I was born with the desire to make people laugh. I practiced funny faces in the bathroom mirror when I was three. In kindergarten I used my brother’s pajamas as a clown costume and swiped my mother’s lipstick for greasepaint when we put on a circus for the PTA. By sixth grade I had perfected a sliding pratfall, so when the janitors were mopping the hallways I would blithely stroll past them and then let my legs slip out from under me, land on my rear, and glide several yards into the nearest wall.
In high school I continued to blossom as a buffoon. Marshall-University High School was located at 1313 15th Street Southeast in Minneapolis. It was the smallest high school in the city; the MPS department finally closed it in 1982 for efficiency reasons. I started there in 1964 and graduated in 1970. I did not much enjoy high school, refusing to have a senior photo taken for the yearbook.
The place was infested with bullies and embryonic thugs; the vice principal’s office carried a large collection of cricket bats and steel ping pong paddles that were in constant use on the backsides of nogoodniks. Being a peace-loving coward, with no pugilistic tendencies, I would have been fair game for every ruffian there if I had not started carrying a used nine iron I bought at the Goodwill Store in emulation of Bob Hope. He always had a mashie niblick or some such golf club with him during his monologues. The Marshall-U criminal element was unsure of my prowess with the club, so they left me alone for the most part.
I shared my risible instincts with some of the teachers there -- those that would not box my ears and frogmarch me down to the vice principal’s abattoir. I fondly recall my English teacher Mrs. Goetz, the wife of Peter Michael Goetz who acted at the Guthrie Theater. Pert and petite, she encouraged my literary zaniness, going so far as to allow me to present a scene from my original play “A Day at the Hospital” in class for extra credit. My play was a homage to the Marx Brothers. All that I can recall of that infantile opus now is that at one point Groucho is operating on a patient and calls for sutures. The nurse tells him they have no sutures, to which he waggles his eyebrows and replies “Then suture self!” I wrote the whole thing out in longhand and a merciful providence has insured that it disappeared a long, long time ago.
Then there was Mr. Chen, the school’s Chinese teacher. Yes, I said Chinese. For reasons that I have yet to discover, the Minneapolis Public School system hired a student at the University of Minnesota, a denizen of Taiwan, to offer classes in Mandarin as an elective course. Since the only other elective was Shop, I took Chinese. Mr. Chen was not so much interested in leading us through the intricacies of calligraphy and proper tones as in denouncing mainland China and its communist hierarchy. It was a small class -- only six of us. I used the time trying out various comic horns and rattles that I acquired from thrift stores or from ads in the back of comic books. Whenever Mr. Chen had his back to us, writing on the blackboard, I would whip out a wooden train whistle or a mini klaxon horn for a quick interruption. Initially irritated and tending to denounce me in a high shrill voice, Mr.Chen eventually became first curious and then charmed with my collection of noise makers. When I presented him with a siren whistle (which I fished out of a box of Cracker Jack) he honored the quid pro quo by giving me an ‘A.’
Another memorable instructor was Lyle Rockler -- a shirttail relative of the furrier L.A. Rockler; my mother stored her red fox fur stole with his company every summer.
Lyle (he insisted we call him Lyle and not Mr. Rockler) taught the theater class and put on the school plays. No Shakespeare or Samuel French farces for him! He preferred contemporary and controversial dramas, such as “Indians”, by Arthur Kopit. He cast me as the Grand Duke of Russia in that play -- where I scored a dazzling comedic coup on opening night by pulling out my belt instead of my sword in act one, letting my pants fall down and bringing down the house as well. Lyle let me keep that bit of business in. God bless him.
During my senior year I collaborated with fellow student Mark Frost, the future co-creator of “Twin Peaks”, on an original play we presented to the entire student body (all two hundred of them.) I should have better recall of such a seminal event in my comedic career, but honestly all I can remember about it is that I choreographed a dance between a ballerina and an atomic bomb to some music by Delibes, and that in the show itself I played one half of a pair of Siamese twins. I do remember the show bombed; the student audience threw pencils, spiral notebooks, and odd wads of bubble gum at us. Although scheduled for three performances, we only gave one. I recently looked at Mark’s website, bymarkfrost, and notice he doesn’t even mention that particular episode in his biography. I wonder why?
Sixty four years ago I was born with the desire to make people laugh, and I’ve been pretty lucky to have spent most of my adult life as a professional circus clown. The sound of a belly laugh is meat and drink to me. Now that osteoarthritis and hyperparathyroidism have slowed me down, I’m angling for the chuckle with my pen, instead of my pratfalls. In the past six years I’ve sent hundreds of humorous poems to journalists via email, commenting wryly on their various stories. Has it paid off? Well, you be the judge. I recently wrote a poem about a bookstore article by the New York Times reporter David Streitfeld, as follows:
The book stores where I lulled away
My youthful angst from day to day
Are gone like gravy from my plate --
All licked away by cyber fate.
Where half price tomes once beckoned me,
With dull remainders almost free,
And clerks with glasses read on stools,
There’s now a Zales with chintzy jewels.
Ecommerce, you’re a villain sure --
Closing bookeries demure.
Without book havens made of bricks
I’ll just stay home and watch Netflix.
Mr. Streitfeld instantly replied to my email thus:
“you might have a future writing ransom notes.”
What comic needs anymore encouragement than that?
