Le Pen Again

In France they are fingering Bren

As one way to stop Ms. Le Pen.

The Center and Left

Are not very deft --

They’ll poke her like she was a wen.

New Orleans Begins Removing Statues Commemorating the Rebel Confederacy

New Orleans is in a sad state
since Robert E. Lee met his fate --
pulled from his piling
he's no longer smiling --
and where will the birds defecate? 

Marine le Pen? What's that -- a writing system for fishes?

A French election is to me a mystery complete.

I do not understand how someone wins, or meets defeat.

Their platforms are a puzzle and their slogans must be Greek.

I think they beat each other on the head with a large leek.

And when the voting’s over, why -- they vote again, the nuts.

And then the country goes on strike (or maybe gets haircuts.)

And all the time they guzzle wine and pick at cheese and snails.

I wish the Russians would attempt to mess with THEIR emails!

Bernie Sanders

Despite being the most sought-after Democrat in the country today, Mr. Sanders is actually an independent and self-described democratic socialist animated chiefly by class uplift.

From the NYTimes

No Democrat is Bernie Sanders.

He’s giving their party the glanders.

He goes his own way

While Democrats pray

He’ll avoid any more Marxist slanders.

Be Ambitious

“In our lives we experience trials, but if we are ambitious for Christ, we can focus on Him and feel joy even in the midst of them.”

Kazuhiko Yamashita

I do not seek for tribulation -- trouble comes to me.

I am a magnet for disaster, now and constantly.

Whether by my own hand or because my fate is fixed,

I often find my plans upset -- my worthwhile goals are nixed.

But since I work for Jesus and for him keep plugging on,

I never feel I’m just a clueless unattended pawn.

I cannot move a mountain -- even molehills are a strain;

But if I stay determined then my life is not in vain!  

Dusty the Clown Speaks!

Schooled at the Ringling Clown College in the virtues of silence, I was always loath to give voice to anything except an occasional roar or howl of pain during clown gags. I even went so far as to leave the show for one season to study pantomime down in Mexico with Maestro Sigfrido Aguilar -- after that refining experience, I took a vow of silence like a Dominican friar.

Imagine my horror and chagrin, then, years later, when circumstances placed me on a small but very peripatetic mud show racing through the wilds of Nebraska -- in which I was required to speak! It was like Harpo Marx being asked to give the Gettysburg Address.

It came about this way -- Dave Royal, the ringmaster for the show, who doubled as a magician, offered to let me share his trailer when my elderly van, in which I lived, dropped a piston and became just another piece of wayside junk on Interstate 80. His kindness saved me from having to invest in another vehicle -- something I desperately needed to avoid if I was to keep sending the weekly paycheck home to the wife and kiddies. I told him how much I appreciated his kindness and hospitality -- and that’s when he sprung his trap . . .

He had noticed, he said, that my silent clown gags were not going over very well. Before I could puff myself up like a blowfish and dispute his heinous charges he blithely continued on as if nothing was amiss; he was prepared, out of the goodness of his heart, to share the spotlight with me with some surefire comic patter that would bring the house down.

What could I do? I needed a place in his trailer so I could keep the dingoes from my family’s door -- so I swallowed my pride (and a good deal of bile) and consented to his demands.

His routine was so ancient it must have been exhumed by an archeologist. It’s called ‘Pencils’, and here is the version we fobbed off on unsuspecting circus audiences for the next several months:

The ringmaster begins an important announcement when I come bumbling into the ring and interrupt him with an importunate request for money.

“Been gambling again, hey?” he booms at me. I meekly nod, then hold out my hand for some baksheesh.

“Tell ya what I’m gonna do . . “ he says to me, all the while winking at the audience like a randy owl, “I’ll give you ten dollars if you can answer all my questions with the word ‘pencils.’”

“You’re on!” I howl gleefully. The contest begins.

“What was your mother’s name?”

“Pencils!”

“Where did you grow up?”

“Pencils!”

“What do you use for brains?”

“Pencils!”

And so on . . .

I’ll give Dave this -- the kids ate up the routine like it was cotton candy laced with opioids. I used a high-pitched voice, somewhat like Ed Wynn’s, mixing in a little Pinto Colvig and Mortimer Snerd. After a few weeks of this my tonsils began to constantly throb and I had to gargle with buttermilk to keep them from going on strike.

The denouement of this fossilized piece of Vaudeville comes when Dave holds out a ten dollar bill to ask me “Well, looks like you’ve won -- do you want the money now or later?”

“Now!” I shout eagerly -- thus losing the bet. As Dave smirks I pull my derby hat over my face in extreme chagrin and trip over the nearest ring curb as I exit. To applause, usually.

I might have gotten used to becoming a talking clown, except that Dave became just a wee bit jealous of the bigger laughs I was getting with my lines than he was getting with his. I mugged shamelessly, of course, and did everything within my power to keep the attention focused on me. I juggled foam rubber hot dogs during the routine and balanced an ostrich feather on my nose -- none of which had anything to do with the routine. But what else is a clown supposed to do -- stand around with his hands in his pockets?

Dave began stepping on my lines, killing the laughs, and then he stopped putting the mike in front of me so my lines could not be heard beyond the first four rows of bleachers. I didn’t complain -- I was still sleeping in his trailer every night. But at last I got fed up and retaliated, even though I knew it would end our cozy living arrangements.

The boss rigger had a bullhorn he used during teardown, when the crew were rather deaf from exhaustion and the local moonshine. I asked if I could borrow it for the show. He agreed, and so the next matinee when Dave began cutting me off I simply pulled out the bullhorn and blasted him and the audience with my comic gems. The crowd thought this was hysterical, but Dave, as I had strongly suspected, was extremely teed off. After that matinee he gave me an ultimatum -- either lose the bullhorn or move out of his trailer. I had been expecting this, and steeled myself to call his bluff. No, I said calmly, the bullhorn is a natural laugh-getter -- I’m going to keep it in. I’ll just have to find someplace else to bunk for the rest of the season, won’t I?

I didn’t have to wait long for his response. It came in the form of a series of interesting anatomical descriptions of me and my ancestors as he threw everything of mine out of his trailer. There wasn’t much, just a sleeping bag, some socks, and a paperback edition of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Everything else of mine was in my clown trunk, which was carried on one of the tent pole trucks.

There is not much more to tell. I was allowed to sling a hammock in the cook tent, which was kept up overnight so the roustabouts could be served coffee, tortillas, stale donuts, and refried beans early each morning. Dave suddenly decided that the Pencils routine was beneath his dignity as a ringmaster and part-time magician, so I went back to all my old silent routines. Truth to tell, they never did get quite the shouts of laughter that Pencils had generated. But somehow I felt more comfortable without words when I was in makeup. The best comedy comes from the heart, not from the mouth.

 

The Musical Saw

The musical saw is a quirk

that causes composers to smirk.

It’s singular pitch

may not make you rich --

Reactions are mostly knee jerk.

Selling Coloring Books

“I don’t know about you, but I’m out here to make as much blanking money as I can -- not to put on a circus!”

So said a circus owner to me many moons ago while we were out in the middle of nowhere and I had had the temerity to complain to him about the paucity of clown gags in the show and the preponderance of peanut pitches and other commercial come-ons to get the scarecrow crowds to cough up their coin.

He allowed just one clown gag during the whole show -- the rest of the time I had to go out and sell coloring books. They were cheap affairs, made in China, that would embarrass a kindergartner. I sold them for two dollars -- one dollar went to the show and the second dollar went to me. So I spent most of the show wandering up and down the dusty bleachers at rodeo grounds sullenly waving this tsotchke in the faces of emaciated children and played out adults.

We were in a section of the country that appeared to still be harboring vestiges of the Great Depression. Tar paper shacks leaned resignedly away from the wind, with skinny crooked stove pipes sticking out of the roofs as if in a Max Fleischer cartoon. Everyone wore patched overalls. Rusted car chassis sat in weedy front yards. Vicious dogs yapped through the gaps of sad wooden palisades surrounding the better homes -- the ones with indoor plumbing.

I developed a cynical philosophy that season -- no matter how poor someone says they are, they always have money for cotton candy and coloring books. Most of the kids came to the show without shoes on. Their parents were faded, like a silk dress left out in the sun too long. There didn’t seem to be any jobs around, and the dirty streets were filled with listless idlers who looked at our circus posters in shop windows with slack-jawed boredom. This was a part of America I thought had disappeared for good when we got into World War Two.

The circus owner was not satisfied with coloring book sales, even though I usually went through a complete carton of them each day. He thought there was more to be done to inveigle greenbacks from the hicks. So he pulled out the old bicycle trick. I was against it, and told him so -- and was in turn told to hold my tongue and do what I was told or I could pack up my clown trunk and hit the road.

For those of you who do not make a study of mountebanks and charlatans, the ruse is performed by placing blue dots inside all the coloring books. One coloring book is kept out of circulation -- it has a red dot inside. Each show a shiny new bicycle is wheeled out during intermission and the ringmaster announces that the lucky boy or girl who buys the coloring book with the red dot in it will win the bike. The show’s clown, in other words me, stands next to him during this announcement with dozens of coloring books ready to sell. I’m smiling like a maniac. To prove that it’s not a fake, one of the show kids always ran into the ring with the ‘winning’ coloring book with the red dot inside, and wheeled away the bike, followed by the envious stares of all the children in the audience. Of course, the kid gave the bike back after each show. Our plant was the son of the slack wire act. He could really act, racing into the ring screaming with excitement. I hope he made it to Hollywood and changed his name to Brad Pitt or something.

This little trick did, indeed, perk up coloring book sales for several weeks. But then our karma changed.

One miserably hot matinee, after the ringmaster had made his coloring book pitch and I had sold several dozen books, and we were waiting for the show’s infant ringer to come up and claim the bike, a little girl, holding her mother’s hand, brazenly came into the ring with a coloring book -- and inside that coloring book was a RED dot. I showed it to the ringmaster, who in turn showed it to the owner, who turned several deep shades of magenta before bowing to the inevitable and letting the little girl wheel the bike away.

“Change the winning dot to green!” the owner commanded. He would not be slickered again. He went out and bought a new child’s bicycle. And he told the son of the slack wire artists to get into the ring to claim the bike a damn sight faster in the future.

All went well until we hit Ruidoso, NM.

In that town not one, but THREE little children came racing into the ring -- each with a green dot in their coloring book. And one of them was the daughter of the Chief of Police. To avoid any unpleasantness the show owner had to pony up for three brand new bikes, as well as the one he had just purchased.

“Drop the dots!” he said afterwards. “This is costing me an arm and a leg!”

So we dropped the swindle and finished out the season mulcting the rubes in a fairly honest fashion. Of course, had that owner happened to look in my clown trunk at the right moment he might have spotted an opened packet of colored adhesive dots I just happened to have with me. They came in handy during these long and stressful circus tours.

Canada

WASHINGTON — President Trump added a new name Thursday to the list of countries he accuses of preying on American workers and exploiting naïve American trade policies: Canada.

From the NYTimes

Canucks are awful tricky -- they will fool you with their smiles,

While stealing all your bizzness from tomatoes to textiles.

Don’t think they are thick witted or accommodating -- no!

They’re plotting our destruction amidst all that blasted snow.

They’ll underbid and undercharge until the USA

Cannot afford a pot to use to -- I really shouldn’t say.

In Montreal they laugh at us; in Ottawa they sneer --

But all they really know is how to drink up Molson beer.

The trade imbalance must be fixed -- there’s no time for delay.

If they must send us snowshoes we should send them Frito Lay!

And if they won’t take quotas that we give them cheerfully,

We’ll beat them with lacrosse sticks, albeit tearfully.  

Lunch at the Provo Senior Center: Turkey Roast with mashed potatoes.

Groucho Marx wrote a stage play in the late 1940's called 'Time for Elisabeth.' It was about a successful businessman who retires and just gets in the way at home so he finally goes back to work. It was not a success. It played the Pasadena Playhouse for 2 weeks solely on the strength of Groucho's name, then sank into a deserved oblivion.

You might say I have rewritten that turkey as 'Time for Timmy.' Only this time it will not be staged anywhere but in my bedroom, kitchen, and living room. So far it has survived the critic's barbs that it was too slow and self-absorbed. I expect it to run for a few more seasons at least, to be replaced at a later date by "Drooling for Dollars."

 In the Old Testament, Isaiah, it says: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord." 
While recognizing this as truth and light, I just want to put in a plug for hibernation for old people. Instead of all these crummy naps that spoil my sleep at night, why not arrange the Universe so old people can just snuggle up in their recliner one snowy day and begin hibernating -- not waking up until the Second Coming. Would it really mess things up to cut us fossils a break like that?

Just wondering.

Here's the turkey roast with mashed potatoes, frozen veggies on the side. I even took the dinner roll, I was so hungry today. A sharp appetite is as rare with me nowadays as ears on a bowling ball. They even put out cranberry sauce, although hardly anyone used it -- about two-thirds of the people who eat lunch at the Senior Center are Hispanic or Asian; they have no idea what cranberry sauce is. I saw several old ladies ladle it onto their plates and then cover it with hot sauce.