Foodies Know: Boulder Has Become a Hub for New Producers

From the New York Times:  Up-and-coming food companies like Purely Elizabeth, Made in Nature and Good Karma Foods have relocated to Boulder to take advantage of the city’s deep bench of food executives, a food retail environment that prizes innovation and experimentation, and a growing pool of money for investments in food companies, among other things.

I’m moving to Boulder today,

Competing with old Frito Lay.

I’m making a chip

From all of Trumps lip;

I call it Bologna Souffle.

The Questions of Jesus

For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?

If reward you’re looking for in this life or the next

You must cherish those you hate, who keep you always vexed.

Though it goes against the grain to think of them each day,

Jesus Christ commands that for their souls you need to pray.

The Savior died for all your foes, as he did so for you;

So we the good in them must strive to always keep in view.

The Questions of Jesus

Art thou greater than he?

I suffer, Lord, I suffer; is it not enough that I

Am suffering in agony and wish that I could die?

Release me or defend me; keep thy promises to me!

Am I to be abandoned though I’m serving only thee?

My little one, I know thy pain and all that hurts thy soul.

What if I have thee taste an atom of benighted sheol?

I went there long before thee and the bitter cup did drain;

Are you now ready to embrace my misery and pain?

There's Something Rotten in Clown Alley

The romance of the circus could never overcome its enervating stench. That, at least, is what my nostrils remember about their years of being rubbed with red rouge at Ringling Brothers.

I do not subscribe to the Proustian belief that a brief taste or smell of something can take you back decades to a fully textured and 900 page memory. Not the smells of the circus, anyways. When I try to recall those fragrances my mind recoils in revulsion back to some distant Neanderthal ancestor who liked to smell daisies -- and then eat them.

A barnyard smells of manure and spilled diesel. A candy factory smells of melted sugar. A bar smells of beer and cigarettes. A baby’s bassinet smells of talcum powder. And a men’s locker room smells of congealed sweat and ripening jock straps. Taken individually, such odors will become bearable in time. But the heady mixture of all of these, combined into a miasma that soaks through your consciousness into your very soul is no longer just an olfactory sensation but a physical affront, like a blow to the solar plexis.

The first time I caught that full aroma was in Tampa, the first stop of my first season on the road with Big Bertha. I had been strolling about the parking lot in the morning sunshine, marveling at the warm inviting fragrance of mimosa and fiddlewood, enjoying the swooping white gulls on their everlasting reconnaissance for fast food wrappers. Girls in sports cars, wearing bikinis, drove along the nearby parkway, and I was convinced they were tossing me smiles like they were beads at Mardi Gras. Life was unfolding before me, a tantalizing clambake. Then I walked past Backdoor Jack into the arena.

Holy Grandma Moses! The funk made my stomach do flip flops. I shook my head and took another deep breath. This could not be. Civilization had not yet descended to such malodorous depths. But there it was again -- and I could see where part of it was coming from, as a roustabout shoveled up steaming piles of elephant dung while smoking a ratty cigar. The llamas were spitting their cud at each other, while outside the heavy blue curtains of clown alley Swede Johnson was slurping up a bowl of pie car soup, flipping out the carrots onto the cement floor, where they were trod upon by the heedless candy butchers shuttling their first crop of cotton candy up into the stands.    

Some have said they grew to enjoy that smell, and to miss it in later life when they had settled down to more normal pursuits. They lie. That omnipotent smell made my eyes water and rattled my digestion right up until the very last day I performed at Ringing. The veteran clowns, who remembered playing under canvas, said they never had any such stink to contend with back then.

“You worked in the tent and you were walking on wild sage and honeysuckle, and the ground absorbed all the animal pee” Prince Paul told me. “These cement floors play hell with the animals. How’d you like to stand around all day in your own crap because it won’t drain off like it does on plain dirt?”

“Yeah, but remember how dusty it got?” interrupted Swede. “All that manure would dry out in the sun and then crumble into dust. I bet I’ve breathed in a ton of dung in my day, and that ain’t healthy!” He paused to take a deep drag on his Chesterfield.  “Or else it would rain cats and dogs and we’d be up to our keisters in mud.”

Mercifully, Backdoor Jack usually kept the arena gates wide open all day so the elephants could come in and out with ease; letting in whatever refreshing zephyrs were handy. This somewhat mitigated the fetor. But when it grew cold and stormy the pachyderms remained inside the building all day and the gates were sealed tight. Then the stench welled up like something out of a sci fi flick. You talk about the smog of Beijing or Los Angeles; the horse flies donned gas masks of an evening when visiting the circus!

I used to welcome a head cold as a respite from the noisome odors. It troubled some of the other First of Mays as well, but they didn’t let it upset their appetite the way it did mine. Whenever the aroma grew too overpowering I completely lost the desire to eat. That damnable odor seemed to coat my tongue like oral thrush. I found some relief, when I could eat, with strongly scented items like sardines and Limburger cheese on crackers; the outlandish fumes drove away the normal fug to some extent. But it didn’t make me a popular character in clown alley.

As the season wore on I came to accept the evil smell as just another bump in the road of circus life. And, truth be told, sometimes it would completely disappear for weeks on end. This happened especially out West, in places like Arizona and Oregon. Was there some microbe in the air that fed on those nasty vapors? I don’t know -- but it might be worth having M.I.T. or NASA look into it. But then, I keep forgetting that Ringling Brothers is gone the way of the mastodon and 8-track. The enchanted environment that created that perfidious smell is no more. Had scientists been able to synthesize it in the lab, it might have been of more use in the Vietnam War than napalm.  

 

How Smart was Clown Alley?

It should be mentioned in these chronicles that high intelligence was not a prerequisite for the Ringling clown alley. Oh, there were a few Rhodes Scholars and high IQ’s scattered amidst the motley crowd, but such individuals never blended harmoniously with their coworkers in the alley. They seemed to be slumming, or on an expedition to examine and perhaps capture specimens of the native circus wildlife. For the sake of narrative flow I will amalgamate these several into one, and name him Waldo.

As we got ready for come in, Waldo would invariably set aside a heavy tome on philosophy or physics to tell the clear blue air that the dichotomy of Nietzsche was most intriguing. On the one hand . . .

At this point Prince Paul would likely butt in with “Is dat zo, Sharlie? You vanna buy ein quacker?”  I think he was mimicking some radio comedian of long ago, but just exactly who I have never been able to honestly figure out.

Then Mark Anthony would begin rhyming. He actually was quite an intelligent guy, but his knowledge was rather scattershot, and not confined to any one particular discipline. And he never self edited himself. He said just what was running through his mind. He could belch and break wind simultaneously, which made him a hero to most of clown alley.

“Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Barbara Frietchie -- eating peanuts, wanted lychee!” he would croon.

Slightly nettled, Waldo would try to regain his train of thought: “As I was saying, the German existential mindset was probably influenced by . . . “

At this point Swede Johnson would rise majestically from his camp stool to declaim “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”  

“I resemble that remark!” Holst would holler at him. Holst, too, was quite well educated; but he took great pains to hide it. He was after a management job with Ringling, and knew that too many brains spoil the broth. Or something like that (hey, I never said I was saddled with a high IQ!)

Waldo would subside, muttering academic footnotes to himself.

It was an axiom in clown alley that low intelligence meant high trust. You could always depend on a dummy to do what they said they were going to do.

JoJo the Dog Eared Boy was a good example.

As our mouser he faithfully discharged his duties as gofer, picking up whatever we wanted from the outside world when we couldn’t get out there ourselves. Groceries, dry cleaning, you name it; JoJo took our money and came back with the goods, and with every bit of spare change we had coming. It would have been easy to nick a dime here and there, but he never did so. You could give the guy a thousand dollars for a pack of gum,and he’d be back in an hour with your Juicy Fruit, and full change.

However, he was a sucker for Chinese fortune cookies. He believed in them implicitly.  

“Those Chinese sagebrushes know what they’re talking about, yes they know what they’re talking about!” he would aver when pressed to explain his gullibility.

It turned into a game; we would send him out for something and include a few bucks so he could grab some ham fried rice for himself. Inevitably he would return with some startling revelation about his prospects and/or love life as revealed in his fortune cookie.

“Lookit!” he would squeal excitedly. “Says here I’m to stay calm to avoid confusion and then riches will fall on me like a rockslide. Just like a rockslide!”

Shaking our hands one by one, he would thank us effusively for all our kindnesses towards him during his days of poverty. Now his ship was about to come in and he would wave at us from inside his limousine. He packed his meager belongings in a cardboard suitcase and sat up all night on the train vestibule waiting for Wall Street or Rockefeller to come calling.

When he came back into the alley the next day, nothing daunted, we innocently asked about his millions. Had he invested it all in buggy whips already? No, he replied cheerfully; sometimes those Chinese sagebrushes didn’t get things exactly right, but still he was going to stay calm to avoid confusion -- that much, at least, had come true!

Another time the little white slip told him to marry the next blonde he met. That happened to be Aricellie, Charlie Baumann’s wife. She took pity on the simpleton and didn’t report his romantic advances to her husband, who doubled as the tiger trainer. Holst told him that she wasn’t a real blonde anyway, but dyed her hair. That seemed to mollify JoJo, and he let up on her.

Getting back to Waldo for a moment; he always loved to display his grasp of foreign languages, speaking familiarly with the Hungarian teeterboard act in what he told us was fluent Hungarian. Or quoting Nietzsche in his native German to the dour Baumann. This didn’t garner him any brownie points in clown alley, where we prided ourselves on knowing every scurrilous swear word in a dozen different languages and nothing more. When Waldo began to expand on the intricacies of the German umlaut, Prince Paul and Horowitz would start up a loud conversation in Yiddish, and I might add a little something in Norwegian (learned from my father) such as “Ga til helvete!”

Still, there’s no denying that having some smarts could have saved me spondulicks and embarrassment in the long run. One day I was on my way to the arena when a guy in a flashy Cadillac pulled up to the curb and motioned anxiously for me to come over to the driver’s window.

“Whatcha want?” I asked.

“You need a good watch, buddy? I got lots of ‘em in the trunk. Brand new, never been worn. I got a Rolex you can have for twenty dollars!”

I massaged my chin, remembering my mother’s warning that if something is too good to be true you’d better take advantage of it right away. So I ponied up the twenty and showed up in clown alley with a shiny new watch. Which I showed immediately to Holst.

“Lookit this brand new Rolodex I got today. Only paid twenty bucks for it!” I boasted.

Holst glanced at it briefly, then shook his head in disgust.

“A Rolodex is a filing system, you jughead. And if that’s a real Rolex then I’m a Baptist. You got rooked, Tork. That thing will stop running in a few days and leave a green band around your wrist! You shoulda flushed that twenty bucks down the toilet instead.”

Incensed at his boorish attitude towards my good fortune, I retorted with a crushing bon mot:  

“Oh yeah?”

Then I strode away in high dudgeon. Nearly stratospheric. He thinks he’s so darn smart, I said to myself; we’ll see who has the last laugh when I take my Rola-watchamacallit down to the pawn shop and get a couple hundred for it!

Which I didn’t. The pawnbroker laughed me out of the shop, saying he wouldn’t pay a nickel for such drek if it were in a gumball machine.

And it took me nearly two days to get that dratted green band washed off my wrist.

The Death of Otto

Clowns are not supposed to die. They get walloped with mallets and blown up with large red sticks of dynamite, but they’re supposed to just run around after the fatal blow and then wave merrily at the crowd.

It’s not right when a clown dies. Or when love dies. Or a child dies.

When the Ringling Blue Unit played Madison Square Garden that spring of 1972 Otto Griebling played pinochle between shows with Chico; he supplied us with light bulbs for our roomettes on the train by stealthily appropriating them from obscure corners of the Garden; he drank a beer between shows each day; he doused himself with Lilac Vegetal so the crowds would know he was playing a hobo, not actually being one.

His voice lost to throat cancer, he was the Shakespeare of mime; his dumpy face encompassed the vasty deep and played to those secret ligaments that reach past the heart into the void of human expectations. As we settled into the Garden, finding baby rats hatched in our clown trunks and paying protection money to the Teamsters to keep our clown props from disappearing, Otto’s silent scenarios grew funnier and more poignant. His frail attempts to balance a spinning plate on a stick grew to symbolize mankind's giddy efforts to find stability where none existed. Out in the audience he sluggishly polished a railing until he ran up against a pretty girl. His dramatic and instantaneous crush on her was ludicrously pathetic. As he bent over for a kiss he represented every lovesick novice in the world, and when the girl inevitably broke into hysterical peals of laughter at his approach his visible disappointment, and then wrath, were wondrous to behold. Straightening up while pulling the lapels of his ragged coat down, he summarily swatted the girl with his rag and wearily stumped away, to begin polishing and searching all over again. As the days went by at the Garden, Otto stayed out in the audience longer and longer playing out these serio-comic scenes.  

Then one morning he was gone. His trunk was closed and locked. Even the sample piece of shag rug he kept in front of it to rest his bunioned feet between shows had been put away.

Where did he go? We asked LeVoi Hipps. He didn’t know. We asked Prince Paul and Swede Johnson. They couldn’t tell, either. When Charlie Baumann came in to give the ten minute warning prior to come in, he stopped briefly by the doorway to say that Otto was at the Lenox Hill Hospital for a checkup and would be back in a few days.

But in a few days he was dead, not coming back to clown alley. His was the first death in my young life that tore at my immature heart. I didn’t want him to go away; I needed him to further study the subtleties of slapstick. For there is such a thing, not just Three Stooges hooliganism and violence. I wanted so very much to learn how he rigged his derby hat so when he threw it out into the crowded arena it would come sailing back to him like a boomerang. You can see Harold Lloyd do the same trick in his movie ‘The Milky Way’. But I never learned how it was done, and nobody in the alley knew the secret, so it went away with Otto.

Then the years began to take away my other clown friends. Prince Paul was sent to a nursing home in Sarasota, where all he did was run around the dining hall counterclockwise, like he did during Spec. Mark Anthony came down with tuberculosis, moved to California, and died living in a friend’s garage. Tim Holst, after ascending to the top of what D’Israeli called the “Greasy Pole” as Vice President of Talent for Ringling, died suddenly and peacefully while watching a basketball game in a hotel room in Brazil. The list grew longer every year, until I wanted to cry out like Job’s servant: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”  

And then one day my little clowny boy, who was named after my great benefactor Irvin Feld, and my great friend Tim Holst, and who loved to dress up like a clown for Halloween to please his dad -- just before his eighth birthday, he, too, left me, and left my wife, after falling into a diabetic coma. We didn’t even know he had diabetes until it was too late. I put away the striped clown pants my mother had made for him for next Halloween. She would never make anything for our other kids, but for funny face Irvin she worked on her Singer despite her arthritis. Now there would never be another trick or treat for little Irvin Holst Torkildson. He sleeps away the time in a tiny plot in Pleasant Grove here in Utah, until the Trumpet blows or the Clown Car comes for him.  

The questions of Jesus:

Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?

Hardwired and conservative, I’ve let tradition rule

My life until I’ve grown as stubborn as a hinny mule.

I do not question all the ruts I’ve dug in years gone by.

My passion for minutiae is now cold and hard and dry.

But then the Great Disruptor tells me all my mint and rue

Are tithed in vain if I do not my habits all review.

How hard it is to change my course upon this broad new sea;

Oh Lord please make me unafraid to face thy novelty!   

Something Fishy in Clown Alley

I didn’t think it was a good idea, but decided not to burst Tim Holst’s bubble that nippy spring  day in Troy, New York. Ringling had a three day stand in town; Holst and I had been fishing from the banks of the Hudson in comradely silence. That morning our catch included some small perch and a few bullheads.

“Let’s take ‘em back to the train so I can put ‘em in the shower with Linda!” Holst suggested, the wild gleam of the newlywed in his eye. “She’ll love the joke!” Holst was now Assistant Performance Director, having usurped that position from Rhubarb Bob the year before. So he had a stateroom on the train, with its very own shower. Only the creme de la creme of circus folk had such a luxury. Although I knew nothing about the female species back then (and still don’t know diddly squat about ‘em today) I felt that such a shenanigan would not be conducive to increased harmony in Holst’s new household. But I held my peace as we wended our way back to the train. I waited outside the train car where Holst and his new bride resided, and it wasn’t long before he came rushing out, or, rather, was propelled out the vestibule by a partially dressed but fully angry wife.

“Didn’t appreciate the gag, eh?” I asked sympathetically.

“Never mind, Tork” he replied, squaring his shoulders and giving me that gung-ho grin all fishermen use when they’ve been skunked. “There’s another hour or two before I gotta get to the building, so let’s catch us some more bullheads!”

“You ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie!” I replied in the same hearty manner. And off we went to stalk the wily mud cat once again.

I came by my piscatorial predilection honestly, having grown up around a tribe of avid fisher folk in Minneapolis. My older brother Billy fished religiously up at the Lake of the Woods; my Uncle Jim had a shack he put on White Bear Lake each winter for ice fishing; even my dad, as inert as any sandbag, bought a plastic gallon of pickled herring every December; and my pals and I were cane pole samurai when it came to doing battle with the carp that swarmed around the sewer outlets on the Mississippi.

Joining the circus did not dim my hunger for fishing, nor do much to improve my veracity when it came to fish stories. I found some like-minded conspirators in Holst, Chico, and Roofus T. Goofus. Whenever there was a river or half decent lake near the train or the arena, we would break out our Popeil Pocket fishing gear and lose a serious amount of sleep by getting up way too early to catch whatever might be biting that morning. The one drawback to our fishing expeditions were the numerous and officious game wardens and deputies that kept pestering us for a fishing license. We didn’t need no stinkin’ fishing license, but we didn’t tell anybody in a Smokey the Bear hat that; instead we smiled politely and said sorry officer but we’re only in town for a few days with the circus so we didn’t have time to get one would you like some free tickets to the show for you and your lovely family? That usually did the trick. They’d look the other way when we slipped them a half dozen Annie Oakleys. Of course, as I stated earlier in this wayward narrative, Ringling was pretty chintzy about handing out free passes, so Chico had a cousin of his who ran a printing shop in Brooklyn run up some authentic looking passes on cardstock, and we would pass those out -- and then hope to god we didn’t meet up with that officer again before move out night.

And you haven’t lived until you’ve fished off of a train vestibule that’s parked over a river gorge in the Rockies or the Cascade mountains out West. On long trips, the circus train often stopped for an hour or more on a side track while waiting for an express to go past. Sometimes that meant we could dangle our hooks a few hundred feet down into a crystal clear trout stream and start hauling ‘em up. Most of them managed to wriggle off the hook before we could get them all the way up, but just having a brookie on my line for ten minutes was worth it. Besides, I don’t believe the cook in the pie car would have filleted and fried them up for me anyways.

What did I do with the fish I did manage to catch? Well, I didn’t throw them into anybody’s shower! Early in the season I discovered that after the last show at night the Romanian bareback riding acts loved to sit outside their train car if the weather were nice to boil up a communal pot of stew, drink wine, and sing the sad old songs of their motherland, accompanied by zither and zongora. Being a hospitable people, they often invited me to come stick my mitt in the stewpot. The smell was tantalizing, but I wasn’t too certain about what they were using for stock, so at first I politely declined. Swede told me that anytime an animal died on the show the Romanians showed up to butcher it and have it for dinner. When I caught my first mess of fish that season I asked one of the Romanian women if she’d like to have it. She smacked her lips and that night by the side of their train car I dipped my mitt into the pot because I knew it contained my fish. It was to die for. I partook of several helpings, and would have licked the pot clean but for the fact I found a fish eyeball floating in my last bowl of the evening. The Romanians believed in using every bit of the fish, including the head. After that, I was a little more discriminating when I accepted their invitation after bringing them my catch. They didn’t bother to fillet the fish very well either; it wasn’t unusual for a big husky Romanian man to run up to a child and indicate he needed to be punched in the stomach, after which he’d disgorge a fishbone that had lodged in the trachea.  

Perhaps the best thing I ever did with some fish, at least the most satisfying, involved my vendetta against the lanky trainmaster after he found my bicycle in one of his storage closets, where I stored it on move out nights, and tossed it out while the train was moving. I paid him back with a large carp that I left to fester in his toolkit during our stay in Little Rock, Arkansas. By the time he discovered it, the bubbling mass of foul corruption was something straight out of an H.P. Lovecraft story.

Robocalls

From the New York Times:  Last year, about 15 billion robocalls were placed to numbers on the Do Not Call registry . . .

A  smartphone is no guarantee

That you won’t be called constantly

About mortgage rates

And cruise line updates

(or sent poems like this one, for free)

The Questions of Jesus

 Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

I add unto my stature with technology, correct?

I grow in consequence as with more people I connect!

My smartphone and my iPod give me power that’s supreme;

So do not tell me internet importance is a dream.

A cubit is old fashioned, I prefer the gigabyte.

I’ll use my tablet for great glory and gigantic height.

All hail the wifi kingdom that is coming on the Cloud!

Will Christ and his disciples become lost among the crowd?

And yet, and yet the still small voice that makes foundations sink

Reminds me that to God alone belongs the saving link.

The Return of Uncle Felbish

Prince Paul started it all in clown alley during our run in Des Moines.

He came into the Ringling Blue Unit alley with the New York Times tucked under one arm and a bottle of Dr. Brown’s Celery Tonic under the other, cleared his throat until I thought his tonsils would come flying out, and proclaimed:

“It’s official, meyn brider. Word has come down that Uncle Felbish is returning!”

Swede Johnson blasphemed softly but intensely into his battered plug clown hat before asking:

“When is that devil going to get here?”

“Tomorrow, or Saturday at the latest.”

Lotsi, Lazlo Donnert’s son, began asking “Who is dis . . . “ but got no further; his father yanked him aside and slobbered all over him in Hungarian. Lotsi shivered, then nodded his head in agreement.

Dougie Ashton shot up like a bottle rocket and shouted defiantly “Buck ‘em all, is what I say! And that includes Uncle Felbish!”

And Don Washburn, whose Sparky the Clown character sported the largest pair of clown shoes in circus history, lowered his head into his hands and began to moan while he rocked back and forth.

We First of Mays were frankly puzzled. Who in the Sam Hill was this alarming Uncle Felbish? We hadn’t heard about him in Clown College, or read about him in any circus history books, or heard even a rumor about him from the roustabouts or showgirls.

“Are you talking about Irvin Feld, is that your ‘Felbish’?” asked Tim Holst.

No! Not the circus owner.  The veteran clowns were adamant. Uncle Felbish was . . . he was . . . and he came . . . and when he got here . . .

None of them could finish a coherent sentence. They turned silently to their trunks and began getting ready for the afternoon come in.

Murray Horowitz, who was called ‘Raccoon Face’ behind his back because of the black band of makeup he incorporated around his eyes, soberly told us newbies, “You only get to see Uncle Felbish once, baby, and then you’re either in . . . or you’re OUT.”

“What do you think we should we do to get ready for him, guys?” I nervously asked Holst and Chico and Roofus T. Goofus.

“Throw away that ratty old hat you been wearing, pinhead” advised Swede Johnson, ambling over to our worried kaffee klatch. “And you” pointing to Holst. “Stop trying to make clown shoes with papier mache.” Holst had indeed been experimenting with papier mache to extend the length of a pair of work boots to comical proportions. He didn’t relish spending two hundred dollars on a pair of professionally made clown shoes because he was trying to pay off his student loan in that first season. So far his experiments had resulted in nothing but a lot of spilled flour paste and soggy newspaper.

“Uncle Felbish is murder; he’s poison” Swede said ominously. “He can’t be bs’ed, no matter how smooth you are!” He looked at us under his beetling brows, resembling for all the world Snoopy doing his vulture impression in ‘Peanuts.’ “Just keep your nose clean, that’s all.”

After the matinee performance I started asking around about Uncle Felbish. Stancho and the Bulgarians didn’t know about him. Backdoor Jack said there was no such thing, and told me to get the hell away from his card table if I was going to waste his time with such crap. LeVoi Hipps, who was boss clown and also served as head electrician, was less than helpful. I found him wrapping black electrical tape around a thick orange extension cord.

“Well, Torkil-twinkle” he started slowly (he never bothered to pronounce my name correctly), “this-a hyear Uncle Felbish is quite theeee character, yessiree bob! I don’t rightly think I orter tell yew anything about him. I reckon yew just gotta find out fer yerself!” He was sounding like Mr. Haney from ‘Green Acres’ by this time, so I told him thanks for nothing. I finally summoned up the courage to ask Rhubarb Bob, the assistant Performance Director. He looked very grave. But he always looked that way, like he had just come from one funeral and was going immediately to another.

“Let me check with Mr. Baumann on that” he finally said.

Sheesh maneesh, I thought to myself, this Felbish guy must be worse than Dracula!

I reported my findings to Holst and Chico and Roofus, and since I really hadn’t found anything out, I started to make things up.

“He’s from the federal government” I extemporized. “Department of Circus Safety and Welfare.”

“What's he want?” asked Chico.

“He can shut down the show and put us all out of work if he don’t like the way clown alley is running” I said importantly, by now totally sucked into my own fantasy. “Not even Mr. Feld can overrule him!”

“Holy *%@&!” blurted out Rufus T. Goofus. “I’m gonna make a new cotton candy outfit!” Roofus had a wonderful walkaround sight gag wherein he dressed as one of the cotton candy vendors and swathed himself in pink cotton, giving the appearance of having fallen into the cotton spinning machine and then barely escaping with his life. But the pink stained cotton had gotten pretty dirty from rough handling, so that now it was hard to tell if he had fallen into a cotton candy machine or a manure pile.

I started to believe my own hooey, running in place as if my bladder were full and saying to myself in a frightened girly voice “I knew I shoulda got that wig from Zauder’s! Ew, I’m in so much trouble!”  

Clown alley became a hive of frantic activity the rest of that day and into the next. Holst borrowed a pair of surplus clown shoes from boss clown Hipps and took them to a shoe repair shop to have them quickly refurbished so the horsehair stuffing didn’t show; Chico removed the Playboy centerfold he had pasted onto the outside of his clown trunk.

Even Swede Johnson, whose costume purposely matched his collapsing face by appearing ready to fall apart at the seams, fixed up his clown shoes. He wore white nursing shoes, so he got out a bottle of white shoe polish and applied the little fluffy ball at the end of the stick vigorously to them until they were as bright and clean as the driven snow.

The word had spread throughout the show that Uncle Felbish was on his way. We got sympathy calls from some of the showgirls, who brought us cupcakes to buck us up. Joe Hodgini, a holdover from the old John Ringling North days, who oversaw the roustabouts while sitting in his golf cart, offered to detail a half dozen of them to clown alley when the fiend showed up, armed with tent stakes, to watch our backs. LeVoi Hipps decided that would only inflame the situation, and reluctantly refused his offer.

Normally the hard physical demands of clowning on the Ringling show put me to sleep like a log each night; but the night of that awful announcement I couldn’t grab a wink. What if I lost my job and had to go back home in disgrace? I hadn’t saved up nearly enough money to do any of the things I’d dreamed about. My career would be over before it started. I tossed and turned until my sheets were pretzels.

The next day clown alley went on Red Alert.

Prince Paul stationed himself at the entrance to give warning of Uncle Felbish’s approach. Swede, the most impious old sinner since Emperor Nero, suggested that some of us might like to pray for deliverance if we felt so inclined. Even Dougie, who normally put up a bold front when faced with a threat, kept a low profile by refraining from playing Tiger Rag on his trumpet while we got made up -- a recital he never missed once he found out how much we detested his playing.

Only Otto, grand old Otto, remained unaffected by the panic. Voiceless due to throat cancer, he calmly surveyed our scurrying hither and thither with amused contempt. But we First of Mays were in a growing cold sweat, and paid no attention to him.

The matinee came and went without any Uncle Felbish. Clown alley remained a brooding encampment of fear. Sparky appeared to be the first one to crack.

“I can’t take it anymore!” he shouted out, beginning to giggle wildly. Then he became unintelligible. “Tell them already, tell them!”

“Here he comes!” screamed Prince Paul. I held my breath as into clown alley walked . . .

Schwartzy! That miserable crossed-eyed drunk who brought us clean sheets each week on the train. Schwartzy? He was Uncle Felbish? He blinked unevenly at us, like a hungover owl, and then asked if anyone had seen his other pair of pants.

The light slowly dawned as I looked around at the veteran clowns, who had all collapsed in hysterics. We First of Mays had been conned, duped, hoodwinked by a practical joke of massive, even classical, proportions.

“There’s no Uncle Felbish, you old goat!” I said to Swede, who was shaking with laughter. “And the whole show was in on it, weren’t they?”

“Pretty much” replied Swede. “I never saw such a bunch of appleknockers as you greaseballs in my life! Hook, line, and sinker!”

Some of the First of Mays finally joined in on the merriment, and got Prince to explain that for years past it had been a cherished scheme on the show to create a boogeyman named Uncle Felbish to keep the new clowns on their toes when the summer doldrums began to take over in the Midwest. It always got them worried sick.

I kept myself aloof from the childish glee, considering the whole thing a meaningless piece of flummery.

But next season, with a new crop of First of Mays just begging for it, I told Prince Paul I thought it was time for a visit from Uncle Felbish when we played Milwaukee . . .