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.
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