Selling Insurance to Circus Clowns

That's me, bottom right. 1971.

Clown alley was a semi-autonomous state

within the larger world of the traveling

circus.  What goes on in there, who

comes to visit, and why a sudden geyser

of water might erupt onto innocent heads

outside of the alley, are all matters of high

policy not usually discussed with outsiders --

including management and the local constabulary.

While no formal passport was ever issued or

required to enter the Ringling clown alley,

all visitors, by mutual consent, were to be

scrutinized outside of the alley by one of

the veteran clowns before gaining admittance.

 This went for sweethearts, bill collectors,

reporters, pizza delivery boys, relatives,

and insurance agents.

Although I was a committed zany during my working

hours, squirting seltzer and flinging pies with deadly

humor, when I was out of makeup and out of the alley

I was a serious young man.  For one thing, I was

haunted by the memory of my Grandmother Torkildson.

 Before I left to join the circus she had come to our

house and pleaded with my mother for a room in her house,

or even a cot in the garage, as she had so very little to pay

for rent and food.  My mother, with tears in her eyes, had

to turn her down – our house was cramped as it was, and my

father, who attended the Simon LeGree school of Hard

Knocks, did not approve of any relatives besides children

moving in.  I did not want to wind up like that, and

thought the best way to avoid such a melodramatic

end would be to salt my money away in the bank and

invest it prudently.  To that end, I was always ripping

ads out of magazines and newspapers for mutual funds

and whole life insurance, sending away for their pamphlets.

One fine day, when the show was playing Philadelphia,

I was told a visitor awaited me outside the alley, having

passed muster with one of the older clowns.  I thought

it might be a girl I had met at church the previous

Sunday, so I smoothed down my bushy hair (which

I was also using for my clown wig), spritzed myself

with some Old Spice, and hurried out, only to be met

by a shambling figure swathed in a tan raincoat, even

though it was a warm sunny day in the City of Friends.

Turns out that this palooka was with a Philadelphia

insurance company which had received one of my

inquiries. He had been assigned to track me down

and pin me with an insurance policy. He introduced

himself as Dewey Moede with a damp and flabby handshake.

Not knowing any better, I invited him into the alley.

Pulling up a folding chair, he began his spiel while

I applied the greasepaint in preparation for the day’s

merrymaking chores.

He asked my age, where I was born, did I smoke, how

much did I drink, and was I married.  He then did some

tabulations on a sheet of graph paper and produced a

document that he told me indicated I would live to the

ripe old age of eighty and that if I began investing in whole

life right now, to the tune of five dollars per week, by

the age of seventy I would have enough to live a life of ease and

comfort in a broom closet in Miami Beach. Provided there were

no hurricanes.  Or, if I preferred, I could immediately invest

twenty-thousand dollars in an annuity, which I would not

start to collect on until the age of sixty-four, and could then

look forward to three square meals a day, if I didn’t mind two

of those meals being cheese and crackers.

While I found his logic interesting, I couldn’t quite see myself

committing to five whole dollars every week.  At the time

my salary was ninety-dollars a week, and I was already putting

ten of that away in a savings account each week.

I was about to voice my hesitation when there was a loud bang

behind us.  It was just Spikawopsky, making black gunpowder

squibs and testing them out to make sure they were efficacious.

 I explained this to Mr. Moede, because he seemed suddenly

rather nervous.  I told him we went through at least two

dozen exploding squibs each show, and I had never lost more

than a few singed eyebrow hairs.  He began fiddling with his

graph paper again.  While he did, I went outside of the alley

to help Swede Johnson with the new flamethrower we had

installed in the stove we used for the baker’s gag.  A nozzle

blew powdered coffee creamer over a candle flame –

creating quite a spectacular tongue of fire, about five feet

long.  It was Mr. Moede’s misfortune to come hunting me

just as Swede squeezed the bellows after I had lit the

candle.  The resulting roar of fire caught the insurance

agent completely off guard, and before I could explain

that the flame was relatively harmless – producing minor

blisters only – he was galloping up the exit ramp of the arena,

tossing aside crumpled graph paper and blank insurance forms

like confetti.

Oh well, I thought to myself, there’s always more insurance

agents – and Sunday School girls – in the next town. . . .

I Get a Snow Job at The Brave New Workshop

In 2000 my sense of humor declined to the point that instead of going out with the circus as a clown that year I took a job as a bill collector with Green Tree Financial, in Saint Paul. They collected mostly on unsecured credit card debts for motorcycles, furniture, and mobile homes. Looking back, I think I was trying to punish myself for real and imagined past indiscretions. It was one of the most horrible jobs I’ve ever held in my life, and, try as I might, I couldn’t get fired from it like I had from so many other jobs previously. I bought a Bozo Bop Bag to set up in my cubicle, beating the tar out of him after almost every minatory phone call I made. My boss told me that was an inappropriate way to handle my frustrations and to get rid of it immediately. I defied him in front of the whole office, saying he’d have to fire me first. He didn’t, and Bozo stayed with me in that gray featureless cubicle until I finally managed to get my mojo working again and go back out with the circus.

Feeling that I was immersing myself in a vat of cold vinegar, I took steps to resuscitate my flagging funny bone. I enrolled in improvisation classes at Dudley Riggs Brave New Workshop -- an improv theater group that has been around since 1958. Riggs himself was an old circus performer, working the trapeze with shows like Hagenback Wallace and Sells Floto. After I started classes I only met the guy once, in passing, and never got the chance to let him know I had a solid three-ring background. It’s just as well -- I was far from a stellar pupil at The Brave New Workshop.

“Stop falling down so much!” my instructor Melissa Peterman would implore me, almost in tears. I liked to end every improv exercise with a spectacular pratfall -- it always got a big laugh. My fellow students were considerably younger than me, and seemed fixated on sex; it turned up, one way or another, in every improv exercise we did. And I refused to go along with the dirty stuff. When it looked like a scene I was in was going to end up in a sweaty boudoir session I’d literally change the subject, fer instance:

“Let’s do it on the kitchen table, right now!” my improv partner would say, with many a suggestive wink and leer. To which I would respond by breaking into a chorus of “When You and I Were Young, Maggie.”  This did not sit well with the faculty, who upbraided me constantly for breaking the Prime Directive of improv -- always agree with your partners onstage and go along with whatever scenario they start.

A big reason I kept going with improv, even though my teachers were less than enthusiastic about my abilities, was that students could try out for the live stage show, and if they succeeded they would become part of the professional ensemble -- that got paid real moolah. But my auditions were not auspicious. We were advised to throw caution to the winds, to push the envelope, when we auditioned. So when I went up onstage for my tryout I brought along a large black plastic trash bin, in which I sat and read knock-knock jokes from Boys Life magazine. Strangely enough, this did not impress the faculty or theater management.

My one success while attending The Brave New Workshop wasn’t even onstage. It was on the radio. One day, after a glum round of improv scenes in which I floundered and finally expired like a beached oarfish, I sat in the Workshop’s basement canteen sipping insipid hot chocolate from  a vending machine that had an attitude problem, when an idea flew into my head and took immediate lodging.

“Cooking with snow” I said to no one in particular. The conceit of a cookbook made up of recipes with nothing but snow intrigued me to the extent that I brought my Walkman tape recorder to classes the next day and simply asked everyone, including instructors, one by one, “What is your favorite snow recipe?” For once, my idea went over big -- and everyone improvised recipes for snow steak, snow pie, snow pancakes, fricaseed snow, and snow soup. I edited the tape down to the five best responses and sent it into KUOM, the student radio station for the University of Minnesota -- at the suggestion of Workshop manager John Sweeney. It was an immediate hit, and snippets were played throughout the day for a full week. This didn’t make me any money, as KUOM classified my submission as a ‘humor contribution.’ Like my old pal Tim Holst always said to me: "Tork, whenever you smell money you run the other way!" But I felt that at long last my real, true sense of humor was finally blooming again. In a burst of manic self confidence I called up an old friend on the Clyde Beatty Cole Brothers Show out of Leland, Florida, and he got me a clown job before you could say “Bob’s yer uncle.” I gave notice at Green Tree and was back on the road within a week. I gifted my Green Tree boss with the Bozo Bop Bag. I hope it developed a leak.

And my Cooking with Snow idea? Well, once I was settled on the road again I planned to write all the recipes out, with a little padding of my own, and start offering the manuscript to publishers far and wide. I contacted everyone who had contributed a recipe to ask for their permission to include it in my upcoming bestseller. They were glad to give me the nod -- as long as they got a cut of the profits if the book ever got published.

I said to hell with it, and forgot about the whole thing. Imagine my chagrin when, a few years later, I read an article in Bon Appetit magazine, entitled “How to Cook with Fresh Snow.”  Then NPR offered a tongue-in-cheek ‘Cooking with Snow’ class, and The Guardian newspaper had a column about cooking with snow in their Life and Style section.

That’s when I started constantly talking to myself in a shrill, hoarse voice as I walked down the street. But since cell phones went totally mainstream at the same time, nobody really noticed me.   

Thai Girlfriends -- and Other Strange Things That Happened to Me in Thailand

Joom and I. 2011.

Old girlfriends are like ---- Oops! That's the wrong way
to start a story in this #MeToo era, isn't it? I'd like to
make it clear at the outset of this particular narrative
that I wanted to marry Joom from the first time I
met her in a restaurant and made her a balloon poodle.
That was back in 2010.
But the Thai cultural norms dictated that I first had to
pay an enormous 'bride price'to her mother up in
Jungwat Louei, which I couldn't afford. No money,
no marriage. But we remained a couple for nearly two
years. Saying any more than that would be
indiscreet. As the poet Wadsworth
put it: "Let the dead Past bury its dead!"

(And I think this is one story I won't copy and send to
daughter Daisy on her LDS mission in Southern California.
Even though I think I've handled this sensitive issue with
my usual ten-thumbed aplomb.)


My Thai girlchum Joom owned a black Toyota pickup truck that
seats five in the cab comfortably, and has a contraption on the
back that opens up into a sun roof, so an additional half dozen
people (if they’re Thai) can ride in the back. It’s a fun way to go
to the beach in Rayong after work, with her cousins and other
vaguely-connected kin grazing on som tum and sticky rice in the
back, with copious draughts of Chang beer, while Joom and I sit
in comfort up front in the air-conditioned cab.

Being a modestly-compensated ESL teacher, I always looked
for additional revenue to help support Joom and, in the
felicitous phrasing of W.S. Gilbert, her “sisters and her
cousins, whom she reckons by the dozens, and her aunts.”
One way was to use Joom’s truck as a taxi for Farangs desirous
of going up to Bangkok for the weekend. A little word of mouth
spread out among the backpackers in Ban Phe, the port that
caters to those going to Koh Samet Island, and we soon had
our hands full, or rather our truck full, of paying riders.

We did not plan on capturing a niche market, but like so many
other serendipitous things that occur in Thailand, we got one
anyways.

Mitch was a rugged six-footer with long black hair and a
love of Thai jewelry. He wore several ornate jade rings and
kept ropes of cultured pearls around his neck. We took him
up to Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok, and agreed to pick
him up in two days to bring him back down to Ban Phe to
recuperate from his surgery. We didn’t ask what kind of surgery,
we just figured him to be one of the many standard medical
tourists that Thailand attracts.

We couldn’t find Mitch when we went back to pick him
up at the hospital lobby. Luckily, she was able to wave us
down just before we gave up and left; Mitch was now Michelle.
She had had sexual reassignment surgery, at a fantastically
economical price, and without the months of intense
psychoanalysis required prior to a sex-change operation
in the US.

Having grown up in the Midwest, I initially gawked at her
like a hayseed at his first carnival, but Joom took it all in
stride. Joom complimented Michelle on her new breasts,
and then they sat down together to plan out her new wardrobe,
with me acting as interpreter. Naturally, Joom had a cousin who
ran a night market boutique in Rayong, and had an “auntie” who
worked wonders with farang hair.

Thailand is known for its unambiguous and popular 'third gender'
people, known as the 'Kathoey.' Thais have no problem believing
that a female spirit from a previous life can get trapped inside
a male body during a hinky transmigration of souls, and vice versa.
So Joom was comfortable with Mitch/Michelle from the get-go.

Michelle rested up in a rented bungalow on the beach in
Rayong, going on leisurely shopping expeditions with Joom –
I was not wanted for these excursions. Pardon me for being
sexist, but girls shopping together have their own international
language that needs no translation.

When Michelle returned home she told others who were
thinking of doing the same thing that they should recuperate,
as she had done, down on the beach in Rayong, and that they
should hire Joom to be their driver/wardrobe consultant.
Joom was a bit handicapped with a big, dumb, fat farang boyfriend –
that was me — but she knew how to send him packing
when the girl talk became intense. And Joom had a
number of men cousins who were always delighted
to squire transgendered farangs-on-the mend around town.

And so little by little we picked up a steady stream of
passengers who came to Thailand for a sex change,
and appreciated the kindness and consideration that
Joom unfailingly showed them. It was not an act or just
a mercenary ploy, either. Even if someone did not hire us as their
driver, Joom liked talking to transgendered farangs in her clipped,
eccentric English, and helping them out. She was always
especially sympathetic to new women who had to deal with
the dreaded Thai squatter, the ceramic hole in the ground
that many bathrooms still feature. You don’t get to sit down,
you literally have to squat on your haunches. Her advice to
recuperating sex-change patients who were facing this
ordeal for the first time was to take several stiff slugs of
rice whiskey prior to assuming the position. It helped
anesthetize the pain and embarrassment.

“They make big change” she told me. Then she laughed

uproariously, sputtering “They sometime forget, still go
the man bathroom!” That's what I liked about Joom; she
was crude and compassionate at the same time . . .

The Devil in the Washing Machine

Tarzan Zerbini in his prime

We were six in clown alley on the Tarzan Zerbini Shrine Circus back in 1988.

Half way through the season we were down to two clowns; the rest had succumbed to the rigors of two shows a day in primitive rodeo grounds where the dust was thick and the audiences were thin. Our juggling and magician clowns were gone; so was the producing clown, who had supplied all the clown props for our gags. There was just me and Victor – who doubled as the Human Cannon Ball. Even Lee Marx, a veteran of the show for the past thirty years, had to throw in the makeup towel after the first few weeks -- he had never fully recovered from a car crash several years earlier that had killed his wife. He walked with a limp, and the cold, damp, Canadian towns we hit at the beginning of the season provoked his thigh muscles to seize up like a car engine with a dropped piston. So he left the show in Lloydminster, Alberta -- several weeks later I got a postcard from him from his hometown in Chillicothe, Ohio, where he had met and married a mere sprig of a girl, half his age, and was going out on the road with her with one of our rivals; Circus Vargas. 

The boss still expected a grand clown gag with plenty of boffos from the two of us, so we put our bewigged heads together and came up with a weird pastiche that used every remaining piece of equipment we had between us. It went like this . . .

We come out lugging a large wicker laundry basket, full of dirty clothes. In the center of the ring is a huge washing machine (hammered hastily together out of plywood scraps and painted an unconvincing white). We begin tossing the laundry into the machine and set the dials. Working several concealed foot pedals at the base of the machine, I am doused with water and suds from the sides of the washing machine. In a passion I start beating on the washer, and Victor helpfully boosts me up so I can peer inside the rebellious contraption. And then Victor casually pushes me inside the washer. Inside we had placed a propane canister rigged up to some pipes along the top of the washer. I turn on the gas, light it, and WHOOSH, the washer is suddenly aflame! About here all logic and sanity disappears, cheerfully subsumed by the clown mandate that the bigger the disaster the bigger the laugh. While the flames roar I put on horns, a red cape and a long red tail. Then I turn off the gas and unlatch the sides of the washer, which collapse outward. The whole thing ends with me, now inexplicably changed into a leering devil, chasing Victor out of the ring with a plastic pitchfork.

 The gag went over big with small town circus crowds. What a sophisticated, urban audience would have made of it I shudder to think. Even the boss, a hard-bitten veteran of the tanbark and not given to praising his joeys, came right out and said he thought it was a pretty good gag.

When the show reached eastern Wyoming my wife brought our (then) six kids to see daddy at his job. I never traveled with my family, preferring to send my paycheck home each week. Clowns always got free room and board, such as it was. I slept in the back of the bleacher wagon and got stale donuts and tap water for breakfast. 

After the matinee I was eager to find out what my children thought of their old man’s comic ability. But when I approached them, still in my clown regalia, their eyes started out of their heads in terror as they ran squealing to their mother, pleading with her to save them from the “daddy devil!”

It was only after I removed my horns and makeup that they would consent to edge nervously close enough for me to give them a hug. We spent a joyful weekend together before Amy had to get them back to school in North Dakota. The kids loved hanging around the circus lot, where they could visit the petting zoo to feed the tame buffalo weed bouquets they had picked themselves. But they evinced a puzzling reluctance to enter the tent once the show had started -- they did not care to see their kindly father transformed into a red-faced capering fiend any more. 

At the end of the season, when I came home for the winter, the kids had mostly gotten over their heebie jeebies from the devil in the washing machine gag. But for several years after that season they played suspiciously obedient whenever I offered to do the laundry for Amy. They didn't want to take any chances . . . 

placid mountain clouds

placid mountain clouds

from skies deep in the scheming

of hard storms to come

up above my head

up above my head

the bright new pine cones flourish

in prodigal sums