Ruling by tweet is absurd

Ruling by tweet is absurd.

Just why should we cherish a word

From some texting fool

Who thinks he is cool --

His musings should all be interred.

A Candy Bar Wrapped in Seaweed

A growing number of entrepreneurs and researchers are working to turn foods like mushrooms, kelp, milk and tomato peels into edible — if not always palatable — replacements for plastics, coatings and other packaging materials.

From the NYTimes

A candy bar wrapped in seaweed

Dampens my caramel greed.

I don’t want my meat

Bound up in a sheet

Of pulverized parakeet seed!

No Summer Peaches?

For almost all Southerners, a summer without a seemingly endless supply of peaches is unthinkable. But growers say the unthinkable is about to happen in America’s cobbler belt. A double punch of unseasonably warm winter weather and an ill-timed freeze has devastated the peach crop.

From the NYTimes

The people who live in Savannah

Consider the peach to be manna --

A nectarous dream,

Served up with some cream --

But now all they’ve got is banana!

Ben Carson

The mindset of paupers is weak,

And that’s why their outlook is bleak.

Ben Carson proposes

That no bed of roses

Be offered to poverty’s clique.

Restaurant Review: The Purple Turtle, in Pleasant Grove.

The Purple Turtle at 85 East State Road in Pleasant Grove serves your basic burgers and fries fare in a competent and plentiful manner. Their specialty is fish and chips. So naturally I had to try that.

I was accompanied by my daughter Sarah and her three kids. It was just he place for them. Everything is either tile, Formica, stainless steel, or linoleum, so it didn't matter how much they spilled, or where they spilled it. Family friendly to the max.

Of course I had to play the Last of the Big Time Spenders.
"Get whatever you want -- don't worry about the price!" I boomed loudly enough for the whole restaurant to hear. And they did.
We had two orders of fish and chips; one chicken nugget kiddie meal; one grilled cheese sandwich kiddie meal; two kiddie shakes; and one fountain drink. (Sarah always just has water.) The total for this feast was $37.64. I paid an additional two dollars for special 'British" chips for my meal -- which proved to be the only disappointment in the whole shebang. They were rather mushy, more like mashed potatoes than the real crisp deal that Britons cherish so highly.

The fact of the matter is that I ate only three of my special chips, and then scarfed down Sarah's sweet potato fries -- which were very good indeed. I'm giving this place 3.5 burps out of a possible 4. The service is quick and friendly, the food is good and filling, and there's plenty of parking. Oh, and it would be nice if they had some bottles of malt vinegar handy for the fish . . .

In Iowa Immigrants Slash

In Iowa immigrants slash

At carcasses for ready cash.

The locals refuse

Such labor to choose --

They’re happy to stay just white trash.

Clowning in Canada with Tim Tegge and Jerry Bisbee

How Tim Tegge managed to keep his wardrobe spotless in the Canadian wilderness I'll never know!

Up in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, in the year 1987, I witnessed second-generation clown Tim Tegge dye his hair purple at a beauty salon to celebrate a new romance. Despite my years associating with clowns of all stripes of eccentricity and psychosis, I had never seen a man go into a beauty parlor for any reason except to pick up his wife or girlfriend. Men got their hair clipped at a barbershop -- women got theirs done at a beauty parlor. And never the twain shall meet. But then, I should have suspected that Tegge was destined to outrage tonsorial propriety when he had me help him film a homemade music video in a local Ukrainian cemetery. He thought the Byzantine architecture of the crypts in the background showed off his willowy physique to good advantage.

He and his partner Jerry Bisbee had been brought in during the Canadian leg of our circus tour when all the other clowns except me quit the show. It was not so much a pay dispute as a contretemps over the mileage. The show was scheduled to make some fantastic leaps between towns in the western provinces of Canada, where hockey arenas are few and far between. Some of the overnight jumps were close to four hundred miles -- that meant packing up and driving all night and then setting up in the next burg without an hour of sleep. And the roads held no charm for an overnight drive. They were as buckled and potholed as a lunar landscape. After doing the math, clown alley figured out that they would barely break even after paying for gas at Canadian prices. So they walked out, en masse. All except me. I had a wife and kids to feed back home in Minnesota, and I was bunking in back of one of the show trucks -- so mileage was not a concern to me. Neither was sleep, since I could lay down and snooze while the show driver wended his weary way over the washboard wastes.

Tim and Jerry did not seem to mind the long hauls. They drove a beat up old Pontiac Brougham, navigating it onto the lot in the wee hours of the morning and sleeping comfortably in it until brunch each day. The show did not offer a cook tent, so I joined them each morning to hunt down a suitable hashery for desayuno. Foolish dreamer that I was, I had imagined a Canadian breakfast to be one of feathery light flapjacks drowning in maple syrup, with hearty slabs of Canadian bacon on the side. The reality was porridge -- a thick gruel that would be more at home in a cement mixer. This was served with watery poached eggs. And the bacon was barely cooked or else burnt to cinders. Lunch and dinner were not much better. Everything was boiled to a sponge-like consistency, or fried in axle grease. This is because Canadians believe that eating out should be a penance for past misdeeds, not a pleasurable holiday from the home kitchen.

Tegge did a classic white face and Jerry did an Auguste. And when I say classic white face I mean lots of elegant costuming, right down to the immaculate white gloves he wore during the entire show. To this day I don’t know how he managed to keep his wardrobe so clean and crisp while we traversed the wilds of Alberta and British Columbia. We ran into nothing but rain and mud, and most towns offered only hand laundries where you gave them your dirty things and got them back in three or four days -- an impossibility for us, as we only spent one day in each town. I wound up washing everything in a galvanized tub full of cold water and Oxidal. Then hanging it over the engine hood of the truck I lived in to dry off when the motor was left running. This left my costumes dull-looking and smelling of diesel.

As a producing clown Tim Tegge has few equals. His knowledge of clown gags is encyclopedic. When he and Jerry joined up with me in Canada he got out the props for a doctor’s gag and a convict chase from the trunk of their Pontiac in the twinkling of an eye. We did simple, basic slapstick routines -- no fancy juggling or musical malarky. And the crowds ate it up.

At first I was a bit stand-offish with the two of them, because I was afraid they were brought in to replace me -- that I would be redlighted in some dismal jerkwater village on the Canadian prairie, left to fend for myself. And I found out years later that the show owner would indeed have abandoned me in the middle of nowhere when Tim and Jerry showed up but for the fact that Tegge threatened to turn around and go back to the States if the owner did such a dastardly deed.

  

As we worked together in a professional way I came to enjoy their company away from the show immensely. We commiserated with each other over Bisbee’s search for a decent cup of Canadian coffee, Tegge’s quest for a cheap Canadian beer, and my growing nostalgia for my family back in the States. I had picked up a head cold while in Yorkton, which held on with the tenacity of a lamprey eel -- it drained me of energy and ambition. Without the companionship of Tim and Jerry that season I doubt I would have stuck it out.

When we finally crossed the border back into the States we had to part ways -- they were contracted for ten weeks with a show in California, while our show was playing the hinterlands of Montana. As it turned out, I left the show in Minot, North Dakota, after getting word that Amy, my wife, had suffered a miscarriage.

After I was back home and saw Amy nursed back to health I asked her if I could get my hair dyed purple as a way to celebrate her recovery and our love for each other. Absolutely not, she replied immediately. -- just think of the uproar it would cause in church the next Sunday, and the weird example it would set for our kids. So I went to the local barber and got a crew cut instead. That showed her who wore the baggy pants in the family!

There is an old woman in Flint

There is an old woman in Flint

Who thought of divorce as a sprint.

She did it so often

Her purse it did soften --

She lives now on hotdogs and mint.

The Cruelty of Clown Alley

Classic American clowning -- which is as extinct as the public telephone booth -- was refreshingly sadistic. Terry Parsons and I once calculated that a typical Ringling performance contained: 2 decapitations; 25 pies in the face; 76 pratfalls; 66 face slaps; 32 blows to the head with a foam rubber mallet; 99 kicks to the keister; 17 black powder explosions; 7 buckets of water in the face or down the pants; and 1 defenestration.

The rough and tumble slapstick of a former generation of clowns was cathartic. I remember as a small child watching the Three Stooges on TV, where I observed with interest Moe blowing a cloud of black pepper into Curly’s face -- with the very gratifying result that he sneezed himself down a flight of stairs. At the time my sister Linda was only nine months old, and I resented her taking up all of mom’s attention. So I took the pepper shaker from the kitchen, poured a generous portion into the palm of my chubby little hand, and blew it into Linda’s face while she was incarcerated in her playpen. She howled and sneezed in a very pleasing manner until mom came rushing in, demanding to know what in god’s name had happened. When I told her, she applied the business side of a hairbrush to my backside -- which continued to glow like a beacon for weeks afterwards, and made sitting a chancy proposition. Still, it was worth it. I couldn’t wait to try out an eye poke on the next person who annoyed me.

Good slapstick is sadistic but never gory. As Felix Adler once said: “Clowns are made of India rubber -- they bounce right back from anything.” And in the screwball romantic comedies of the mid-30’s it always seems that at the end of the movie Irene Dunne would wallop Cary Grant across the chops, he would return the favor, and then there was a dissolve to the two of them getting married while grinning like idiots. What a formula: Fisticuffs = Romance!

While Steve Smith and I leaned more towards the traditional British music hall pantomime when we worked as the advance clowns for Ringling, we always maintained a transparent respect for down and dirty comic violence. We had a swordfight routine in which I finally best Smith, forcing him to fall on top of an empty barrel and then jackknife into it. Mystified as to his whereabouts, I circle the barrel, stooping low to gaze about me -- which allows Smith to skewer me repeatedly through the bunghole. We discovered that the more he impaled my rear end the louder the laughter grew -- until we compressed the whole routine down to me throwing him into the barrel and then getting poked in the butt for the next ten minutes. Without the swordplay -- which we initially thought was pretty darn funny -- the bit became the biggest laugh generator in our two-man show. Go figure.

In reaction to the influx of European musical clowns back in the early 70’s, Smith and I spent a long afternoon trying to figure out how to do a gag where every musical instrument we pick up either explodes, catches on fire, or both explodes and catches on fire. The blow off would be a grand piano devouring us. We abandoned the project, which I still think has great potential, after doing the math and figuring out the constant destruction of musical instruments would bankrupt us pretty fast. Besides, Spike Jones and His CIty Slickers pretty much took care of that concept long before Smith and I started clowning.

My last year with the Ringling clown alley, Terry Parsons and I decided on a reductionist approach to violent slapstick. We each brought a chair out on the track, solemnly bowed to each other, sat down facing each other, and then began slapping each other in the face, tit for tat. Of course we pulled our punches. But that’s all the gag was -- buffeting each other on the cheek. For reasons that remain enigmatic to me, our fearsome Performance Director, Charlie Baumann, thought our little routine was extremely “Urkomisch.” He would pause in his rounds during the show to enjoy us slapping each other silly. He said in Germany this was a traditional clown routine, called “Schlagen Fest.” I think he just enjoyed the cruelty of it. Anyway, the audience didn’t seem to mind -- we never got any catcalls or rotten chayotes thrown at us.

Alas, the gag came to an untimely end one day when Terry and his wife Danuta attended a birthday party between shows at the Polish train car. The vodka flowed a little too freely into Terry. That night when we did the Schlagen Fest he nearly knocked me out of my chair on the first slap. I stood two more overenthusiastic cuffs before staggering off with a nose bleed. The next day Terry apologized profusely, but the damage had been done. I held no grudge against him, but decided that a solo gag would guarantee my face did not become a punching bag again.

Terry Parsons was a slapstick reductionist

There was a lawmaker in Raleigh

There was a lawmaker in Raleigh

Who thought equal voting a folly.

He thought to restrict

The vote to hand-picked

Stooges -- but he’s off his trolley.