The Hats of Clown Alley

A clown without a hat is like a bird without a beak; practically useless.

A hatter never instructed us at the Ringling Clown College, but it might have been a nice academic touch. Can you picture Laurel and Hardy without their bowler hats? Or Chico Marx without his pointy hat? Or Harold Lloyd without his straw boater? And those towering, garish stovepipe hats that W.C.Fields sported were sight gags in and of themselves!

No, hats play a vital part in maintaining a clown character, as well as being one of the most versatile props a comedian can posses.

I never cared for those miniature top hats or peaked hats that whiteface clowns attached to the top of their bald wig. Too cutesy for me. And you couldn’t do anything with it, because it didn’t come off. As useful as an air horn to a cat burglar.

The pointy hat is a good, all-around headpiece for active circus clowns. Made properly, they have a fine balance so you can juggle with them. Here’s how they are made in clown alley:

Take a used men’s felt hat. Cut off the hatband. Dye it whatever outlandish color you wish. Soak the hat in sugar water for stiffening (one part sugar to two parts water) for about an hour. Remove from the sugar water and immediately pull the crown of the hat over a football until it forms a point. Let it dry a few hours. Voila! A pointy hat is born. When it gets dirty and starts losing its shape, you can wash it and resoak it in sugar water, then pull it over a football again to make it look practically brand new.

But for my money the bowler hat is the top performer when it comes to comedy. It looks funny; it sits securely on the head even during the most frantic chase; it’s sturdy; and it lends itself perfectly to a myriad of mixed up possibilities. To see bowler hats put through their paces by master clowns, just watch the beginning of Laurel & Hardy’s silent two-reeler ‘Bacon Grabbers.’   

A bowler hat makes a satisfying “thunk!” when you hit another clown over the head with the brim, and it won’t cause a concussion. And it’s the perfect head piece for the old hello/goodbye routine. One clown meets another and politely raises his hat to him, while the other clown just as politely holds out his hand in fellowship. Seeing their mistake, they switch tactics; the first clown putting his hat back on and extending his hand, while the second clown puts down his hand and lifts his hat in greeting. It can go back and forth like this ad infinitum.

You can balance the brim of a bowler hat on your nose, then let it fall gracefully in place onto your noggin; this never fails to delight the kiddies, and even the grownups think it must take years of practice. It took me all of ten minutes to master, and I’m a Grade A klutz.

Costume shops stock rather cheap and flabby bowler hats. Most of the professional clowns I worked with bought their bowlers from expensive haberdasheries in New York or Chicago. They were silk lined and stiff as the British upper lip. Consequently, they were not to be messed with in the slapstick rough and tumble of the circus. Dougie Ashton, the Australian clown, bought his directly from a department store in Brisbane and had them shipped out to him. His elegant black derby was a startling contrast to the rest of his outfit, which consisted of a purple jacket patched like an old fashioned inner tube, a collarless shirt, a necktie that appeared to have gone through a paper shredder, baggy pinstriped pants, and a pair of Army boots that dated back to the Boer War.

It took him three months to get a new hat whenever he ordered one, so he was particularly finicky about it.

“Which one of you bahsterds got baby powder on me hat?” he’d roar in vexation if he found a few grains of talcum on it. Since we all used baby powder to set our greasepaint by applying it in great billowing clouds each day, that was rather a moot question.

The other standard headgear in clown alley was the top hat. A universal symbol of dignity and elegance, it never failed to raise a laugh when perched on the head of a zany. Swede Johnson always wore one, when he was not playing a Keystone Kop. In fact Swede went all the way, also wearing an elegant cutaway tailcoat and black dress trousers with a black stripe down the side. He offset this with white nurse’s shoes. With his stark white face, he looked like a small town undertaker during the McKinley administration. One of his favorite walk around gags, which Irvin Feld hated and kept trying to get him to drop, was to simply walk around the arena dolefully carrying a large suitcase on which was stenciled SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATOR. I don’t know why Swede thought this was funny, but he did. Audiences pretty much scratched their heads over it. When I asked him one day what was supposed to be so hilarious about it, he told me graciously “Aw, go to hell, you pinhead!”  

Steve Smith, who we nicknamed ‘The Little Fellow’ in recognition of his resemblance to Chaplin’s ‘The Little Tramp,’ wore a crushed top hat, much like Harpo Marx. It had originally been an opera hat, one of those contraptions that is flat and then pops up like spring snakes in a peanut brittle can. But the springs broke so that it was only half open. It gave Smith’s clown character a rakish winsomeness.

For my headgear I initially chose a cotton twill bucket hat, because I could buy them at any five and dime for fifty cents. I always bought two; one my size and one a size larger. That way I could put the bigger hat over the smaller one and whenever I greeted someone in the audience I lifted the bigger one, leaving the smaller one on my head. It always got a laugh. I used to throw one into the audience and then have the audience members throw it back at me, to see if I could catch it on my head. This was a good stretch gag, or accordion gag, when Baumann would whistle out the clowns during a wardrobe malfunction or some other glitch that prevented the next act from going on. The gag had to be flexible, timewise, since we never knew how long we would be needed as a diversion -- anywhere from twenty seconds to twenty minutes. Most of the time I would get my hat back, no problem. But occasionally some wisenheimer would think it funny to keep it. Or someone would throw it smack into a pile of unsavory sweepings. Either way, I just went out the next day and bought another one.

Later in the season I read about the Chapeau Act in a magic catalogue and sent away for one. The Chapeau Act was a Vaudeville staple before moving pictures arrived. It’s a thick black pancake of velvet, with a hole in the middle. With various twists and turns the chapeau can be turned into a turban, a Napoleon hat, a tricorn, a nun’s wimple, a pirate hat, and various other kinds of hats. It came with an instruction booklet, and soon I was “amazing my friends and family” by suddenly becoming a gun-toting cowboy with the flick of my chapeau. It was a very effective routine, and I thought I could add chapeaugraphy to my act, like the musical saw I was also learning to play -- but the inside rim of the chapeau rubbed my clown white completely off at my forehead; so every time I used it I had to run back to clown alley and repair the damage before appearing again. That was too inconvenient, so I regretfully put the chapeau away in my clown trunk for a future day when I would do comedy without makeup -- maybe as a stand up comic or as a movie character actor.

Out of curiousity I just went online to see if they still make them today. They do! The Abbott’s Magic Company sells ‘em for thirty bucks. (And NO I don’t get anything for mentioning their company.) I just might invest in one -- it might come in handy if and when my Social Security checks stop coming and I have to go back to street performing to make a living!  

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.