How to Write a Great Circus Blog

Quite often I have someone pm me to ask “Tim, how do you produce such brilliant work on circus clowning, and so consistently? What is your professional secret?” There’s no need for any false modesty between you and I, dear reader -- we both recognize that my work is outstanding and ought to become a bestseller as soon as I can number all the pages; so I’m going to lay all my cards on the table right here and now. After you’re done reading my guidelines, you, too, will be able to jot down your circus memories in a fascinating and coherent manner. Guaranteed or your cotton candy back!

The first thing I always do prior to starting one of my clown mini-memoirs is to wake up. Now you may think this is already happening, but that is not the case. Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night to use the facilities, and then, still in only a semi-conscious state, I wend my way to the fridge for a light snack of pickled herring and Triscuits, washed down with a Mountain Dew. Thinking myself wide awake and ready to create a masterpiece, I settle into my recliner in the living room and begin typing random words on my Chromebook. When I actually wake up fully in the morning still in my recliner I’m covered in Triscuit crumbs and all I’ve managed to bang out is “Now is the time for the quick red fox . . . “

Once I know I’m awake and fully conscious (they are NOT the same thing, once you pass a certain age) I pull out some photo albums and rifle through my journals. I’ve kept an extensive log of my activities for the past 45 years, as many LDS adults do -- so I have plenty of material to resurrect and scribble about. Unfortunately, I wrote most of my journal entries in pencil until about 2004 -- they are pretty blurry now. Plus my kids spilled a great deal of grape soda on my photo albums when they were little and liked to go through them when I wasn’t around. The baboons.

So I often just sit back in my recliner, after a hearty breakfast of braunshweiger on a toasted bagel, two hardboiled eggs, a can of sardines, and a bowl of cottage cheese sprinkled with cayenne pepper, and let my memory take me back to those halcyon days in the Ringling clown alley when Prince Paul called me “Schmutz Finger” and Performance Director Charlie Baumann had to keep an eye on me at all times lest I pin a balloon to the back of his black tuxedo coat. Should I tell of the time the midgets Stanley and Lester Janus dressed up like children to get the special airfare rate on a trip back home to Hungary? Or maybe it’s time to reveal how Otto Griebling actually cheated at pinochle.

Once I have a memory I want to pull out and polish up in detail, my work is nearly done. But first I have to find the proper motivation. A true artist cannot just come up with some harum-scarum thought and then commit it to the laptop. Certainly not! The first rule of all good writing is that it’s an excuse to get out of doing chores. The breakfast dishes are piled high in the sink, and last night’s mistaken attempt at shrimp scampi is also hidden somewhere in the depths of the kitchen sink. They need to be taken care of immediately, which is why I go into my bedroom, close the door, and get to work on my clown posting. Two paragraphs in, when I’m feeling my oats, I decide to check my email; then see what’s happening on Facebook; then check the weather forecast for Provo; then double check my banking accounts online to see if the rent check came through yet (I hope not -- I want to buy some Xanth paperbacks at the used bookstore down the street, and they don’t come cheap, and my Social Security won’t kick in for another week and a half!)  And then I watch a few episodes of The Bernie Mac Show on Netflix, just to get my comic juices flowing -- and then I start to fall asleep, so I set aside everything and put the lavender-scented gel pack over my eyes for twenty winks. When I wake up refreshed an hour later I am reminded of the last time I vacuumed the carpet -- Christmas, 2015. I probably should do it right now -- and that motivates me to finish my clown article. I always try to end it with a salty quote from Swede Johnson or some bathos about clowns with broken hearts.

But before I post it I always call one of my daughters in the area to see if she'll take me to Costco so I can buy a case of black olives or marinated artichoke hearts. That way I forget to proofread the darn thing before posting it. And when one of my old friends from Hawaii or Thailand emails me to say “Hey birdbrain, you misspelled ‘lycopodium’ again!” I get into such a snit that sometimes I delete the whole damn article -- so you readers never see hide nor hair of it.

And that, pupils, is how to write a great circus blog! Or, as Swede Johnson once said, “Why don’t you try putting your thumb in your eye, Pinhead?” That was the same night Dougie Ashton found out he had a daughter in the Stasi that he never knew about . . .

Advance Clowns in Mexico

Smith and I were known as 'Dusty & TJ'

I was partnered with the effervescent Steve Smith as Advance Clown for the Ringling Blue Unit in 1973.  We played many a curious venue under the direction of various advertising agencies across the US that were frantic to use us to full effect to boost circus ticket sales. Back then the Ringling account was considered a plum assignment for local marketing companies -- it paid very well and brought both prestige and a certain ‘show biz’ cachet to those who handled the account. So Smith and I wound up exploited in many remarkable ways.

We were booked into a seafood restaurant in New Jersey to perform thirty minutes for the patrons. The place was nearly pitch black, with only candle light from the tables to give our comic business a vague form. They didn’t have a stage -- just a cleared area in the middle of the dining area. We bombed magnificently -- bumping into tables and jostling lobster thermidor onto the laps of assorted wise guys and their ladies. We cut the show short in order to avoid a pair of cement overshoes and a plunge into the Atlantic.

In Tampa we were scheduled to do a show at an alligator farm. I don’t know how the local marketing agency figured that clowns and alligators went together, but when Smith and I saw that they had set up a stage for us in the middle of a large green pond full of smiling gators we adamantly refused to go on. There were no reporters present, anyways. Instead, we sullenly did  meet-n-greet for an hour by the ticket office, shaking hands with incoming tourists and reminding them that the Greatest Show on Earth would be in town the next week.

Then there was the incident at the Tijuana-San Diego border. The local agency in San Diego scheduled us for a radio interview with Wolfman Jack at XERB Radio in Rosarito Beach over in Mexico -- this rogue station broadcast with over 250 thousand watts. It reached everything west of Chicago and Houston. The station specialized in cheap advertising for pentecostal storefront churches, and sex drive nostrums. We had no trouble crossing into Mexico in our clown makeup. The Wolfman proved to be a gracious radio host, for the most part. He asked us some intelligent questions about circus life and let us give our prepackaged spiel about date, time, and place for the show in San Diego. But inevitably, like most media personalities, he had to end the interview by asking us to ‘do something funny.’ How the hell can a circus clown ‘do something funny’ on radio? Clowns are strictly visual humor. But we had been asked this so many times already that we came prepared. Smith blew on a duck call, I blew on a siren whistle, we both chanted “A little song, a little dance -- a little seltzer down the pants!” Then we both blew simultaneously on slide whistles and announced “We gotta go -- our elephant is double-parked!” That usually satisfied radio interviewers. The Wolfman seemed happy with it, anyways. He gave us each a complimentary bottle of Florex Masculine Reviver pills as we went out the studio door.

Ten minutes later, as our local agency rep drove us up to the border, Smith and I were eagerly discussing where to have dinner that night. I plumped for tamales and refried beans at a dingy cantina near where our motorhome was parked -- it was filling and cheap. But Smith wanted to find a place that served meatloaf and mashed potatoes because he was feeling nostalgic for his girlfriend back in Zanesville, Ohio -- and that is the kind of food she liked to fix him.

Alas, we never got dinner of any kind that day. Because once the Mexican border guards saw us in our clown makeups they decided we were drug runners. They had us pull over and began a rigorous search of the ad agency’s car. Back in those days you didn’t need a passport to get into or out of Mexico. But the guards grew ever more suspicious when they found out we didn’t carry our wallets with us when in clown garb.

“Don’t worry, fellahs” said the local agency guy smoothly. “This happens all the time. We’ll be across the border in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

A thousand shakes later we were inside a Mexican border patrol office, that reeked of roasting coffee from a nearby open air market, being questioned by an officer whose grasp of the English language was fragile and inconclusive. The guards had found our makeup kits in the trunk of the car. Convinced the tins of Stein’s Clown White were a new type of heroin, they had sent them to a laboratorio for analyses -- and we had been invited to cool our heels at the adjacent policia station.

“You have a confession to make here, no?” the capitan asked us severely.

“No!” we both shouted together. “We’re clowns -- payasos -- not criminals!”

Smith was all for contacting the American embassy at this point, but the local agency rep begged us not to do that.

“Think of the negative publicity, guys!” he pleaded. “We can’t afford a story about Ringling clowns being detained as drug smugglers to get into the papers for godsake!”

So we sat and waited and glowered, as our stomachs growled and contracted. Those Mexican martinets didn’t even offer us a glass of agua.

Finally, around midnight, the test results on our clown makeup came back negative and we were free to go. We got back to our motorhome around two in the morning. We were scheduled for an early morning TV show the next day, so we took off our makeup, showered, and sat in our bathrobes playing Uno and eating Cap’n Crunch cereal until it was time to get made up again.

Such was the glamor of our Advance Clown tour . . .  

Wolfman Jack was a pretty decent interviewer

Utah Headlines & Verses. Thursday. June 8. 2017

 ANGRY MOB DISRUPTS PLAN BY UTAH DEMOCRATS TO ELECT ALLEGED SEX PREDATOR TO LEADERSHIP POSITION.

When Democrats want to elect

Someone with blatant defect,

The crowd up will rise

to spit in their eyes --

Democracy has that effect . . .

WASATCH FRONT HIT WITH DEADLY OZONE POLLUTION AS UTAH DIVISION OF AIR QUALITY WARNS THAT INFANTS AND ELDERLY SHOULD STAY INSIDE

There was an old man from Tooele

Who thought that the air was a killa.

“Because” he complained,

“It makes me feel drained --

And pokes like a darn rototilla!”

MICRO HOMES BECOMING MORE POPULAR -- AND MORE EXPENSIVE -- IN UTAH

There was a young couple from Draper

Who read of small homes in the paper.

They crammed inside one

And said “Ain’t this fun?”

“Now we can be a trend shaper!”

******************************************************************

Late last year, researchers carried out a proof-of-concept demonstration showing how internet-connected home thermostats, such as Nest, could be hacked and held hostage, leaving homeowners in the freezing cold (or blistering heat).

From the NYTimes

The world will not be ended in a whimper or a bang.

The whole shebang will perish from a heinous hacking gang.

Our cars will stop, our homes will fry -- our bank accounts will freeze,

While ransomware extortion brings us quickly to our knees.

We’ve gotta go all Luddite on our internet foundation,

or suffer from prolonged malaise and definite castration!

Walkin' the Walk in Clown Alley

Bill Ballantine, the avuncular Dean of the Ringling Clown College back in 1971, was big on clown walks. He insisted that every professional clown should have their own trademark shuffle, just as they had their own trademark makeup and costume. He often demonstrated his patented clown walk to us during classes -- a sort of bowlegged swagger that made him look like he needed to be milked.

In order to encourage our creativity in this area, Uncle Bill had our Yoga teacher beat a tom-tom each day for half an hour, at varying speeds, and then had us walk around the practice ring one at a time, in the hopes that this would speed our development of a comic amble. This exercise proved to be one of the less popular items in our comedy curriculum. Steve Smith simply skipped in time to the drum. Chico actually broke his ankle when he attempted a sort of sideways shamble that tripped him over the ring curb -- he had to perform at the audition show for Irvin Feld wearing a leg cast. Most of the class simply imitated Chaplin’s famous waddle or did a lecherous lope like Groucho Marx. Originality was sadly lacking in our group of embryonic funny folk. When it came my turn I at first tried walking backwards -- but this proved unhandy in consequence of the number of guy wires and elephant tubs I backed into. I imitated a crab, sliding sideways -- the move generated no chuckles and was hard on my ankles. I hopped; I crawled; I even spun like a whirling dervish. But nothing struck a chord. Finally, in mad desperation, when it came my turn to practice the tom-tom induced journey around the ring, I tore off my pants and streaked around the ring in my undies. This raised a huge laugh, but even I realized it would not be practical to keep tearing off my baggy pants every time I appeared in the ring.

I don’t remember anyone coming up with an original clown walk by the time of our audition performance. And once I got on the Ringling Blue Unit, there were very few of the veteran clowns who bothered with any kind of distinctive strut whatsoever.

Prince Paul, of course, had a very distinctive walk -- but that was because he was a dwarf. He had a regular-sized head and torso, but a cruel trick of nature had foreshortened his arms and legs -- so he couldn’t help display a ridiculous waddle when in motion. Still, he was very fast and nimble on his feet. He never let his handicap keep him from running like the wind to be first in line to get paid when the ghost walked.

Sparky, who sported the largest pair of clown shoes in the alley -- nearly four feet long and two feet wide -- necessarily had to drag his feet along at a slow pace. His distinctive scrape could be heard a half block away.

Rubber Neck developed a very unique head bobbing gesture -- something like the courting dance of a turkey cock -- which affected the way he walked in clown makeup. It was a sort of hop-skip-jump movement that audiences found funny all by itself. So Rubber Neck was lucky -- he could go into the ring and do nothing but strut around for a few minutes to raise a large healthy laugh.

Swede Johnson did not bother with any kind of eccentric walk. Neither did Mark Anthony -- but Mark loved to tell about his old pal Bumpsy Anthony, who apparently had a very peculiar mode of locomotion. The way Mark told it, Bumpsy always dragged a piece of rope behind him, head bowed in deep concentration, walking like a pall bearer at a funeral. Inevitably, someone would step on his trailing rope -- causing him to execute a spectacular backflip. This was Bumpsy’s stock--in-trade for twenty years.

Boss clown Levoi Hipps had a normal walk -- except when he was on stilts, of course. He was our premier stilt walker that season -- he strode around the arena on 20-foot stilts, risking serious and incapacitating injury with every step. He loved doing it.

We First of Mays didn’t consciously develop distinctive clown walks -- but we got them anyways. They came from the thin-soled Capezio dance slippers we were forced to wear for all the production numbers. Pounding around on a hard concrete floor every day began to give us all fallen arches and flat feet. To ease the constant pain, I began walking in a stumpy manner reminiscent of a sailor back on land again for the first time in two years.

I’ve kept that flat-footed walk with me ever since -- even in civilian life. An old friend of mine from Church tells me that the first time he saw me enter the chapel he knew I must be a comedian of some sort, just by the funny way I walked in. My kids tell me I walk like a duck.

Nowadays I don’t do a lot of walking. Used to be, I loved walking along the Provo River Trail for miles and miles. But a bad bout of the flu this past winter has sapped my stamina and some of the meds I take for blood pressure and arthritis make me photosensitive -- so now I content myself with a morning stroll to the Rec Center for a swim and a soak in the hot tub. Then a brisk walk home before the sun gets too hot. I spend the rest of the day in my recliner, dreaming and writing . . . and napping.

Utah Headlines & Verse. Wednesday. June 7. 2017.

SALT LAKE POLICE THREATEN TO STRIKE OVER PAY RAISE. MAYOR'S OFFICE SAYS THEY'RE ALREADY OVERPAID, ACCORDING TO NATIONAL STANDARDS. 

The cops of Salt Lake are so broke

They hardly can buy a cold Coke.

Pay them more money

Or else they’ll get funny --

And Salt Lake will go up in smoke.

UTAH REPUBLICANS RACE TO FILL CHAFFETZ HOLE -- THE CONTENDERS ARE PILING UP LIKE SARDINES.

A vacuum Republicans hate

Happens when they have to wait

To fill a blank seat

In Washington’s heat --

They’ve already glutted the slate.

UTAH COUNTY SUES CITY OF PROVO OVER ALLEGED FRAUD IN PROMISED PARKING SPACES FOR UTAH VALLEY CONVENTION CENTER

When county sues city, there’s feelings galore

That are not too Christian -- and might lead to gore.

But lawyers rejoice in such long altercations --

It means they can plan for expensive vacations.

So let’s all be friends and a settlement carve --

And chase all the lawyers away so they starve.


****************************************************************************************

A teacher at a Texas middle school is out of a job after she gave mock awards to students that included designations like “most likely to become a terrorist” and “most likely to blend in with white people,” the school district and local media reports said.

From the NYTimes

A teacher who gives accolades

Instead of just sticking to grades

Increases the odds

That her school board gods

Will chase her down with razor blades.

The Politics of Clown Alley. 1972

I have been reading old books written by an irascible newspaperman named H. Allen Smith. He was once a best-selling humorist, during World War Two -- but nobody knows about him today. He was fond of lists -- lists of people who died of bee stings; lists of companies that manufactured exploding cigars (there used to be twenty-five in the United States); even lists of schools for aspiring ecdysiasts. So I have decided to ape him by compiling a list of which political party the clowns on the Ringling Blue Unit belonged to back in 1972.

This was not very hard to do, because I have a steel trap memory and because all the clowns back then were vociferous and militant about their political beliefs. There were no Shrinking Bozos when it came to politics amongst the giggle brigade. Some days you couldn’t get clown alley to shut up about Watergate, the ERA amendment, or the Vietnam War. The place sounded like a Wheeler & Woolsey movie. So here goes, in no particular order:

• Prince Paul -- Staunch Republican. Anyone in the alley who called Nixon a crook could expect to be conked on the noggin by Prince with his canvas folding camp chair.
• Levoi Hipps. Dixiecrat. As boss clown, Levoi felt it incumbent upon himself to uphold the traditions and priciples of the Old South. That meant 'do as your told and don't ask questions.'
• Swede Johnson -- Lazy Democrat. He once  said “All politicians are lognere, but at least the Democrats try to hide their lies better than the Republicans.” He told me the last time he voted was when Truman was running for President.
• Mark Anthony -- Confused Democrat. He remembered Henry Wallace as the Vice President under FDR, and thought Wallace was still a Democrat when he voted for him in 1948, when Wallace was actually running on the Progressive party platform. Mark liked to explain to anyone who would listen that Henry Wallace was the best thing the Democrats had going.
• Otto Griebling -- The Silent Majority. Since Otto couldn’t talk after his throat operation, his political beliefs were hard to fathom. All I know is that he had Mark Anthony make him a bamboo birdcage, on the bottom of which he placed various newspaper photographs of personalities such as Richard Nixon and Tiny Tim. He never took it out as a walkaround, just kept it by his trunk in the alley.
• Steve Smith -- Liberal Democrat. Smith was dedicated to the Civil Rights movement. Martin Luther King was one of his heroes.
• Ron Severinni -- Opportunist. He said to me once “Nut-nut, ya gotta vote for whoever can promise you the most.”
• Sandy Severinni -- Democrat. She grew up in California and had an unreasoning affection for former Governor and Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren.
• Tom Kenyon -- Communist. He carried a copy of ‘Das Kapital’ around with him -- but I think he used it mostly to impress girls with how intellectual he was.
• Robbie Dorfman -- A Tammany Hall Democrat. He liked to say “A new broom should sweep up a lot of cash.”
• Don Washburn -- Republican. As a collector of fine porcelein tea cups, he had a simple explanation for his political leanings. “Have you ever” he asked me once, “seen a Democrat who collected anything but favors?”
• Tim Holst. Republican. But he didn’t like Nixon. He called him a ‘honyocker.’
• Don DeBelli -- Democrat. His line of reasoning in a political debate was always straightforward: “Shut your frigging mouth or I’ll feed it a knuckle sandwich!”       
• Ray Lesperance -- Democrat. Despite his last name, or perhaps because of it, he claimed to be ‘Boston-bred Irish,’ which could only mean being a card-carrying member of the Democratic party. “Republicans” he would say after a few drinks under his belt, “don’t stink after hard work -- they just smell like tea roses.” What he meant by that remark remains a deep dark mystery in the annals of political science.
• Rick Cobban -- Whatever his girlfriend told him to be. He was hooked up with one of the showgirls and never made a plain statement of fact without consulting her first. This made them the happiest couple in clown alley.
• Ted Tertwiller -- Hippie. He believed in Free Love, Drugs, and Rock-n-Roll. If he ever saw the inside of a voting booth he probably thought it was for taking photographs with his date.
• Butch Williams -- Dixiecrat. He loved the Deep South so much he kept a bag of Quaker Instant Grits in his clown trunk and had the piecar boil him up a big bowl every day for breakfast.
• Dennis Collevecchio -- Democrat. His clown costume was a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit, and I think it went to his head. He said that Democrats drank Moxie with their little pinky stuck out at a right angle.
• Me -- Farmer Labor Party. My dad voted the Farmer Labor ticket back in Minnesota, and I followed suit. Harold Stassen and Hubert H. Humphrey were the only honest men in Washington D.C., as far as I was concerned. Add to that list Walter Mondale and Paul Wellstone, and I still think it’s true!

This list does not include the foreigners in clown alley, such as Dougie Ashton, Lazlo Donnert, Kochmanski, and Stanley and Lester Janus. As guests in the United States, they were remarkably reticent about what they thought of American politics. Even the irrepressible Dougie never said a peep about Watergate or the war in Vietnam. Perhaps they were of the same mind as Woody Allen, who about that same time made a movie called “Take the Money and Run.”

Email to a friend.

I just woke up from a long, disorienting nap. It was filled with R.E.M. dream images that began to fade the moment my damn cell phone rang (it was a robo-call for business loan money) but left me very disturbed -- or maybe it was the automated phone call that upset me. Anyway, I was just sitting here completely shattered -- unable to remember anything I wanted to do or needed to do today, feeling like I’d somehow survived a terrible cataclysm. And then I got your nice comment on my scorpion story, and the world started to fall back into place again. I pretty much have to take a siesta every day or I get physically sick -- but sometimes I dread it because of the weird dreams that come creeping up on my vulnerable mind. They mug my sanity, leaving me uncertain and perplexed about everything. So, thank you for your restorative comment.

One other person has contacted me about the scorpion story. I don’t know him at all, but he used to work for Ringling in some capacity and got the story link off my Facebook page. He pm’ed me that he wanted to talk to me about why God allows suffering in the world when He is all-powerful, etc. I referred him to the Book of Job in the Bible, which seemed to help him somewhat. He didn’t even recognize that I had quoted Job in my story. People need to be more Bible-literate. Whether you believe in it or not, it’s a cornerstone of Western civilization.

Oh, before I forget, I don’t remember where the scorpion story took place, except that it was the first place I was assigned in Thailand, some Bangkok suburb, and Bart Seliger was my companion. I sure miss not being in touch with him. I think of him as an older brother. He was very good to me, his ‘greenie’ companion.

Your roof story reminds me of my bathroom story. Amy and I bought a house on Como Avenue in Minneapolis, just down the street from my parent’s house, and across the street from Van Cleve Park, where I spent my childhood winters skating and summers swimming. I thought it was a beautiful setup. This was just before the break up, around 1991. We didn’t have to make any down payment, because most of the neighborhood houses were being used as student rentals for the U of M and the city wanted to reverse that trend and bring in families -- so we got a special dispensation through the city and the bank to buy the house w/no down payment cuz we were a big family.  

It only had 2 bedrooms, but a big glassed in front porch -- which we divided to make a third bedroom. The basement was full of mice, because the house sat across the alley from a hive of grain silos and a tangled skein of railroad tracks. Immense clouds of pigeons circled the silos endlessly, cooing eerily. There was an ancient cottonwood tree in the backyard that dumped several tons of fluff on our house in the early summer. The kids loved to play in it as if it were a sandbox or the torn out stuffing of a mattress, and dragged so much fluff into the house that we had to buy a new vacuum when the old one asphyxiated on the cottonwood ‘snow.’

The house had been built in 1897 and had only one bathroom, upstairs. The tub began leaking, staining the dining room ceiling, so I tore up the bathroom floor to find the leak -- only to discover that the old lead pipes were completely rotten. We called in a plumber for an estimate, and like your roof, the price of repair was way beyond our ability to pay. We couldn’t qualify for any kind of home improvement loan, so we used the tub to store linen. Luckily, there was a crude shower in the basement, and that’s where everyone had to go to clean up. The kids were terrified of going down there without either Amy or I going down with them, because of all the mice. I caught dozens of mice with glue traps, but they just kept coming back.

That first winter in the house was a brutal one -- a blizzard on Halloween dumped over 3 feet of snow on Minneapolis overnight and we couldn’t dig our car out of the garage for three days. Then Amy had a bad attack of rheumatism that nearly crippled her for life. The doctor said we should think about moving to a warmer climate, so we decided to pull up stakes and move out here to Provo, where most of Amy’s brothers and sisters were located. A year later we were divorced . . . just when I had finally gotten a good paying government job. Tax collector. Which I hated, but if I stuck with it for a year I could get a promotion into management and then just goof off like the rest of the supervisors I knew there.

But after the divorce I bought a VW van to live in and went down to Florida to work for the Clyde Beatty Cole Brothers Circus as an advance man -- setting up ticket outlets and scheduling media interviews for the show’s stars and clowns. And I’ve never had my own home again. Just rented, like I’m doing now.

I like your idea of selling up and going to Thailand, but won’t encourage you since Jennie is against it. A peaceful marriage is better than the beaches of Thailand.