Thank You, Ken Colombo!

Several readers of my mini-memoir “Remembering Leon McBryde” have taken me to task for the scare-raising title, thinking that Leon had passed on. He hasn’t, of course! I apologize for the unintentional obituary-like headline, but I have to admit that in this age of clickbait it helped drive a lot of traffic to my piece. Writing is a learning process, even for an old hand like me -- and I appreciate readers who take the time to interact with me about what I do. You guys (and gals) are the best of teachers!

Ken Colombo; Joe Giordano; Leo Acton; Alfred E. Neuman; Alberto Ramirez; Keith Holt; Robert E. Handley; Billy Jim Baker; Andrew Fronczak; Dustin Portillo; Mike Weakley; Gabriel Romero Sr.; Mike Johnson; Corky Dozier; Mary Pat Cooney; Sache Taylor; Ronald Hathaway; Pat Stevenson; Brandon Torbett; Eric Plaut; Nadiia Shupik; Pat Graves; Noah Royak; Linus Vanpelt; Linda F Vogel Kaplan; Kent Mercer; Glenn Godsey; Scarlett J. Sullivan; Diego VeeKay Barquinero; Ronnie Vavak; Scott Whittow; Kenneth L Stallings; Jeremy Hammack; Kenneth Ahern; Dave Sieja; Anthony Hughes; Laura Lee Vaughn Nadell; Jacob Sparkles Cowger; Rafi Rondon; Tim A Dolan; Randy Weldon; Jeffrey Potts; Leandra Finder; Joey Klein; Miles Baker; Dave Corbett Sr.; Tim Cunico; and David Orr.

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia”

Barbra Streisand

The celebrated singer on an eating binge has gone,

Gorging on sweet pancakes, caviar, and roasted fawn.

Her appetite’s unparalleled -- she’ll need a stomach pump;

And all because of stress induced by Mr. Donald Trump.

Cod cheeks by the carload, fricaseed in so much butter

Her fans begin to think that she has turned into a nutter.

Slurping Ben & Jerry’s like there isn’t any morrow,

She sucks the marrow out of bones to assuage her sorrow.

Oh Babs, don’t let the policies of this administration

Do a Marlon Brando on you out of aggravation!

If you truly hate the man, then be more businesslike

And sublimate your passions with a lengthy hunger strike.

Samantha Bee

Samantha Bee has got a sting that never seems to cease.

She likes to prick celebrities and presidents without peace.

Her comments often are benign -- at least she says it’s so.

But janitors must clean up blood when she has done her show.

Samantha, please don’t pick on me -- I’m just a poetaster;

I have to cut my own hair cuz I don’t have a piastre.

Julian Assange

This troublemaker Aussie is both loved and much reviled.

He is a proud crusader of transparent truth -- self styled.

His website leaks just like a sieve, except that ev’ry spill

Is always so corrosive it makes heads of state quite ill.

He’s stuck inside an Embassy, a stateless refugee --

Gosh, I hope someday he’ll leak a story about me!

Tim Holst Holds FHE

I rejoined the Ringling Blue Unit clown alley on Wednesday, March 30, 1977, after my two year LDS mission to Thailand was completed. Brimming over with a curious blend of nostalgia and deja vu, I immediately got back to the serious business of being funny.

Things had changed in my absence, of course; there were new First of Mays, Swede Johnson was gone, my old partner Steve Smith was out ahead of the show doing the advance work by himself, and Tim Holst was now the assistant Performance Director. The first thing he did when he saw me there in Cincinnati was invite me over to his stateroom on the train for a traditional Family Home Evening.

In 1915 LDS President Joseph F. Smith set aside Monday nights in the Church for members to gather as households or groups of single individuals for "prayer ... hymns ... family topics ... and specific instruction on the principles of the gospel." This is what is known as Family Home Evening. Over the years tradition has added a festive round of snacks and goodies to the mix, making it both full of piety and cholesterol. I felt grateful to Holst for including me in his own family’s FHE. Especially since I did not immediately fit in with the climate of clown alley -- the amount of carousing and dedicated blasphemy seemed, to my evangelical eyes and ears, to have escalated enormously since last I had worn the cap and bells for Ringling. I did not score any points on sociability when I was invited out by some of the new clowns for a night on the town, ending with a bit of something in the red light district, by stiffly refusing their invitation. At least I had the good sense not to try preaching to them; sinners have as much right as anyone to be left alone until they find their own epiphanies.

And so when the next Monday rolled around I went over to Holst’s stateroom after the last show, bringing along my LDS hymnal and my Book of Mormon. Holst’s wife Linda, who worked as a showgirl, had made up a special beanbag chair for me -- since their furnishings were limited by the size of the train room, they had little real furniture. Their stateroom was not much larger than a modest walk in closet. Still three times as large as my roomette, but Lilliputian nonetheless. We began with a standard hymn, Come, Come, Ye Saints; I was asked to give the opening prayer; and then Holst asked me to give a ten minute description of my proselyting efforts in Thailand for the lesson. Never one to hide my light under a bushel, I described the frustration of trying to introduce the concept of a final resurrection to a people steeped for centuries in the Buddhist belief of reincarnation and eventual oblivion. I also tried to describe how much I had come to love Thailand and the Thai people -- never once did I have a door slammed in my face when I and my companion went door to door to introduce the LDS church to anyone willing to listen. Although I was attacked several times by geese -- the Thais use them in lieu of guard dogs. The fact of the matter is they were ALL willing to listen -- they thought the Joseph Smith story a fine ghost tale. And in every home we were offered a meal -- not just a drink of water, but a full blown repast. The Thais believe in keeping a pot of rice and a kettle of fiery curry warming on the stove for every visitor, with an overflowing bowl of papaya, custard apples, mangoes, and rambutans for desert. My description of their luscious food led naturally to the end of my narration and the beginning of our snackfest. Linda outdid herself with a pan of BYU brownies -- an LDS specialty consisting of thick rich chocolate brownie cake overlayed with a light mint icing and topped with thick whip cream. She also produced a gallon of ice cold milk to wash it down with. After two years of chalky Thai soy beverages and cloying pineapple Fanta, I guzzled it with unrestrained glee. We closed with a prayer and Holst walked me back to my roomette on the old ‘Iron Lung.’ He said it was good to have me back and invited me to visit them every Monday for the rest of the season. You betcha, I replied gratefully.

Holst was only trying to be friendly, and he always invited a few others he thought might enjoy an FHE evening in his stateroom to show he wasn’t playing favorites, but his generous offer turned out to be something of a problem for me in clown alley later on.

As I settled back into the routine of clown alley I learned to let the frailties and foibles of my fellow joeys roll off my back. And I quickly relearned that old lesson on human nature: most of it was pure unadulterated brag. On a clown’s modest salary they really couldn’t support much in the way of spectacular vices. A few stiff drinks and an X-rated movie was about all it ever amounted to. I made an especially close connection with Terry Parsons, a true comic hellion. He and I hatched some clown gags together that raised Charlie Baumann’s hackles, and blood pressure, in a most gratifying manner. And Parsons, known to one and all in clown alley as Spikawopsky, was a dyed in the wool atheist who left no stone unturned attempting to show up my religious credulity and hypocrisy. I enjoyed our theological wrangles almost as much as the stunts we pulled out in the arena. I was in the habit of picking up any loose change I found in the alley -- finders keepers, losers weepers was my motto when it came to a stray quarter.

“Yer going straight to hell for that one, Tork!” he’d yell gleefully at me. “That quarter probably belonged to a poor orphan girl who won’t be able to pay for her education now; she’ll wind up a streetwalker instead. All because of you!”  

During intermission it was our fiendish delight to hawk “Used Balloons.” We’d rig up some deflated specimens we found on the floor to a few dowels and offer them to the audience for a dollar. A surprising number of audience members wanted to buy them, but I, of course, simply grinned and walked on. Spikawopsky, on the other hand . . . well, let’s just say he always came away from that gag richer in laughter, and a few dollars. The candy butchers complained vociferously to Baumann about this trespass into their mercantile territory, so he’d yell at us to stop the verdammt monkey tricks. We’d bow our heads contritely before his terrible wrath, wait a few weeks, and then start up again.

But as the weeks flew by I noticed a distinct frost in the atmosphere. And I noticed I now had a new nickname in clown alley. Brownie the Clown. As in brown nose. My weekly visits to Tim Holst’s stateroom were being viewed by members of the alley as debriefing sessions where I would report on all the scofflaws in the alley so Holst could crack down on the miscreants. He did seem to have eyes in the back of his head when it came to sniffing out egregious misdemeanors in clown alley -- but that was only because he had been a clown himself, and knew all the dodges, not because I was a stool pigeon. He never asked me what went on in clown alley, and I never told him. It all came to a head that summer, when the Bulgarian baggage smashers began leaving my trunk outside of the alley on set up day. Thinking it a simple oversight, I moved my trunk back in -- only to discover it back outside the next day, with a note on it to the effect that snitches were not welcomed in the alley.

I asked Spikawopsky about this, and, as ever, he was brutally honest.

“Most of the alley thinks you’re a %#@** informer, Tork” he told me. “And sometimes I have my doubts about you myself. You’re an ass kisser, aren’t you?” I told him how it stood between me and Holst: he was a cherished friend who had introduced me to the LDS Church, and that we met on Mondays for religious and social purposes only. He could come and see for himself if he wanted -- I respected the privacy of my coworkers and wouldn’t think of ever ratting them out.

“Well, to keep things quiet you better let things alone for now. I’ll talk to some of the guys. But if you report this to Holst everyone will know you’re a spy.”

He was right. I’d have to solve this problem myself. The next day I brought in a pair of cheap toy binoculars, and instead of painting my nose red I painted it brown. I used the binocs in every clown gag, avidly watching the other clowns and taking copious notes, and even brought it out for the production numbers, where I ogled the showgirls appreciatively. The change in my makeup was soon noted, and appreciated with high good humor, and the crisis passed. My trunk was restored to its rightful place in clown alley. A few of the First of Mays actually took Holst up on his offer and came to FHE once or twice. But it didn’t really ‘take’ with them -- they saw nothing in it for themselves. Not even a chance to do a little brownnosing of their own.

Nicholas Kristof

Nicholas Kristof of the Times

Doesn’t deal in nursery rhymes.

The topics that he writes about

Make his readers scream and shout.

But he’s running out of steam

With his Trump-is-evil theme.

Come on, Nick; how ‘bout some more

On sweatshops helping out the poor?

Remembering Leon McBryde

Leon McBryde is a big fellow. Big in stature, big in expertise, and big in heart. When Steve Smith and I were made the advance clown team for the Ringling Blue unit back in the mid-70’s, he was also big on the image a Ringling clown should project. He did not like to see clowns as declasse citizens. A true Southern gentleman, Leon demanded dignity and respect -- and usually got it.

Smith and I were provided with a beat up old motorhome by the show, which sometimes ran -- and sometimes didn’t. Jim Howle painted the exterior in his inimitable style, putting our two clown faces prominently on each side of the balky vehicle. Leon was detailed to train us in the art and craft of advance clowning before the season got underway. Part of that crucial instruction was how to grill the perfect pork chop on a hibachi and serve it up with lots of red eye gravy and applesauce. Most of our tutoring took place around his hospitable table, with his wife Linda encouraging us to sample her homemade cornbread until we began addressing each other as “y’all” like Jed Clampett.

One day our motorhome refused to start, even when Smith crawled underneath to hotwire it. We desperately needed to do our laundry, so reverted to the old clown alley expedient of washing it by hand. We strung up the laundry to dry around the motorhome, giving it the appearance of a gypsy tent. This displeased Leon mightily.

“Y’all take that stuff down right now, hear?” he commanded. “Makes the show look like a ragbag!”

We meekly took our washing down.

As punishment for our boorish behavior he had us over for Smithfield ham and sweet potato pie. Then drove us to an auto parts store to buy a new battery for our motorhome. That took care of the starting problem -- for a while. That clunker ate more batteries during the season than you could shake a stick at. It finally developed a chassis-wide short circuit, so when we were plugged into an electric outlet and tried to fill the water tank (my responsibility) it gave me a shock that left my hands and arms tingling unpleasantly. On the brink of relaying a snarky complaint to the home office in Washington D.C., Leon counseled us on how to deal diplomatically with Irvin Feld’s bean counters.

“Y’all cain’t just insult those fellers and expect them to do anything for you. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar” he told us, then helped us draft a courteous dispatch that buttered them up and then hinted that a new vehicle might help us generate more enthusiasm for the show. It worked; within a week we got a brand spanking new motorhome and the old one, with Howle’s classic paintings, was retired to Winter Quarters -- where it sat in a sad state of disrepair for many years before vandals looted it and sprayed graffiti over our clown portraits.

As part of our training we observed Leon several times doing his celebrated grade school show, “Readers are Leaders.” Combining some hokey magic tricks with large doses of audience participation, Leon as ‘Buttons the Clown’ had them eating out of his hand. I credit Leon McBryde with first awakening the desire to be a teacher in me -- he was so obviously delighted to teach the kids about the joys of literacy. Many long years later, when I became an English teacher in Thailand, I often thought back to his methods and spirit while attempting to instruct my pupils in the mysteries of English spelling and grammar.

Smith and I made a sincere attempt to follow Leon’s example with our own school show -- to keep it focused and on track. But we both were contaminated with the invidious spirit of improvisation. We didn’t much care to stick to the same script, over and over and over again. To Leon, doing the same show the same way day after day was a sign of discipline and dedication. So he was slightly distressed at our casual and scattershot approach to entertaining and educating the elementary school kiddies. We’d always started out with our scripted show, but along about ten minutes in either Smith or I would get a wild hair up the wazoo and start throwing curve balls at each other just to see what would happen. In the middle of ‘Bigger and Bigger’, which involves blowing up a balloon, I might just release the balloon to let it fly out into the audience, and then shout “Niagara Falls! -- slowly I turned . . . “ This was Smith’s cue to yell “Yoicks and away!” before bouncing a foam rubber mallet off my head. Then we would head out into the gymnasium to begin flirting with a lady teacher until she blushed beet red and the kids were howling in delirium. At least we always ended the show the same way -- I’d play my musical saw, Smith would do a little tap dance in his clown shoes, we’d drop our pants, and then run offstage crying “May all your days be circus days -- our elephant is double parked!”

Eventually Leon became reconciled to the fact that Smith and I were intractable loons who fed off of each other’s manic attempts to derail any form of linear narrative, and gave our ‘show,’ such as it was, his blessing. The last day under his benign instruction he had us over for fried chicken smothered in milk gravy to give us these final insightful words:

“Wherever you go, there you are.”

 

Scott Pruitt

Scott Pruitt of the EPA

Puts climate change on holiday.

His agency is more concerned

That fossil fuel is always burned.

Clean air is okay in its place

(Somewhere below a welfare case.)

Thank You, Mary Pat Cooney!

And a bright green ‘Go raibh maith agat’ to readers who liked my mini-memoir “A Clown Triptych.’ You make the flowers blossom in the garden of my soul.

Paul Dymoke

Amy Schumer

Leo Acton

Herberto J Ledesma

Sandy Weber

Gabriel Romero Sr.

Keith Holt

Mike Johnson

Andrew Fronczak

Tony Chino

Billy Jim Baker

Mary Pat Cooney

David Orr

Kenneth L Stallings

Erik Bartlett

“To write is to think through your fingers”

My Clown Triptych

"Clowning keeps the world spinning -- without circus clowns the earth would probably stop rotating with laughter and lose its warmth, becoming cold and dead to children and adults alike!"

 Those immortal words were penned by Roland Butler, the head of Ringling publicity for many years, back in 1929 -- the year of the Stock Market Crash. The coming decade would see an increased need for clowns and their elixir of laughter as the Great Depression choked the life and hope out of millions of people worldwide.

I didn't catch many circuses as a child; usually just once a year. But I loved the clowns with all my heart, mind, might, and strength. Growing up in Minnesota I was lucky enough to discover the Minneapolis Film Society, where I watched the cinema clowns caper in silent black and white every Friday night. They were magnificent. And I wrote about them:

CHAPLIN.

One alone against the world, and homeless in the gutter;

the Little Tramp ate bitter bread without a touch of butter.

His sentimental pantomime is out of sync today;

nobody likes to laugh and cry — tis but a stale cliche.

But resurrection comes to those who clowned with all their heart.

And Chaplin will again someday resume his waggish part.

Otto Greibling once gave me a slip of brown butcher paper, on which he listed the clowns he thought were the best. The first name on his list was Buster Keaton:

His stillness was of that great kind when loud reverberation

has ceased but still the air remains in flux and agitation.

Soberly considering a world filled with derangement,

he was the very archetype of post modern estrangement.

The puzzle of the Sphinx or Mona Lisa in his face

gives to all his slapstick a tintype religious grace.

The greatest compliment I ever received as a clown was from a school teacher down in Mexico, where I studied pantomime for a year during a hiatus from Ringling. That teacher told me, after I did a show at his school, "You remind me of Stan Laurel." I'll always cherish that plaudit, even though nowadays I much more resemble Oliver Hardy!

Yin and Yang, they travel down the primrose path together;

bound and harnessed by the most peculiar type of tether.

Their friendship is at odds with the dynamics of existence.

They rub along together with a risible resistance.

The serious and sane do not pretend to understand

what makes them so beloved by the folk of ev’ry land.

But like all clowns who caper for our pleasure, then depart,

Stan and Ollie have a purchase on the humble heart.

I've always loved the poem that Dick Van Dyke read at Stan Laurel's funeral, so please let me share it with you -- in tribute to the many, many clowns who have lightened our load over the years:

God bless all clowns.
Who star in the world with laughter,
Who ring the rafters with flying jest,
Who make the world spin merry on its way.

God bless all clowns.
So poor the world would be,
Lacking their piquant touch, hilarity,
The belly laughs, the ringing lovely.

God bless all clowns.
Give them a long good life,
Make bright their way—they’re a race apart!
Alchemists most, who turn their hearts’ pain,
Into a dazzling jest to lift the heart.
God bless all clowns.

Or, as Roland Butler also once wrote:

"A good clown is not only worth his weight in gold, but worth all the sunlight that ever has shone!"

Amen to that! 

If you want to know more about Roland Butler, I recommend reading "Center Ring" by Robert Lewis Taylor.