before investing my life savings I needed to know if the Thais could actually make sushi, since they never ate it.   Joom assured me that Thais are world-class cooks by nature; their DNA includes msg.  We downloaded recipes and instructions from the Internet; Joom and several of her cousins (everybody who needs a job in Thailand is a cousin) went to work in the kitchen – and produced an inedible mish-mash that smelled bad, tasted worse, and would not pass muster for famine relief anywhere. They could not get the hang of it.  I nearly cut my thumb off while slicing some squid.  So we finally called it quits.  I threw the mangled experiments into our fish pond, where the tilapia and turtles feasted on it happily, and took the cases of Chang beer down to the beach, with Joom and her cousins, where they disposed of it with the help of grilled clams dug straight from the sand.

Publicity Director for Culpepper & Merriweather Circus

In 1984 I once again thought I had given up the circus for good.  That year began auspiciously enough, working as a clown for the prestigious Nameless Shrine Circus.  We played a lot of dates in Canada and the U.P. of Michigan, moving from one squat hockey arena to the next in the early spring.  There were five of us in clown alley, all seasoned veterans, and getting along well.  I had the coloring book concession; for every book I sold I got two dollars.  So the money was good.  Initially. 

Things  fell apart that summer, when all the clowns but me left the show.  They all apparently knew what I didn’t; that the Nameless Shrine Circus always did good business in the spring, and then went to hell in a hand basket for the summer, when they sporadically played rodeo grounds and county fairgrounds in the western United States.  I had to carry all the clown gags myself, and discovered, to my embarrassment and dismay, that I have no talent as a producing clown, making big props for big ring gags.  My forte has always been pantomime.  But the owner of the Nameless show hated pantomime; he wanted explosions and dummies flying around on bungee cords.  When I couldn’t deliver the goods, he hired some Mexican clowns to produce the gags (and I did become good friends with them, and do have a lot of respect for Latino joeys.)  I didn’t realize I had become a fifth wheel on the show, not until the owner asked me, as a special favor, to travel ahead of the show to Bentonville, Arkansas, to do some pre-show publicity.  He handed me some cash, told me to get a decent motel room, and wished me luck.  I sure needed it, because the show never came to Bentonville, Arkansas, and when I finally contacted the owner he calmly said my services were no longer needed, and this was the kiss-off.  I had spent every last cent I had, waiting for the show, so I pawned my wedding ring for bus fare back to Minnesota, where my wife and kids were expecting the big paychecks to continue.

After that debacle, I swore I’d never follow the tanbark trail again.

Fast forward to 2005; I was working for the Utah State Tax Commission, as a tax collector.  Y’know, the fellow you never want to hear from on the phone.  I garnisheed the wages of hard-working blue collar workers, revoked licenses when businesses fell behind on their sales tax, and put liens on the homes of little old ladies to squeeze every last dime out of them.  All I needed was a black cape and long mustache to twirl and I’d be Snidely Whiplash.  One morning as I was knotting my tie I had a flashback to a time and place where all I ever did was make people laugh.  Calling in sick, I spent the day repairing my resume and sending it out to every circus I could think of.

A week later Trey Key called me.  Would I be interested in a clown job with Culpepper & Merriweather Circus?  You bet I would!

I resigned from the Tax Commission and was down in Hugo, Oklahoma, in two weeks, with my clown  trunk crammed with refurbished costumes and props.  After talking things over with Trey, he made a decision that profoundly impacted my life and career.  He told me to forget about being a clown for the show; he was going to send me out as the Publicity Director.

Wow!

He personally trained me in the job, all the ins and outs of dealing with sponsors and maximizing every free publicity outlet.  I also had to inspect every patch of ground where the circus would set up, to make sure it was adequate and safe.  Low telephone wires are the bane of any mud show’s existence.

Then he gave me my itinerary and wished me god speed.  I was to report in to him each evening by cell phone about each town and each sponsor I had visited.  (This was the first time I’d ever used a cell phone; I felt like Buck Rogers!)

I’d like to say I was an immediate and decided success in my new role of Publicity Director, but the truth was it took me a long time to internalize all the information and advice Trey gave me.  Too long, that first season.  I was in Spencer, Iowa, on the Fourth of July, when Trey called to bluntly say that things weren’t working out as well as he had hoped.  Attendance had been way down for the past six weeks, and he was laying off staff so he could keep the show on the road.  He’d have to let me go.  Since he did it in a straightforward and professional manner, I didn’t mind it so much.  Besides, I’d just been to the local radio station, KICD, where I’d left off a stack of tickets for the DJ’s to give away during their shows, and discovered that the station manager was an old friend of mine from Brown Institute back in Minneapolis.  He’d said that if I ever wanted to go to work for him he’d have a place for me.

Don’t you love it when things like that happen?

So, I went from being Publicity Director for Culpepper & Merriweather Circus to Talk Show Host for KICD-AM Radio, in Spencer, Iowa.  As such, I promoted the eating of canned sardines (one of my prime fetishes; they’re GOOD for you, and so cheap!); I cracked an egg on the sidewalk on Main Street on the hottest day of the year to see if it would fry – it didn’t – and I single-handedly revived the ancient art of making corn cob jelly by inviting a 90-year-old woman onto the show to demonstrate how it is done.  (The jelly, I may say, makes a good relish for an Iowa chop.)

But that’s NOT the end of the story . . . “good day” . . . as Paul Harvey might say.

The next spring Trey Key calls me to ask if I want to give the circus publicity job another try.  He needs someone fast.

Well, Land o’ Goshen!  Here I am settled into a comfortable job in a friendly little town in Iowa, making decent money and becoming of a local celebrity.  What do you think I told him?

I’d be in Hugo in two weeks.