Studying Pantomime in Mexico. Part One.

In the fall of 1972 I decided to leave off clowning with Ringling Brothers Circus in order to explore the possibilities of mime. My clowning, I felt, suffered from a lack of communication with the audience. Not verbal communication, but the kind of visual communication that veteran clowns like Otto Griebling and Prince Paul possessed; it was a visceral physicality that immediately communicated their thoughts and emotions to the audience. This skill let them display their comic ideas to full effect, whereas my gag ideas usually fell flat when I put them out in front of the circus crowds. I felt as frustrated as a chicken trying to lay an apple.

I had a strong hunch that improving my pantomime skills would make me a more effective clown, would give my gag ideas more 'punch.'

The show was in Chicago that fall for a 3 week run near the old Stockyards. The train was parked on a siding that had been used for cattle cars for the previous seventy years, and the ground still reeked of their panicked feces and blood. It rained constantly. And it was Contract Time.

Old man Feld came down from Washington D.C., where the Ringling headquarters were located, to view the clowns; noting which ones still had clean and bright costumes and which had let their wardrobe fall off. He gauged the effect of each clown gag on the popcorn munching audiences, and quickly removed any gag that had run out of belly laughs. And Charlie Baumann, the Performance Director, would breath into his ear the names of those clowns considered to be ‘heat merchants,’ or troublemakers. The clowns he decided to keep for another season were called into a plush office, one by one, for a brief word of praise from Mr. Feld, and the offer of another year’s contract, with a small raise. If you weren’t called in, you were out -- for good.

I was called into the office, where old man Feld called me by name, sort of -- he pronounced my patronymic as “Torkill-twinkle” -- and praised my clowning style.

“You’re a real nut act” he told me expansively. “When you’re out in the ring nobody knows what you’re going to do next! I like that. Like it a lot. The crowds think you’re completely crazy. That’s good for business, that kind of clowning. So how about it -- you ready to sign up for another year with the Greatest Show on Earth?”

He pushed the contract and a pen towards me; saying he was raising my First-of May salary by twenty-five dollars a week, so I’d be pulling down a grand total of 150 smackers each week. It was a tempting offer to a still green kid like me. I had no idea when I’d ever see that kind of money again. But I silently shook my head, then explained that I wanted to pursue more training in classical pantomime to become a better clown.

He didn’t seem too put out by my defection; I guess he was in a hurry to sign up the rest of clown alley for the next season. So he took back the contract and pen, stood up, wished me luck, shook my hand, and the next thing I knew I was outside his office, sans steady employment.

But I had savings in the bank and knew right where I wanted to go for my mime training.

During my stint at the Ringling Clown College our mime instructor was Sigfrido Aguilar, a noted maestro of the silent art, from Mexico. Impressed with my earnest efforts to scale invisible walls and walk against invisible winds, he had offered me a student scholarship at his Academia de Pantomima in Mexico whenever I wanted to quit the circus. I still had his address in Mexico, so the very next day I dropped him an aerogramme asking to be enrolled in his next class.  Three weeks later, just as the show was closing in Hartford, Connecticut, I got his reply: “Felicitaciones, Tim. We start our new classes in January!”

After a brief stopover back home in Minneapolis to mooch off the parents for a few weeks, and to have dinned into my ears my mother’s baleful warning that once I was south of the border I would be shot, garroted, and skewered with machetes before I could say ‘Pancho Villa’ -- I took a flight to Mexico City to begin a new chapter in my quest to hopefully increase the world’s fund of hilarity.

Back in those halcyon days an American citizen didn’t need a passport to reside in Mexico for as long as he wanted, so there was no paperwork for me to deal with. That kind of simple freedom existed in abundance when I was young -- and mourning its loss may yet turn me into an anarchist of the Kropotkin variety.

I would not be friendless in Mexico. My pal and Ringling cohort Steve Smith (after whom my son Steve is named) was also attending Sigfrido’s Academy. We met up in Mexico City, where we had reserved a double suite at a cut-rate caravansary that featured zoonotic ice water and hot and cold running cucarachas. After a few days of dealing with Montezuma’s revenge, we boarded a Tres Estrellas bus for Pátzcuaro, in the province of Michoacan, where Sigfrido personally met us at the bus station, which smelled strongly of roasted coffee and cacao beans, to escort us to our living quarters on a quiet side street, next to a pig slaughterhouse, with a fortress-like Catholic nunnery across the calle.  

(to be continued)