Dusty the Clown Speaks!

Schooled at the Ringling Clown College in the virtues of silence, I was always loath to give voice to anything except an occasional roar or howl of pain during clown gags. I even went so far as to leave the show for one season to study pantomime down in Mexico with Maestro Sigfrido Aguilar -- after that refining experience, I took a vow of silence like a Dominican friar.

Imagine my horror and chagrin, then, years later, when circumstances placed me on a small but very peripatetic mud show racing through the wilds of Nebraska -- in which I was required to speak! It was like Harpo Marx being asked to give the Gettysburg Address.

It came about this way -- Dave Royal, the ringmaster for the show, who doubled as a magician, offered to let me share his trailer when my elderly van, in which I lived, dropped a piston and became just another piece of wayside junk on Interstate 80. His kindness saved me from having to invest in another vehicle -- something I desperately needed to avoid if I was to keep sending the weekly paycheck home to the wife and kiddies. I told him how much I appreciated his kindness and hospitality -- and that’s when he sprung his trap . . .

He had noticed, he said, that my silent clown gags were not going over very well. Before I could puff myself up like a blowfish and dispute his heinous charges he blithely continued on as if nothing was amiss; he was prepared, out of the goodness of his heart, to share the spotlight with me with some surefire comic patter that would bring the house down.

What could I do? I needed a place in his trailer so I could keep the dingoes from my family’s door -- so I swallowed my pride (and a good deal of bile) and consented to his demands.

His routine was so ancient it must have been exhumed by an archeologist. It’s called ‘Pencils’, and here is the version we fobbed off on unsuspecting circus audiences for the next several months:

The ringmaster begins an important announcement when I come bumbling into the ring and interrupt him with an importunate request for money.

“Been gambling again, hey?” he booms at me. I meekly nod, then hold out my hand for some baksheesh.

“Tell ya what I’m gonna do . . “ he says to me, all the while winking at the audience like a randy owl, “I’ll give you ten dollars if you can answer all my questions with the word ‘pencils.’”

“You’re on!” I howl gleefully. The contest begins.

“What was your mother’s name?”

“Pencils!”

“Where did you grow up?”

“Pencils!”

“What do you use for brains?”

“Pencils!”

And so on . . .

I’ll give Dave this -- the kids ate up the routine like it was cotton candy laced with opioids. I used a high-pitched voice, somewhat like Ed Wynn’s, mixing in a little Pinto Colvig and Mortimer Snerd. After a few weeks of this my tonsils began to constantly throb and I had to gargle with buttermilk to keep them from going on strike.

The denouement of this fossilized piece of Vaudeville comes when Dave holds out a ten dollar bill to ask me “Well, looks like you’ve won -- do you want the money now or later?”

“Now!” I shout eagerly -- thus losing the bet. As Dave smirks I pull my derby hat over my face in extreme chagrin and trip over the nearest ring curb as I exit. To applause, usually.

I might have gotten used to becoming a talking clown, except that Dave became just a wee bit jealous of the bigger laughs I was getting with my lines than he was getting with his. I mugged shamelessly, of course, and did everything within my power to keep the attention focused on me. I juggled foam rubber hot dogs during the routine and balanced an ostrich feather on my nose -- none of which had anything to do with the routine. But what else is a clown supposed to do -- stand around with his hands in his pockets?

Dave began stepping on my lines, killing the laughs, and then he stopped putting the mike in front of me so my lines could not be heard beyond the first four rows of bleachers. I didn’t complain -- I was still sleeping in his trailer every night. But at last I got fed up and retaliated, even though I knew it would end our cozy living arrangements.

The boss rigger had a bullhorn he used during teardown, when the crew were rather deaf from exhaustion and the local moonshine. I asked if I could borrow it for the show. He agreed, and so the next matinee when Dave began cutting me off I simply pulled out the bullhorn and blasted him and the audience with my comic gems. The crowd thought this was hysterical, but Dave, as I had strongly suspected, was extremely teed off. After that matinee he gave me an ultimatum -- either lose the bullhorn or move out of his trailer. I had been expecting this, and steeled myself to call his bluff. No, I said calmly, the bullhorn is a natural laugh-getter -- I’m going to keep it in. I’ll just have to find someplace else to bunk for the rest of the season, won’t I?

I didn’t have to wait long for his response. It came in the form of a series of interesting anatomical descriptions of me and my ancestors as he threw everything of mine out of his trailer. There wasn’t much, just a sleeping bag, some socks, and a paperback edition of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Everything else of mine was in my clown trunk, which was carried on one of the tent pole trucks.

There is not much more to tell. I was allowed to sling a hammock in the cook tent, which was kept up overnight so the roustabouts could be served coffee, tortillas, stale donuts, and refried beans early each morning. Dave suddenly decided that the Pencils routine was beneath his dignity as a ringmaster and part-time magician, so I went back to all my old silent routines. Truth to tell, they never did get quite the shouts of laughter that Pencils had generated. But somehow I felt more comfortable without words when I was in makeup. The best comedy comes from the heart, not from the mouth.

 

The Musical Saw

The musical saw is a quirk

that causes composers to smirk.

It’s singular pitch

may not make you rich --

Reactions are mostly knee jerk.

Selling Coloring Books

“I don’t know about you, but I’m out here to make as much blanking money as I can -- not to put on a circus!”

So said a circus owner to me many moons ago while we were out in the middle of nowhere and I had had the temerity to complain to him about the paucity of clown gags in the show and the preponderance of peanut pitches and other commercial come-ons to get the scarecrow crowds to cough up their coin.

He allowed just one clown gag during the whole show -- the rest of the time I had to go out and sell coloring books. They were cheap affairs, made in China, that would embarrass a kindergartner. I sold them for two dollars -- one dollar went to the show and the second dollar went to me. So I spent most of the show wandering up and down the dusty bleachers at rodeo grounds sullenly waving this tsotchke in the faces of emaciated children and played out adults.

We were in a section of the country that appeared to still be harboring vestiges of the Great Depression. Tar paper shacks leaned resignedly away from the wind, with skinny crooked stove pipes sticking out of the roofs as if in a Max Fleischer cartoon. Everyone wore patched overalls. Rusted car chassis sat in weedy front yards. Vicious dogs yapped through the gaps of sad wooden palisades surrounding the better homes -- the ones with indoor plumbing.

I developed a cynical philosophy that season -- no matter how poor someone says they are, they always have money for cotton candy and coloring books. Most of the kids came to the show without shoes on. Their parents were faded, like a silk dress left out in the sun too long. There didn’t seem to be any jobs around, and the dirty streets were filled with listless idlers who looked at our circus posters in shop windows with slack-jawed boredom. This was a part of America I thought had disappeared for good when we got into World War Two.

The circus owner was not satisfied with coloring book sales, even though I usually went through a complete carton of them each day. He thought there was more to be done to inveigle greenbacks from the hicks. So he pulled out the old bicycle trick. I was against it, and told him so -- and was in turn told to hold my tongue and do what I was told or I could pack up my clown trunk and hit the road.

For those of you who do not make a study of mountebanks and charlatans, the ruse is performed by placing blue dots inside all the coloring books. One coloring book is kept out of circulation -- it has a red dot inside. Each show a shiny new bicycle is wheeled out during intermission and the ringmaster announces that the lucky boy or girl who buys the coloring book with the red dot in it will win the bike. The show’s clown, in other words me, stands next to him during this announcement with dozens of coloring books ready to sell. I’m smiling like a maniac. To prove that it’s not a fake, one of the show kids always ran into the ring with the ‘winning’ coloring book with the red dot inside, and wheeled away the bike, followed by the envious stares of all the children in the audience. Of course, the kid gave the bike back after each show. Our plant was the son of the slack wire act. He could really act, racing into the ring screaming with excitement. I hope he made it to Hollywood and changed his name to Brad Pitt or something.

This little trick did, indeed, perk up coloring book sales for several weeks. But then our karma changed.

One miserably hot matinee, after the ringmaster had made his coloring book pitch and I had sold several dozen books, and we were waiting for the show’s infant ringer to come up and claim the bike, a little girl, holding her mother’s hand, brazenly came into the ring with a coloring book -- and inside that coloring book was a RED dot. I showed it to the ringmaster, who in turn showed it to the owner, who turned several deep shades of magenta before bowing to the inevitable and letting the little girl wheel the bike away.

“Change the winning dot to green!” the owner commanded. He would not be slickered again. He went out and bought a new child’s bicycle. And he told the son of the slack wire artists to get into the ring to claim the bike a damn sight faster in the future.

All went well until we hit Ruidoso, NM.

In that town not one, but THREE little children came racing into the ring -- each with a green dot in their coloring book. And one of them was the daughter of the Chief of Police. To avoid any unpleasantness the show owner had to pony up for three brand new bikes, as well as the one he had just purchased.

“Drop the dots!” he said afterwards. “This is costing me an arm and a leg!”

So we dropped the swindle and finished out the season mulcting the rubes in a fairly honest fashion. Of course, had that owner happened to look in my clown trunk at the right moment he might have spotted an opened packet of colored adhesive dots I just happened to have with me. They came in handy during these long and stressful circus tours.

Canada

WASHINGTON — President Trump added a new name Thursday to the list of countries he accuses of preying on American workers and exploiting naïve American trade policies: Canada.

From the NYTimes

Canucks are awful tricky -- they will fool you with their smiles,

While stealing all your bizzness from tomatoes to textiles.

Don’t think they are thick witted or accommodating -- no!

They’re plotting our destruction amidst all that blasted snow.

They’ll underbid and undercharge until the USA

Cannot afford a pot to use to -- I really shouldn’t say.

In Montreal they laugh at us; in Ottawa they sneer --

But all they really know is how to drink up Molson beer.

The trade imbalance must be fixed -- there’s no time for delay.

If they must send us snowshoes we should send them Frito Lay!

And if they won’t take quotas that we give them cheerfully,

We’ll beat them with lacrosse sticks, albeit tearfully.  

Lunch at the Provo Senior Center: Turkey Roast with mashed potatoes.

Groucho Marx wrote a stage play in the late 1940's called 'Time for Elisabeth.' It was about a successful businessman who retires and just gets in the way at home so he finally goes back to work. It was not a success. It played the Pasadena Playhouse for 2 weeks solely on the strength of Groucho's name, then sank into a deserved oblivion.

You might say I have rewritten that turkey as 'Time for Timmy.' Only this time it will not be staged anywhere but in my bedroom, kitchen, and living room. So far it has survived the critic's barbs that it was too slow and self-absorbed. I expect it to run for a few more seasons at least, to be replaced at a later date by "Drooling for Dollars."

 In the Old Testament, Isaiah, it says: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord." 
While recognizing this as truth and light, I just want to put in a plug for hibernation for old people. Instead of all these crummy naps that spoil my sleep at night, why not arrange the Universe so old people can just snuggle up in their recliner one snowy day and begin hibernating -- not waking up until the Second Coming. Would it really mess things up to cut us fossils a break like that?

Just wondering.

Here's the turkey roast with mashed potatoes, frozen veggies on the side. I even took the dinner roll, I was so hungry today. A sharp appetite is as rare with me nowadays as ears on a bowling ball. They even put out cranberry sauce, although hardly anyone used it -- about two-thirds of the people who eat lunch at the Senior Center are Hispanic or Asian; they have no idea what cranberry sauce is. I saw several old ladies ladle it onto their plates and then cover it with hot sauce.

My Radio Career: Hello, Spencer Iowa!

I was the News Director at two radio stations in Northwestern Iowa for several years.

I have pleasant memories of my time spent there.  When I worked at KICD AM in Spencer, we broadcast live from the Clay County Fair every year, in the same building as the large, intricate model train display.  I was introduced to my first taste of corn cob jelly while broadcasting at the Clay County Fair.

At KIWA AM in Sheldon I enjoyed the last vestiges of a harmless payola; radio employees got a free pass into the movie theater next door.  (To set the record straight, I always paid for my own popcorn.)  I loved to drive down to the Loess Hills, stopping on the way to snap pictures of weary old barns, frozen in mid-collapse, on deserted farmsteads.

And people in that region put a slice of dill pickle in their beer bottles, which I’m still trying to figure out.

One thing I did NOT enjoy about my News Director position in Northwestern Iowa was pronouncing the names of the dead.  A small market radio station, such as the ones I worked at, derives a steady chunk of income from the broadcast of funeral announcements. Each funeral parlor in the home county of the radio station faxes over the announcement, as it is to appear in the local newspaper; it is then the News Director’s job to edit the information for inclusion in the next broadcast.  It is normally done three times a day; on the 8am newscast, the noon newscast, and the 6pm recap of the day’s news.  There are days when the funeral announcements run longer than the local news does – especially during the long, cold winter, when pneumonia settles in as an uninvited guest at all the local nursing homes.  Before coming to Iowa I had done radio news in North Dakota and Minnesota, so I thought I was prepared to do the obituary announcements – but I wasn’t.  Not with those tricky, pretzel-like Dutch names!

In the early 1900’s, according to the local history books, several thousand families, all members of the Dutch Reformed Church, came to settle in Clay and O’Brien counties in Iowa.  They not only brought their rigorous religion with them, but they brought some pretty darn challenging surnames, too!  I was used to dealing with Scandinavian tongue-twisters like Stuhlsted and Thingvold -- but Gontjes, Vander Ploeg, and Imwiehe left me flabbergasted.  My hubris initially did not allow me to ask for help in pronouncing these alphabetically-challenged surnames (after all, I was a graduate of the prestigious Brown College of Broadcasting up in Minneapolis, Minnesota!)  But after the first dozen irate phone calls from the next of kin, demanding to know why I was making fun of the deceased, I humbly began seeking help.  The office secretary was usually a local gal, so she often knew how to pronounce the names.  But even she would get stumped once in a while, glancing at the name on the glossy fax sheet and shaking her flaxen mane in bewilderment.  Then I would have to call the funeral home to see if they knew how to pronounce it.  Sometimes they did, and sometimes they didn’t.  If they didn’t there was nothing for it but to track down the pastor or priest who was to give the eulogy and ask them, for heaven’s sake, how do you pronounce “Baughfman”?

Then there was the great Kneen controversy.  This was a large, spread-out, long-established family, so members were going to meet their maker on a regular basis.  The problem was that some of the family pronounced the name “Keen”, and some of them pronounced it “Kaneen”.  Inevitably, if I said “Keen” on the air, it was supposed to be “Kaneen”, and vice versa.  And in what kind of world does a man go around with the last name of Caauwe?  I honestly and sincerely wanted to get the names right, since this would probably be the last time they would be pronounced in full, besides at the funeral, this side of eternity.  Every human being deserves at least that much respect.

I’m happy to say that as time went by I picked up a smattering of knowledge on Dutch surnames – I even took the trouble to look up the use and pronunciation of tussenvoegsels at the local library in Sheldon (and if you want to know what that is you can go look it up yourself!)  And so my frantic calls to the funeral home became fewer and fewer, and my flubs became fewer and fewer.  But then, one fatal day, I read the obituary of a person with the last name of Snuttjer (it’s pronounced “Snooter”).  I pronounced it correctly, but it struck me as just plain funny.  I came down with an attack of the giggles on the air.  After that I had to be careful, to think really sad thoughts as I read the names of the departed, so I would not desecrate them with a belly laugh.  I met my Waterloo when I had to do the sports one day.  I scanned the script hastily before going on the air, too hastily – since halfway through I read the following:  “The Red Raiders at Northwestern University in Orange City have made two selections so far; Donkersloot and Boogert . . . “

The Program Director rushed in to finish the broadcast for me, as I slid helplessly to the floor, choking on my stifled guffaws.

They Breed 'em Big in Texas

The unpredictable weather patterns stimulated by climate change affect infectious diseases, as well as chronic ones. Warmer weather encourages food-borne organisms like salmonella to multiply more rapidly, and warmer seas foster the growth of bacteria like Vibrio that make oysters unsafe to eat. Spikes in heat and humidity have less visible effects, too, changing the numbers and distribution of the insect intermediaries that carry diseases to people.
from the NYTimes 

They breed ‘em big in Texas, those mosquitoes that compel

The folks there to wear Kevlar all the skeeter bites to quell.

But just when things got quiet and the skeeters were subdued

That global warming devil came along to see them screwed.

It didn’t freeze all winter and the rains came early, too --

And now the skeeters zoom about like it was World War Two!

They pass along diseases with a generous disdain

Of all the woe they’re giving and the unremitting pain.

Now Texas is the tropics -- I guess yellow jack will spread

And who needs all those oil wells when the populace is dead?

'Devil's Night' at the Circus

There are two holidays that the smaller shows never book. Mother’s Day and Halloween.

On Mother’s Day families take their mothers and grandmothers out to a nice Sunday dinner -- nobody in their right mind wants to celebrate the day under the big top. Even the mighty Ringling Brothers show, at least when I was on it as a clown forty five years ago, lost money on Mother’s Day. The seats were so empty that tumbleweeds blew through them during intermission. Smaller shows, all the mud shows and Shrine shows that I played spanning a thirty year period, took the day off and didn’t worry about setting up the tent. It was a nice change of pace from the normal frantic tear down, drive like a maniac, and set up before the sun rises routine. The cook tent would make a special meal for dinner -- sometimes lamb, sometimes turkey -- which was also a wonderful change from the usual beans, tortillas, and greasy carne asada that kept the Hispanic roustabouts content.

Halloween was a zebra of a different stripe. It was not only unprofitable to play on that last day of October, but it was downright dangerous.

The reason goes back to the 1980’s in Detroit, when the destructive tradition of Devil’s Night began in the rundown neighborhoods and slums of the crumbling Motor City. Mobs of unemployed and psychotic people roamed the streets Halloween night, torching abandoned houses and factories. Any innocent trick and treater caught out by the mob that night was in for a very rough time -- sometimes lethal. This nasty tradition spread throughout the Rust Belt in the next few years, and then became a general malaise in the Midwest. It is still a terroristic tradition in some of the more backward areas of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and southern Illinois. But you never find it mentioned in brochures from their Chamber of Commerce.

Fifteen years ago, when I was the ringmaster on Carson & Barnes, the management decided to buck the tradition of no shows on Halloween. We were in the deep south of Illinois and the weather was holding up fine -- beautiful Indian Summer days of warm hazy sun and crisp refreshing nights. Most of the show was Hispanic or Russian, and playing on Halloween meant nothing to them one way or the other. It was just another day, like any other day. But to the few Americans on the show who knew the pulse of the Midwest, it didn’t seem like a good idea.   

The Halloween matinee was meager. Most of the candy butchers didn’t bother to go out to sell their wares, since there was pretty much nobody out there to sell to. I did the Peanut Pitch to one of the most lethargic group of goitrous yahoos I’d ever seen. We sold exactly two bags.

But the evening show was packed -- and it was an ugly crowd. No children, just teenagers and young adults, who were obviously drinking hard and spoiling for a fight. Their costumes were not pretty and cute, they were brutal and monstrous. Creepy fanged clowns predominated.

Gary Byrd, one of the owners of the show, came up to me just before opening to say “I don’t like the look of these people. The minute any sumbitch starts trouble I want you to blow the whistle and close the show!”

“Yessir!” I replied.

He strode off and his wife, Barbara, came up to me a few seconds later to say: “I know these people look to be trouble, but they’re buying concessions like there’s no tomorrow. No matter what, don’t you whistle down the show -- you hear me?”

“Yes ma’am!” I replied.

Now I was in a pickle. Gary was known to deliver a stout roundhouse punch to any employee who disobeyed him -- but Barbara was the one who handed out my salary each Sunday. I decided to take my chances with Gary. Not out of bravery -- but out of greed.

There was trouble not long after the show got underway. After the first clown act, Pepito, the head clown, came to me to say they were not going to do the rest of the show -- the hente maldito were slinging pennies at them from slingshots. He showed me a cut right above his left eye.

“They blind me, those bastardos!” he screamed in my face. I told him to calm down and go talk to the Byrds about it. “No show!” he spat in my face and strode away.

All five clowns took off their makeup, despite Gary Byrd’s resonant threats. But they didn’t just leave the tent. They saw how good concession sales were going, so they borrowed some white jackets and striped caps and went out hawking hot dogs and Coke and making a killing.

During the lion act someone set fire to a hay bale under the bleachers, but since the roustabouts put it out quickly while the big cats were jumping through their smoky flaming hoops the crowd didn’t catch on -- they thought all the extra fug was just part of the act.

During my Peanut Pitch that night some reveler sent a penny speeding into my forehead, leaving a flap of skin that bleed like hell. Barbara Byrd patched it up and passed me a hundred dollar bill while hissing “Keep going -- we’re almost sold out of everything and then we can kick these hillbillies all out!”

“Yes ma’am” I said woozily, my head ringing with an incipient migraine. To this day I still carry a slight scar on my forehead from that episode.

As the highwire act got ready to go one I spotted a furtive group of kids trying to set fire to the sidewall of the tent. I quickly pointed them out to Rudy, the roustabout hefe -- he got a group over to the pyromaniacs pronto and had them frogmarched outside, where they were gently massaged with an assortment of hand tools.

We didn’t let either the elephants or the trapeze act go on that Halloween night. The elephants might have been spooked into stampeding and too many drunks were hanging around the rigging trying to untie it -- the flyers could have come plummeting down on a loose guy wire.

Barbara finally gave me the high sign to end the show, so I blew the show down and gave the audience the most insincere thank you for their attendance in the annals of show biz. The Midway rides and concessions didn’t bother to stay open for the aftershow crowd -- they were afraid they’d be robbed and their stands smashed. So there were no elephant or pony rides, and the petting zoo was securely locked up as the crowd staggered out of the tent and back to their cars. The local cops had finally shown up, strengthened with a spate of State Troopers, so we thought there’d be no more trouble.

But during the night someone, or something, got into the pony stable and ripped open one of the animal’s throats. The poor thing was found bled to death early the next morning.

That was the only Halloween I ever worked on a small circus. And believe you me, if another show had proposed the same thing I would have gladly quit rather than go through that kind of Grand Guignol deviltry again!

The Name

“And whoso taketh upon him my name, and endureth to the end, the same shall be saved at the last day.”

Taking on the name of Christ is done not with a label

On your coat or shirt or blouse, or placemats at the table.

No uniform or special hat; no haircut that’s distinct

Can mark a person as with Jesus Christ securely linked.

Lugging scriptures all around and quoting prophets past

Doesn’t make me instantly His partisan steadfast.

Outward signs of fealty are billboards, nothing more --

Only tender heart and mind can prove who I adore.

Restaurant Review: The Smoking Apple, in Lindon Utah

I needed to go to Lindon, to the Map Store, to complete my wall map collection -- Mexico and Minnesota. I've already got Scandinavia, Great Britain, and Thailand, up on my apartment walls -- with the addition of Minnesota and Mexico I have now completed my personal geography. Except for North Dakota -- where I lived a total of six years. But that map can wait a long, long time . . .

Daughter Sarah drove me up to Lindon, with grand kids Brooke and Lance kibitzing in the back seat. In return I took them all to lunch at the Smoking Apple on State Street in Lindon. It's barbecue and sides the way it's supposed to be done -- rib sticking and generous.

Sarah had the rib platter. I had the two meat platter (brisket and Cajun sausage.) The kids had chicken nuggets and mac & cheese. The sweet potato fries are dipped in white sugar after they've been fried, which made them taste better to me. But Sarah shares the prejudices of all younger people who believe sugar is a gateway drug to heroin. The kids loved their meals; Sarah enjoyed her ribs; and I gobbled down as much of mine as I could without bursting my gizzard.

The whole shebang, with fountain drinks, came to $32.00. And I took home enough in my doggie bag to make a toothsome dinner tonight or possibly a decadent brunch tomorrow morning. I'm giving this place 4 juicy burps. If you need a carnivorous injection stat, this is the place to go and riot in red meat.

The staff is quick and friendly, and even the restroom knew my nickname --