Clowning in Canada with Tim Tegge and Jerry Bisbee

How Tim Tegge managed to keep his wardrobe spotless in the Canadian wilderness I'll never know!

Up in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, in the year 1987, I witnessed second-generation clown Tim Tegge dye his hair purple at a beauty salon to celebrate a new romance. Despite my years associating with clowns of all stripes of eccentricity and psychosis, I had never seen a man go into a beauty parlor for any reason except to pick up his wife or girlfriend. Men got their hair clipped at a barbershop -- women got theirs done at a beauty parlor. And never the twain shall meet. But then, I should have suspected that Tegge was destined to outrage tonsorial propriety when he had me help him film a homemade music video in a local Ukrainian cemetery. He thought the Byzantine architecture of the crypts in the background showed off his willowy physique to good advantage.

He and his partner Jerry Bisbee had been brought in during the Canadian leg of our circus tour when all the other clowns except me quit the show. It was not so much a pay dispute as a contretemps over the mileage. The show was scheduled to make some fantastic leaps between towns in the western provinces of Canada, where hockey arenas are few and far between. Some of the overnight jumps were close to four hundred miles -- that meant packing up and driving all night and then setting up in the next burg without an hour of sleep. And the roads held no charm for an overnight drive. They were as buckled and potholed as a lunar landscape. After doing the math, clown alley figured out that they would barely break even after paying for gas at Canadian prices. So they walked out, en masse. All except me. I had a wife and kids to feed back home in Minnesota, and I was bunking in back of one of the show trucks -- so mileage was not a concern to me. Neither was sleep, since I could lay down and snooze while the show driver wended his weary way over the washboard wastes.

Tim and Jerry did not seem to mind the long hauls. They drove a beat up old Pontiac Brougham, navigating it onto the lot in the wee hours of the morning and sleeping comfortably in it until brunch each day. The show did not offer a cook tent, so I joined them each morning to hunt down a suitable hashery for desayuno. Foolish dreamer that I was, I had imagined a Canadian breakfast to be one of feathery light flapjacks drowning in maple syrup, with hearty slabs of Canadian bacon on the side. The reality was porridge -- a thick gruel that would be more at home in a cement mixer. This was served with watery poached eggs. And the bacon was barely cooked or else burnt to cinders. Lunch and dinner were not much better. Everything was boiled to a sponge-like consistency, or fried in axle grease. This is because Canadians believe that eating out should be a penance for past misdeeds, not a pleasurable holiday from the home kitchen.

Tegge did a classic white face and Jerry did an Auguste. And when I say classic white face I mean lots of elegant costuming, right down to the immaculate white gloves he wore during the entire show. To this day I don’t know how he managed to keep his wardrobe so clean and crisp while we traversed the wilds of Alberta and British Columbia. We ran into nothing but rain and mud, and most towns offered only hand laundries where you gave them your dirty things and got them back in three or four days -- an impossibility for us, as we only spent one day in each town. I wound up washing everything in a galvanized tub full of cold water and Oxidal. Then hanging it over the engine hood of the truck I lived in to dry off when the motor was left running. This left my costumes dull-looking and smelling of diesel.

As a producing clown Tim Tegge has few equals. His knowledge of clown gags is encyclopedic. When he and Jerry joined up with me in Canada he got out the props for a doctor’s gag and a convict chase from the trunk of their Pontiac in the twinkling of an eye. We did simple, basic slapstick routines -- no fancy juggling or musical malarky. And the crowds ate it up.

At first I was a bit stand-offish with the two of them, because I was afraid they were brought in to replace me -- that I would be redlighted in some dismal jerkwater village on the Canadian prairie, left to fend for myself. And I found out years later that the show owner would indeed have abandoned me in the middle of nowhere when Tim and Jerry showed up but for the fact that Tegge threatened to turn around and go back to the States if the owner did such a dastardly deed.

  

As we worked together in a professional way I came to enjoy their company away from the show immensely. We commiserated with each other over Bisbee’s search for a decent cup of Canadian coffee, Tegge’s quest for a cheap Canadian beer, and my growing nostalgia for my family back in the States. I had picked up a head cold while in Yorkton, which held on with the tenacity of a lamprey eel -- it drained me of energy and ambition. Without the companionship of Tim and Jerry that season I doubt I would have stuck it out.

When we finally crossed the border back into the States we had to part ways -- they were contracted for ten weeks with a show in California, while our show was playing the hinterlands of Montana. As it turned out, I left the show in Minot, North Dakota, after getting word that Amy, my wife, had suffered a miscarriage.

After I was back home and saw Amy nursed back to health I asked her if I could get my hair dyed purple as a way to celebrate her recovery and our love for each other. Absolutely not, she replied immediately. -- just think of the uproar it would cause in church the next Sunday, and the weird example it would set for our kids. So I went to the local barber and got a crew cut instead. That showed her who wore the baggy pants in the family!

There is an old woman in Flint

There is an old woman in Flint

Who thought of divorce as a sprint.

She did it so often

Her purse it did soften --

She lives now on hotdogs and mint.

The Cruelty of Clown Alley

Classic American clowning -- which is as extinct as the public telephone booth -- was refreshingly sadistic. Terry Parsons and I once calculated that a typical Ringling performance contained: 2 decapitations; 25 pies in the face; 76 pratfalls; 66 face slaps; 32 blows to the head with a foam rubber mallet; 99 kicks to the keister; 17 black powder explosions; 7 buckets of water in the face or down the pants; and 1 defenestration.

The rough and tumble slapstick of a former generation of clowns was cathartic. I remember as a small child watching the Three Stooges on TV, where I observed with interest Moe blowing a cloud of black pepper into Curly’s face -- with the very gratifying result that he sneezed himself down a flight of stairs. At the time my sister Linda was only nine months old, and I resented her taking up all of mom’s attention. So I took the pepper shaker from the kitchen, poured a generous portion into the palm of my chubby little hand, and blew it into Linda’s face while she was incarcerated in her playpen. She howled and sneezed in a very pleasing manner until mom came rushing in, demanding to know what in god’s name had happened. When I told her, she applied the business side of a hairbrush to my backside -- which continued to glow like a beacon for weeks afterwards, and made sitting a chancy proposition. Still, it was worth it. I couldn’t wait to try out an eye poke on the next person who annoyed me.

Good slapstick is sadistic but never gory. As Felix Adler once said: “Clowns are made of India rubber -- they bounce right back from anything.” And in the screwball romantic comedies of the mid-30’s it always seems that at the end of the movie Irene Dunne would wallop Cary Grant across the chops, he would return the favor, and then there was a dissolve to the two of them getting married while grinning like idiots. What a formula: Fisticuffs = Romance!

While Steve Smith and I leaned more towards the traditional British music hall pantomime when we worked as the advance clowns for Ringling, we always maintained a transparent respect for down and dirty comic violence. We had a swordfight routine in which I finally best Smith, forcing him to fall on top of an empty barrel and then jackknife into it. Mystified as to his whereabouts, I circle the barrel, stooping low to gaze about me -- which allows Smith to skewer me repeatedly through the bunghole. We discovered that the more he impaled my rear end the louder the laughter grew -- until we compressed the whole routine down to me throwing him into the barrel and then getting poked in the butt for the next ten minutes. Without the swordplay -- which we initially thought was pretty darn funny -- the bit became the biggest laugh generator in our two-man show. Go figure.

In reaction to the influx of European musical clowns back in the early 70’s, Smith and I spent a long afternoon trying to figure out how to do a gag where every musical instrument we pick up either explodes, catches on fire, or both explodes and catches on fire. The blow off would be a grand piano devouring us. We abandoned the project, which I still think has great potential, after doing the math and figuring out the constant destruction of musical instruments would bankrupt us pretty fast. Besides, Spike Jones and His CIty Slickers pretty much took care of that concept long before Smith and I started clowning.

My last year with the Ringling clown alley, Terry Parsons and I decided on a reductionist approach to violent slapstick. We each brought a chair out on the track, solemnly bowed to each other, sat down facing each other, and then began slapping each other in the face, tit for tat. Of course we pulled our punches. But that’s all the gag was -- buffeting each other on the cheek. For reasons that remain enigmatic to me, our fearsome Performance Director, Charlie Baumann, thought our little routine was extremely “Urkomisch.” He would pause in his rounds during the show to enjoy us slapping each other silly. He said in Germany this was a traditional clown routine, called “Schlagen Fest.” I think he just enjoyed the cruelty of it. Anyway, the audience didn’t seem to mind -- we never got any catcalls or rotten chayotes thrown at us.

Alas, the gag came to an untimely end one day when Terry and his wife Danuta attended a birthday party between shows at the Polish train car. The vodka flowed a little too freely into Terry. That night when we did the Schlagen Fest he nearly knocked me out of my chair on the first slap. I stood two more overenthusiastic cuffs before staggering off with a nose bleed. The next day Terry apologized profusely, but the damage had been done. I held no grudge against him, but decided that a solo gag would guarantee my face did not become a punching bag again.

Terry Parsons was a slapstick reductionist

There was a lawmaker in Raleigh

There was a lawmaker in Raleigh

Who thought equal voting a folly.

He thought to restrict

The vote to hand-picked

Stooges -- but he’s off his trolley.

The Adventures of Tim Laughingstock. The Terrible Thingamabob. 13.

Have you ever been given a gift you didn’t want, or didn’t know what to do with? That was now Tim Laughingstock’s dilemma, pretending to be Warden Um of Larry’s Lockup. After he made sure every prisoner had been fed a piece of hum cake, and that all the guards took a bath, trimmed their beards, and exchanged their heavy leather boots for wooden clogs, he didn’t know what to do next.

“Why don’t you let all the prisoners go, and march the guards off a cliff?” suggested Gullet the Ghoul, whom Tim had released and made his secretary. The thought of all those guard cadavers just waiting for him at the base of a cliff sent a shiver of pleasure down his short spine.

“But I have no idea if any of the prisoners are really dangerous or not. Were they all put in here unjustly like me -- like us -- or do some of them deserve to be here?” Tim mused more to himself than to Gullet.

Tim’s perplexity lasted until he went to bed that night, when he dreamed a dream.

In his dream he saw a huge mountainside that was lit up with the words “Exit Interview.” He climbed the mountainside, fought off a few dragons at the top of it, rescued a beautiful maiden, and rode off with her into a forest full of dancing hedgehogs and skinks.

The dream was sent to him by Poorstar, the minor deity that ruled over paperwork and filing cabinets. Now that Tim’s heart was open to heroics, he had been assigned a deity, or a muse, to champion him and guide him. In Tim’s case, that happened to be the god of paperwork. Poorstar was a very minor member of the pantheon of gods -- truth be told, he hadn’t had a client or protege in nearly four hundred years. So he was delighted to be given such a promising young hero to chaperone as Tim Laughingstock. But Poorstar was so out of practice that he couldn’t think of anything to do but send Tim a dream full of humdrummeries.

Still, when Tim awoke next morning he immediately called for his head guard -- Snoozlepuss. This worthy was aroused from his slumbers -- he slept a good deal, and was usually eating the rest of the time -- and quickly pulled on his red shirt, blue trousers, and wooden clogs, and presented himself to Warden Um as smartly turned out as a brass weathervane.

He stood stock still in front of the Warden and saluted with such ferocity that the breeze from his upraised hand blew paper’s off the Warden’s desk.

“Who is considered the very worst prisoner in our lockup?” Tim asked him.

Snoozlepuss did not hesitate in his answer.

“Without a shred of doubt it must be the Thingamabob!” he replied.

“The what?” asked Tim.

“We call him the Thingamabob, sir, because he has been locked up for so long and become so ferocious and uncontrollable that no one remembers his name or where he comes from or why he’s even locked up!”

“I want to see him right now” said Tim calmly. “Send your strongest guards to fetch him and bring him here please.”

Snoozlepuss turned nearly white with fear.

“But, but, sir -- no one has been in his cell in years! We just throw in some soup bones and a bowl of water twice a day, through the grate at the bottom of his door. He howls back at the guards and shakes the door until it nearly breaks in two. I wouldn’t be in the same cell with him for all the owl pies in Boogle Hollow.”

The mention of Boogle Hollow set Tim’s temper ablaze. And it was now a heroic temper.

“Frap mappit, man! I want to do an exit interview with him. If you’re too foozled of him, I’ll go get him myself!” So saying, Tim arose and strode out of the room. Then sheepishly came back to contritely ask the head guard to take him to the Thingamabob’s cell -- since Tim himself didn’t know where it was.

Down, down they went -- past the snarling wombats and the sulking sulfur snails. Into the bowels of the rotten earth they descended -- until the very air turned gritty with a rooting foulness. Their torches guttered in the fetid atmosphere, nearly going out. It stank of stale rust and overboiled cabbage. They arrived at the very most bottom of the very lowest dungeon. There was only one door, and it was heavily padlocked and chained shut. A guttural murmur came from behind it. With quivering fingers, Snoozlepuss unbolted and unchained the door -- then fled back up the stairs in sheer terror -- leaving Tim alone with the terrible Thingamabob. But a man who has faced albino bumperstumpers and ishgobs, not to mention pickled lumdiddles, is not going to back down for some paltry Thingamabob!

Deciding that politeness was just as heroic as rudeness, Tim gently knocked on the thick wooden door and murmured “Would you mind coming out, Thinga . . . er, ah, whoever you are? We seem to have misplaced your records and would like to update them.”

With a tremendously disappointing creak, the heavy wooden door slowly swung open to reveal a perfectly ordinary man -- who was very well-dressed to boot!

Tim lowered his arms, which he had put up to fight off the terrible Thingamabob, to gape like a beached eelpout.

“Allow me to introduce myself” said the well-dressed man. “I’m Sir Cornelius Cornwit Gnawson. I believe my older brother Lawrence is the steward of this dungeon retreat, is he not?”

“Well . . . “began Tim uncertainly. “He rode out a while back to organize guided tours for trees. He felt they needed to travel around instead of standing in the same place all the time.”

“Ah, that sounds like Larry! But, pardon my decayed manners! Who might you be?”

“Oh, I’m the new Warden. Warden Um. Appointed by your brother Larry -- I mean Sir Lawrence.”

“Happy to make your acquaintance, young man. Would you care to step in for a cup of pimento wine and a slice of hazy pudding?”

Tim did not know what to say, so he simply went into the cell -- which turned out to be an elegantly furnished apartment with the sweet smell of mallows and cucumber honey. He sat in a plush upholstered chair, still speechless, as Cornelius puttered about -- at last bringing him a plate of hazy pudding and a full cup of pimento wine. Both of which tasted wonderfully fresh. The prison fare, even for the Warden, was usually potatoes boiled to death with lumps of fatty meat burnt to a crisp. And the potatoes were getting spoiled, since there was a madman in the potato bin who kept hollering he wanted to get out.

When Tim finally found his tongue again, he could not frame his questions in a coherent manner.

“What? Where? How? When do you . . . ? Do you mean to tell me . . . ?”

But Sir Gnawson’s younger brother kindly overlooked Tim’s befuddlement and answered his questions in a few well-chosen words.

“Larry furnished this place for me years ago, so I could pursue my work in peace and quiet. I bang on the door occasionally just to keep the guards from bothering me. Over there is a tunnel that leads to the nearby village of Woolly Willows, where I stroll each day for supplies and fresh air. Since I make no demands on anyone here, I believe dear Larry forgot all about me some time ago. I am perfectly happy and content living and working here.”

Starting to recover from his surprise, Tim finally managed to ask “What kind of work do you do, sir?”

“I am a writer” said Sir Cornelius Cornwit Gnawson “of fantasy novels.”

Meeting John Toy

Information on John Toy is hard to come by.

Back in 1990, during a hiatus from circus clowning when my wife Amy and I bought a house on Como Avenue in Minneapolis so our six kids would not spill into the streets like a pack of stray dogs anymore, I got a phone call from an old clown -- John Toy. He said that a mutual friend of ours, Robin Shaw, told him I was a very nice guy and a former Ringling clown. I hadn’t heard from Robin in years -- not since she got mad at me for pouring ketchup on a shepherd’s pie she’d baked for me down at Winter Quarters. Toy said he’d like to get together sometime soon to talk about the ‘old days’ at Ringling. I sensed a loneliness in his voice, so although I was not partial to meeting strangers to wallow in nostalgia I agreed to meet him the next day at Aarone’s -- a bar and grill my dad managed on Hennepin Avenue. They had recently upgraded the place -- “for the damn carriage trade,” as my dad snorted -- so it was now a decent place for a meal.

But the next day there was an emergency at work and I couldn’t make it. I worked for Fingerhut Catalog Telemarketing as an assistant sales manager -- we were always chronically short of people to man the phones, relying heavily on penurious students from the University of Minnesota. The student newspaper had raked up enough muck to run an article about how underpaid and overworked Fingerhut telemarketers were -- half of them walked out after reading the story. Ted Deikel, the CEO, told our office he still expected us to meet our monthly sales quotas -- so all the management, including me, had to get on the horn to sell Corningware casserole dishes and percale pillow protectors to little old ladies in Bemidji. We worked double tides, so I barely had time to see my wife and kids, let alone visit with John Toy.

We rescheduled our tet-a-tet for the following month, November. That’s when all the carnival workers laid off for the winter and needed something to tide them over until the marks came out of hibernation in the spring. A dozen or so carnies always showed up at our office for work, They were extraordinarily good at selling (and lying) over the phone. As long as they didn’t cut the cake too wide we turned a blind eye to their slightly larcenous sales pitch. They moved a lot of product with a minimum of customer backwash. I could then go back to a more relaxed schedule, monitoring sales calls and reminding the staff to ‘stick to the script’ and ‘smile and dial.’

This time John Toy and I agreed to meet at Bridgeman’s Ice Cream in Dinkytown, by the U of M campus. But the day before our meeting my son Adam found a rusty old butcher knife in a trash can on his way to school and decided to bring it into his classroom for show and tell. He was immediately suspended until Amy and I could go in to give the principal an acceptable alibi for his ‘threatening’ behavior. It took us several days to convince the insanely cautious school authorities that Adam was just a curious little boy, not a homicidal psychopath.

I apologized profusely to Toy for this second postponement. Feeling slightly guilty and foolish, I invited him and his wife over for dinner. Come Hades or highwater, we would meet at long last.

But then his wife developed a serious illness that kept her hospitalized for weeks. He did nothing but weep during our last phone conversation. I fully intended to go over to his apartment, but a blizzard dumped a foot of snow on us and I put my back out shoveling the walk. By the time a chiropractor had me walking upright again John Toy’s phone number was disconnected. I had not taken the trouble to ask for his street address during our previous conversations.

So we never met. Years later when I finally found Robin Shaw’s email address out in Los Angeles I sent her a note asking for information about John Toy. But she never replied.  

The only information available on the internet about John Toy is a New York Times article from 1985. It reads in part:

John Toy clowned with many circuses, he was personally acquainted with many elephants, and he has stories to tell. I like his stories because they remind me of what Eudora Welty writes that she finds in the stories of Chekhov: ''What is real in life - and what a Chekhov story was made to reflect with the utmost honesty,'' she writes, ''may be at the same time what is transient, ephemeral, contradictory, even on the point of vanishing before our eyes.''

It is hard for me to conceive of anything with elephants as ephemeral, but in John Toy's memory the circus is a series of fragile, fleeting moments. They were good days, he says, but it wasn't all wonderland and spangles. He talks about clowns he worked with, marvels my somber 10-year-old self missed: Emmett Kelly, trying to sweep the spotlight from the sawdust, or holding out his pocket handkerchief to catch any Wallenda who might tumble from the high wire. He tells me about Gargantua (''the world's most terrifying living creature!'') a gorilla bought by Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey from a woman in Brooklyn who kept him as a house pet.

''I was lousy, terrible, when I first broke in,'' John Toy says, but with glitter on his nose and a heart painted on his forehead, he learned to use explosives and to fall flat on his face gracefully and competently (most of the time). Once in a clown band he was playing cymbals. ''The conductor kicked me in the rear,'' he said, ''and I fell on top of the cymbals and broke most of my ribs.'' He went on with the show.

He says he still doesn't know what is funny, but whatever it is, it should be done quickly.

At home in his apartment John Toy keeps his old trunk, full of costumes and the long, long shoes he designed for himself. Somewhere he still has a can of clown white. He hasn't clowned in almost 20 years, but practically every night he dreams about the circus. He does not dream about performing, about his time in the ring. Rather, his dream is always that he is putting on his makeup, getting ready for the show. ''After all,'' he says, ''most of the work was preparation. Two hours out of 24 are not that many.''

Robin Shaw, in the center

The Vigilantes of Clown Alley

As a First of May I was awfully judgmental & stupid

A young boy's definition of 'hygiene' is rather flexible. At least mine was. I was constantly at loggerheads with my mother over her insistence that I change underwear every day. At the time, this seemed rather drastic to me. Who would ever see my underwear, or ever be offended if it began to reek a teeny weeny bit? Changing it once a week seemed the saner course for a young man busy with long sweaty bike rides in the summer and intense ice skating sessions in the winter.
The constant washing of face and hands that were demanded of me prior to each meal at home were also an onerous and certainly unnecessary burden imposed by a germaphobic parent. Her high-handed approach to cleanliness was not next to godliness -- it was next to torture!
But as I matured (or at least my body matured -- there is still some debate in academic circles as to whether my mental abilities have ever extended beyond the capacity of an eight-year-old) I found that soap and water, and a good deodorant, were not the incredible imposition I had once thought; indeed, I realized if I was ever to snag a girl friend I would need to be as clean as a hound's tooth, if not as sharp. So I brushed my teeth and combed my hair and lathered up once a day -- and much good did it do me in the romance department. Girls not only wanted a sanitized boyfriend, but one with money and a car. Pfui!

It was a bitter lesson, one that I took with me to the Ringling clown alley in the year 1971 -- along with my by now entrenched habits of normal cleanliness.

Maintaining hygienic standards in clown alley took some doing. First there was the daily application, and then removal, of the heavy greasepaint. We didn't use any of that namby-pamby powdery stuff you see in stage productions, but good old Stein's Clown White -- a thick and oily white paste that stayed on despite sweat and strain -- and that came off unwillingly only with industrial-strength mineral oil. And even then there'd still be streaks of it in odd corners of the face and around the ears when vigilance was lax.  

My costumes were constantly under siege from animal fluids -- everything from tiger urine (they could direct a stream with unerring accuracy up to ten feet away from their cage) to the watery feces of the elephants after they had raided a handy dumpster. Not to mention the gallons of white goo that were flung around during the ring gags. It consisted mostly of shaving soap and glycerin, and it dried to a thin white crust that was as hard to dislodge as cement.

We were all kept busy washing, scrubbing, and brushing. The hobo clowns, like Otto Griebling and Mark Anthony, were doubly jealous of their personal sanitation; they kept their fingers rigorously manicured and doused themselves with pints of Old Spice. Even then, audience members would sometimes wrinkle their noses at one of them and exclaim "Pee-yoo, does that bum stink!"

But there was one holdout in clown alley who did not follow accepted hygienic practises. I'll call him 'Kyle' for the purposes of this narrative. He was a First of May, one of my fellow students from the Ringling Clown College in Venice, Florida.

Kyle disdained the use of mineral oil for makeup removal. He used Ponds cold cream, not very effectively. The outlines of his Auguste makeup were still clearly visible when he quit clown alley each night. He did not shower because, he claimed, he caught cold very easily. He shaved only intermittently. He rarely trimmed his nails, and the grime underneath them was as potent as night soil from any Third World country.

In other words, he was as filthy and smelly as a goat. How he ever got a contract with the show is a mystery on par with what actually started the infamous Hartford Circus Fire back in 1944.

And he kept his roomette on the circus train in the same squalid shape as himself. These roomettes had originally been the premier accommodations on the crack train lines between New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, back in the 1920's and 30's. But by the time Ringling Brothers purchased the cars they were practically slums on wheels. So we clowns had our work cut out for us just to keep our roomettes one step above a ghetto. They were dusty, drafty, and uncarpeted, but with a little elbow grease most of us managed to keep them somewhat civilized.

But not Kyle. He never changed the sheets on his Murphy bed; loved to eat fried chicken in his room and scatter the bones around like a Norman baron feeding his mastiffs; and he used his fold down sink as a urinal. The consequence was a new herd of cockroaches every few weeks, which would stampede out from his foul den to the surrounding roomettes -- including mine!

As spring swiveled to summer, Kyle's personal hygiene grew worse -- or at least the cumulative effects of his existing state of filth grew more offensive. There was talk of vigilante action.

 When the show reached Anaheim in July Kyle was unceremoniously removed from his noisome roomette late one night for a complete hosing down. I was not part of this posse, but I heard that they were not very gentle with him. The group also cleaned and scrubbed out his roomette, smashing family photos and other keepsakes while in the grip of their Lysol mania.

The next day Kyle showed up in clown alley sullen and bruised, but very clean. For the rest of that season Kyle kept his nose, and everything else, clean. If he began to slip he was grimly reminded that another midnight ablution could be arranged.

Today such brutal and direct action would certainly be condemned and probably prosecuted as a hate crime. I look back on that episode myself with lingering discomfort and guilt. But what else could have been done? We all asked him to please clean up his act prior to the outrage; our requests met with nothing but a grimy sneer. In the close-packed and volatile world of clown alley Kyle was just asking for trouble.

He did not get invited back for a second season with the circus. Many years later, at a Clown College reunion, I saw him sitting by himself in the corner of the hotel Hospitality Suite, smoking a cigarette. He would not make eye contact with me, so I didn't go over to say hello. He was wearing a light yellow polyester sports coat and white slacks and looked perfectly normal and clean to me. Somebody told me later he worked in Las Vegas as a lounge singer in some of the second string casinos. I remembered then -- he always had a pretty good baritone and used to sing cheerful Broadway show tunes a lot -- before the Night of the Hose.

A Cup of Premium Coffee Costs How Much?

Eight dollars a cup for some joe

Would give my billfold lumbago.

Just why should I spend

On premium blend

Enough for a box of bordeaux?

Mutiny in Clown Alley

The Ringling clown alley where I started as a First of May back in 1971 patiently put up with a lot of things. Bad lighting. Dirt. Lack of decent chairs to sit in. Fluctuating temperatures that left us freezing in one town and broiling in the next. Rats in our trunks. Pigeons in the rafters dropping their soft white regards on our heads. The smelly proximity of elephant manure piles.  Obnoxious guest clowns. Chiggers. And once, in South Carolina, an arena management that put up signs on all the men’s rooms reading “NO CIRCUS PERSONNEL ALLOWED!” But we did come close to mutiny once -- over balloons.

We were doing a spirited balloon chase that season -- wherein an annoying balloon vendor up in the stands has his balloons stolen by a nimble clown. The vendor gives chase as the first clown passes the balloons to a second clown, and so on -- until the final clown takes a spectacular header with the balloons grasped to his chest, popping them all in a glorious burst of noise. Naturally, this required a new set of balloons for each show. The circus paid for our balloons but we had to blow them up ourselves. Which was considered a task more abhorrent than working on a chain gang. Boss clown LeVoi Hipps knew better than to ask any of the veteran clowns to blow up balloons, so he charged the First of Mays -- all twelve of us -- with the onerous job. Eager to show our worth as part of the alley, we at first took turns inflating the balloons with pride and zeal. That lasted for about one week. Then no one would do it.

LeVoi finally had to get tough. He made blowing up the balloons a punishment for minor infractions such as tardiness or excessive drunkenness (in those more elastic times a tipsy clown was not considered incapacitated, just selfish if he didn’t share his bottle of hootch.) That made the chore even more despised. Looking back, I think the main reason we hated it so much was that the show provided us with the cheapest balloons possible -- made in China of a latex so chintzy it exploded in our faces more often than not. Why we didn’t just all pitch in to buy an inexpensive foot pump to blow them up with a minimum of fuss and bother I don’t know. But then, clowns are not known for their analytical skills or cool, dispassionate reasoning. Things got so bad that at one point we had to drop the balloon chase entirely -- we refused to blow them up at all because inflating them ruined the makeup around our lips. Then Performance Director Charlie Baumann got into the act.

“Get that verdammt balloon chasing back into the show -- schnell! Or I dock your salary -- Verstehst du alle?” he roared at us one afternoon before the matinee. His message was very clear and precise, so we drew straws. Chico drew the short straw. He was stuck with blowing up balloons for the rest of the season. But, being Chico, he managed to get out of the job by the simple expedient of having his marks do it for him. For Chico was a loan shark of sorts. Many of the roustabouts, and some of the new clowns and showgirls, often fell short of funds a day or two before payday on Friday. And Chico was always glad to lend them five or ten dollars to tide them over -- for a considerable vigorish. I had to borrow from him once or twice myself. Those debtors who had trouble paying him completely back on time were offered a merciful reprieve -- if they agreed to blow up the balloons for a week. Sort of like a mafia version of Tom Sawyer’s whitewashed fence . . .   

The connection between clowns and balloons goes back to the inflated pig bladders on a stick of medieval court jesters. Or perhaps even further back -- apparently ancient vendors in Greece and Rome offered inflated sheep intestines to those with a drachma or two burning a hole in their toga. I like to think that the comic playwright Aristophanes couldn’t resist inserting some business with an inflated bladder or intestine into one of his lost Athenian comedies.

British scientist Michael Faraday invented the first latex balloons in 1824. He liked to fill them with helium and let them float away over the Kentish countryside. His balloons had to be powdered inside and out with flour to keep the tacky caoutchouc from sticking together into a flaccid uninflatable sheet.  

Modern colored balloons were first introduced at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 -- where patrons could purchase balloon zeppelins, espirals, dollies, mouse heads, and bunny heads. My researches have not yet pinpointed the exact date when pencil balloon sculpting  became identified with clowns. Magicians were using them by the late 1940’s in the Midwest. By the time the Tillotson Rubber Company came out with an improved latex pencil balloon in the 1950’s, circus clowns and balloons were already verging from the iconic to the cliche. Today the best quality circus balloons in America are made by Qualatex. In England most clowns use Betallatex brand balloons.

My favorite clown routine with balloons has always been Bigger & Bigger. You can see a masterful version of this old routine in the Laurel & Hardy movie ‘Saps at Sea.’

Another great balloon movie for clowns is the French film “The Red Balloon” by Albert Lamorisse.

The symbiosis of clowns and balloons seems to be kaput nowadays. The balloons have floated away to other venues, and clowns have become corrupted archetypes exploited for horror movies and sadly prominent in police blotters . . .

Confederate Monuments

If you are a statue with Confederate cachet

You will be torn down in haste and quickly thrown away.

Your dreams and social policy were bankrupt long ago,

And so off to the landfill your brass butt we now must tow.

It’s been a long time since you lost the War Between the States --

If it wasn’t for Abe Lincoln you would all have been inmates.

Let bygones now be bygones, and away resentment cast --

Our present troubles ought to make us overlook the past.