The Ballad of Pie Car Chili

In 2010 the New York Times did a puff piece on the Ringling Blue Unit Pie Car. Truth to tell, from Glenn Collins’ description I thought he must be writing about some other pie car on some other circus on some other planet. The whole place sounded too tasteful and dignified. Not what I remembered at all.

But then, what I remember more than anything else from a half century before is the dreaded pie car chili. It is a subject that I find hard to put into mundane prose, so I’ve attempted instead to put it down in verse. Forgive me, Ogden Nash!

Oh, the circus train is mighty long and it holds both man and beast.

And when the men get hongry, there’s the pie car for a feast.

But stay away from the chili, son, oh stay away I beg;

For it turns the stomach into flame enough to boil an egg!

The recipe’s been handed down from Fu Manchu, I trow.

It’s got a lot of kidney beans and quite a bit of crow.

There’s rubber tires, thumb tacks, and a touch of powdered ghoul;

NASA wants to test it for their next flight’s rocket fuel.

Chock full of spices volatile, so volatile indeed

That it would make Beelzebub start up to cough and bleed.

Some gravel and a pinch of lard, along with molten tar

Is what they serve as ‘chili’ on that wretched old pie car.

And when the clowns are broke and have a hangover as well

They like to slurp and gobble up that brew that’s made in hell.

Then their stomachs rumble and feel heavy like feldspar --

And that is when they have to cram into the damn clown car!

The Black Hole of Calcutta never was as foul a sink

As the wretched clown car when those fellows start to stink.

The fumes are like a mastodon or any herd of swine;

There is no cure besides a dose of hundred-proof strychnine.

It’s evil work is never done, for when you think it’s gone

You find you still are belching it full many a mournful dawn.

So spurn that awful chili that the pie car thrusts at you

And order up instead a tender charbroiled potoroo!

Jeff Sessions

Although his boss ain’t overwrought,

Jeff Sessions sure is anti-pot.

The states may do just as they please

But Sessions they will not appease

Until each marijuana bush

Is banished to the Hindu Kush.

Juan Carlos Hernandez Pacheco

Ev’ry net that’s cast so wide will always nab a few

Who ought to swim as free as anyone (that’s me and you.)

But federal officials do not care who takes their bait,

So Pacheco will be forced to about-face immigrate.  

Thank you, Tony Chino

This is to thank the wonderful readers who support my most recent clown memoir: “The Dancing Clown.” Your photograph is always in my heart.

Tony Chino

Lupino Lane

Lorna Hymer Spellman

Sandy Weber

Mike Johnson

Joe Giordano

Leo Acton

Mike Weakley

Gabriel Romero Sr.

Chris Twiford

Herberto J Ledesma

Victor Ruiz

David Orr

Fred Baisch

Jim Aakhus

Kenneth L Stallings

Dave Michaels

Keith Karas

Tammy Parish

Mary Pat Cooney

“May your pockets fill with gold as your hair fills with silver”

The Dancing Clown

Terpsichore was a mere rumour in the Ringling Clown alley when I set up my bailiwick there. While the veteran clowns, except for Otto, had to participate in all the production numbers, they were given individually-themed costumes to strut around in and not required to learn any dance steps. Unlike we First of Mays, who were drilled unmercifully in box step, closed change, and heel turn until our bunions had bunions on them. Our production costumes were flashy chorus boy stuff, to match the showgirl’s wardrobe in each production number. There were five production numbers in which we had to exhibit some fancy footwork: Opening; Spanish Web; Spec: Manage; and Finale. While my contemporaries, such as  Chico, the Little Guy, Roofus T. Goofus, Holst; and Rubber Neck, submitted to the demands of the chorus line, and eventually grew competent, if not elegant, in their movements, I was stymied from the get-go.  

Dancing had made up no part of my Minnesota childhood. Not even square dancing. In First Grade when the other children were merrily frolicking in the classroom to the strains of “Skip to the Loo My Darling,” I would be in the nurse’s office -- having clumsily hurled myself into a steam radiator on the first note, splitting my lip open. I believe my mother may have danced when she was young -- her photos show a lithesome nymph with a fetching smile, ready to fox trot until the rosy dawn -- but dad was a leaden lump. He moved with all the grace, and speed, of a glacier -- unless someone yelled ‘beer kegs are here’ at a picnic. He was nordic phlegm personified. I must have inherited all his anti-dance genes. My Senior Prom night I stayed home to watch Dave Moore’s Bedtime Nooz. As much as I liked girls, I was not going to chance a midair collision with one while attempting the Funky Chicken.

I thank the gods of comedy that there were no dance courses at Clown College during my time there. I literally had to label my tennis shoes with a big ‘L’ and a big ‘R’ in order to remember which was which when the need arose. As my first season on the show progressed I gave less and less effort to my dancing. It was a lost cause, and besides I was getting the reputation as a ‘zany’ on the show. Now a zany at Ringling was different from just a clown. A clown was slightly cracked in the head, but a zany had left orbit and wandered the greater universe. Otto Griebling and Mark Anthony were considered zanies -- they had created their own little worlds, which they might or might not invite you into. I joined this unique band of delinquents after visiting Radio City Music Hall and taking a pratfall down the red velvet carpeted central stairway -- just because it looked like so much fun to roll down. My fellow clowns who were with me at the time soon spread the story throughout the show that “Torkildson is not right in the head -- he’s a zany.”

I would grab a bear costume as I passed a clown prop box and scream in agony as I made it maul me. I did a clown gag where I brought out a big book labeled “How to be Funny” and then proceeded to get instructions from it to wear a lampshade and pry open a can of peanut brittle with spring snakes inside. When the audience didn’t react as clamorously as I wanted, I accusingly held up an optometrist's eye chart in front of them, questioning their obviously faulty eyesight. For these reasons, and many more, I was allowed the zany’s leeway during production numbers.

When it was time to do a high kick like the Rockettes, I would pull out a jump rope and do a dozen or two skips instead. Or I would attach a cheap Halloween clown mask to the back of my head, and when clowns and showgirls linked arms and began the high step I would turn my back to the audience and just bend my legs at the knees. I carried an outsized pack of playing cards with me during Finale so that when we were supposed to be tracing complicated dance steps I could whip out the deck and ask a nonplussed showgirl to “Pick a card, any card”, and then spend the rest of the production number futilely trying to locate the card she had originally picked, scattering aces and kings around like autumn leaves. Occasionally I dragged out a folding chair and would sit in the middle of a dance number calmly reading the Cleveland Plain Dealer or the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

As long as I didn’t hurt anybody or put a complete stop to the production number, Performance Director Charlie Baumann turned a blind eye to my horseplay. He, too, respected the tradition of the Till Eulenspiegel, who was to be given more leeway than others because of his fey condition.

I also liked to carry a faux skunk with me into production numbers and toss it to startled members of the audience. It broke the monotony of Broadway tunes and voluptuous showgirls.

But alas, time marches on. And it has such a wicked short memory. When I returned to clown alley after my 2 year LDS mission in Thailand I found things had tightened up and battened down. The boss clown Steve LaPorte told me that since I had joined the show in mid-season he would detail one of the clowns to teach me the proper dance steps for all of the production numbers. I told Steve not to bother; I was not in the habit of following the dancing anyhow but to gum up the works with a few little clown gags here and there. He gave me a long hard stare and repeated that he would detail one of the clowns to teach me the proper dance steps. That’s when I knew there had been a paradigm shift in clown alley. Zanies were now persona non grata.

One of the new clowns who was naturally light on his feet, Herbie, did his best to show me how to arabesque and manage a pas de deux, but my two left feet sabotaged all his patient, kindly efforts. My pathetic attempts at dancing during the production numbers made me look like a department store mannequin on strings. I was completely miserable.

And then Charlie Baumann, still the fearsome and apoplectic Performance Director, happened to walk by me as we were coming offstage from Spec and whispered so only I could hear “Und vhat happened to my zany?” He remained poker faced as he said it and never made eye contact with me. But from that day on I began to loosen up and add a few monkeyshines to my dance routines. The showgirls were disgusted with me, LaPorte just glared and muttered under his breath, and the new clowns were mystified at how I got away with it. None of them dared try anything like it.

“Aren’t you worried that Baumann will beat the #%@** out of you?” one of them asked me.

I merely shrugged my shoulders silently and continued working on my latest clown alley invention -- a bagpipe made entirely out of whoopee cushions.

John Kelly of Homeland Security

Homeland Security now has John Kelly

Whose spine, Trump supposes, is made up of jelly.

He won’t deport masses as promised by Trump,

Nor into Mexico non-Mexicans dump.

This feisty Marine thinks ‘Commander-in-Chief’

Is not an excuse for psychotic belief.

Steve Bannon

Deconstructing government is on this man’s agenda.

He will turn the regulators into mere addenda.

Bureaucrats and backsliders, beware of Mr. Bannon;

Whether he is loose or not, he surely is a cannon!

Trump to Skip White House Correspondent's Annual Dinner

Thanks but no thanks our good President said

As with the reporters he would not break bread.

“I’m busy with matters of state; I repeat

I’ve no time for you cuz I must post a tweet!”  

Thomas E. Perez

The loyal opposition now has Thomas E. Perez;

They’re happier than Shriners who have found a missing fez.

The DNC will rally ‘neath the chairman’s canny charm.

(Runner up Keith Ellison will be his strong right arm.)

The Democrats are poised upon the cusp of greatness now;

I’m sure they will achieve it (when a penguin learns to plow.)

My Favorite City in Clown Alley

Take a Minnesota kid like me, who’d never been anywhere, and put him in the Ringling clown alley, traveling to a new city each week for 48 weeks, and what do you get?

An insightful bon vivant, naturally. One who has strolled the elegant boulevards and drifted through the sinister back alleys of the world, and who knows the value of whispering “Iftah ya simsim” in the right ear at the right time for access to mysteries and pleasures beyond reckoning.

I also collected bus tokens in each town. They were neat to use as tiddlywinks.

As Hank Snow famously sang: “I been everywhere, man.” New York. Los Angeles. Chicago. Atlanta. Kansas City. Calgary. Houston. Philadelphia. Seattle. And even Soddy Daisy, Tennessee. To the complaisant mind, the constant travel from one metropolis to another may dull the senses -- but I found my wits sharpened and my perceptions deepened each time the circus train pulled into a new city. Each town has a distinctive smell, for instance. Chicago smells like broiled meat and sewage. Manhattan has a distinctive bouquet of fermented rat droppings and spilled gelato. New Orleans, before Katrina, absolutely reeked of roasting coffee beans. Detroit always smelled of heated metal and burning tires.      

Food and drink vary from place to place, and one does not need to be a frenchified gourmet to distinguish a Philly grinder from a Baltimore hoagy. Or to relish the suppleness of a soft street taco in Amarillo as compared to the austere crispness of the fiery taquitos sold along the riverbank in San Antonio.

Even background noise is varied from town to town. The summer cicadas in Little Rock never let up; their buzzing followed me inside every building, bouncing around in my head until sanity was but a faint memory. In Long Beach the booming of the surf traveled underground to come up through the soles of my feet to my ear drums; it made me dream of constructing a raft like Thor Heyerdahl and drifting off to the Sandwich Islands.  

I discovered that each city has its own vernacular. In Milwaukee a water fountain is a ‘bubbler.’ In Des Moines a rubber band is a rubber ‘binder.’ You must never use the word ‘Frisco’ in front of a resident of San Francisco, lest they slit you open with a glaive. In Jackson I heard one respectable old lady tell another “That ol’ booger is a good shot with a rifle.” If you want just a little of something Down East in Bangor you ask for a ‘tidge’ of it, as in “May I have just a tidge more blueberry pie please?”

Now that osteoarthritis has slowed me down and I have given up my car, I don’t plan on traveling more than a few miles from my Senior Housing apartment in the foreseeable future. I’ve traveled a good deal more than most folk; a comfortable wing chair, a glass of Vernors at my side, and a Patrick O’Brian sea novel, is all I now require to tide me over from day to day. In other words, as grandpap used to say, my get up and go has got up and went.

But I have my memories. And I remember the city of Salt Lake best of all. One reason is because it was the city where Chico was finally able to cash in his pennies. During the season he had scrounged everywhere for unwanted and abandoned pennies; on sidewalks, in phone booths, even under the bleachers. He put them in a five gallon glass water cooler bottle. When it was nearly full he took it to one bank after another to exchange for paper money. But bank clerks took one look at it and shut their grille doors in alarm, refusing to deal such an outre piggy bank. I helped him lug it around until my back began to warp. Without much hope, we took it into Zion’s National Bank in downtown Salt Lake City when the show played the Salt Palace. A bank vice president came out to inspect Chico’s penny vault and asked him if he knew how much was in there. Chico didn’t, obviously; but being Brooklyn born and bred he was ready to bluff it out to the last cent.

“Two-hundred-and-fifty-dollars-and-sixty-seven-cents” he said promptly.   

“Fine!” enthused the vp. “We’ll set this up in the window and let customers guess the amount. The closest guess wins a gift certificate to ZCMI. I’ll have the cashier bring you your money in just a moment.”

So Chico walked out of there with a cool two-fifty and some cents -- and he was nice enough to give me twenty-five of it, for helping him carry that heavy glass bottle around to so many other banks first.

I blew most of it on a big box of See’s Nuts & Chews, and a coffee table book called “Meet the Mormons,” which I sent to my parents (who never read it; my mother put it in the linen drawer where she kept lace doilies and oversized dinner napkins.)

Other reasons I consider Salt Lake my favorite city is Temple Square and fried liver. Temple Square is a small public park that surrounds the LDS Temple. The first time I went there was when I’d just gotten a letter from mom telling me my Grandma Daisy was dead. She had been the only one in the family really happy to see me succeed as a clown. She never had any money to give me, but instead gave me lavender-scented hugs that a scared boy on his way to Florida really needed. As I sat there rereading the brief letter, I felt a sudden uplift -- the way you feel when a daylong drizzle lifts just at sunset so you can see the sun burst through the clouds for a few glorious moments. It was a small fine moment that I’ll always cherish, and associate with Temple Square and Salt Lake City.

And as for fried liver, I don’t know why it is but I consider fried liver a basic patriotic staple -- something I eat to ward off terrorists and tea parties. Nobody knows how to fix it except in Salt Lake City. They don’t bread it or monkey around with a lot of foolish spices. The restaurants beat it with a mallet to tenderize it, and then cook it with bacon and a generous helping of sliced yellow onions. They give you lima beans and a dinner roll to go with it. Whenever we played the Salt Palace I went to Denny’s for liver every other day. I never found it made as plain and as well in any other city.