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.
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.
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