Studying Pantomime in Mexico. Part One.

In the fall of 1972 I decided to leave off clowning with Ringling Brothers Circus in order to explore the possibilities of mime. My clowning, I felt, suffered from a lack of communication with the audience. Not verbal communication, but the kind of visual communication that veteran clowns like Otto Griebling and Prince Paul possessed; it was a visceral physicality that immediately communicated their thoughts and emotions to the audience. This skill let them display their comic ideas to full effect, whereas my gag ideas usually fell flat when I put them out in front of the circus crowds. I felt as frustrated as a chicken trying to lay an apple.

I had a strong hunch that improving my pantomime skills would make me a more effective clown, would give my gag ideas more 'punch.'

The show was in Chicago that fall for a 3 week run near the old Stockyards. The train was parked on a siding that had been used for cattle cars for the previous seventy years, and the ground still reeked of their panicked feces and blood. It rained constantly. And it was Contract Time.

Old man Feld came down from Washington D.C., where the Ringling headquarters were located, to view the clowns; noting which ones still had clean and bright costumes and which had let their wardrobe fall off. He gauged the effect of each clown gag on the popcorn munching audiences, and quickly removed any gag that had run out of belly laughs. And Charlie Baumann, the Performance Director, would breath into his ear the names of those clowns considered to be ‘heat merchants,’ or troublemakers. The clowns he decided to keep for another season were called into a plush office, one by one, for a brief word of praise from Mr. Feld, and the offer of another year’s contract, with a small raise. If you weren’t called in, you were out -- for good.

I was called into the office, where old man Feld called me by name, sort of -- he pronounced my patronymic as “Torkill-twinkle” -- and praised my clowning style.

“You’re a real nut act” he told me expansively. “When you’re out in the ring nobody knows what you’re going to do next! I like that. Like it a lot. The crowds think you’re completely crazy. That’s good for business, that kind of clowning. So how about it -- you ready to sign up for another year with the Greatest Show on Earth?”

He pushed the contract and a pen towards me; saying he was raising my First-of May salary by twenty-five dollars a week, so I’d be pulling down a grand total of 150 smackers each week. It was a tempting offer to a still green kid like me. I had no idea when I’d ever see that kind of money again. But I silently shook my head, then explained that I wanted to pursue more training in classical pantomime to become a better clown.

He didn’t seem too put out by my defection; I guess he was in a hurry to sign up the rest of clown alley for the next season. So he took back the contract and pen, stood up, wished me luck, shook my hand, and the next thing I knew I was outside his office, sans steady employment.

But I had savings in the bank and knew right where I wanted to go for my mime training.

During my stint at the Ringling Clown College our mime instructor was Sigfrido Aguilar, a noted maestro of the silent art, from Mexico. Impressed with my earnest efforts to scale invisible walls and walk against invisible winds, he had offered me a student scholarship at his Academia de Pantomima in Mexico whenever I wanted to quit the circus. I still had his address in Mexico, so the very next day I dropped him an aerogramme asking to be enrolled in his next class.  Three weeks later, just as the show was closing in Hartford, Connecticut, I got his reply: “Felicitaciones, Tim. We start our new classes in January!”

After a brief stopover back home in Minneapolis to mooch off the parents for a few weeks, and to have dinned into my ears my mother’s baleful warning that once I was south of the border I would be shot, garroted, and skewered with machetes before I could say ‘Pancho Villa’ -- I took a flight to Mexico City to begin a new chapter in my quest to hopefully increase the world’s fund of hilarity.

Back in those halcyon days an American citizen didn’t need a passport to reside in Mexico for as long as he wanted, so there was no paperwork for me to deal with. That kind of simple freedom existed in abundance when I was young -- and mourning its loss may yet turn me into an anarchist of the Kropotkin variety.

I would not be friendless in Mexico. My pal and Ringling cohort Steve Smith (after whom my son Steve is named) was also attending Sigfrido’s Academy. We met up in Mexico City, where we had reserved a double suite at a cut-rate caravansary that featured zoonotic ice water and hot and cold running cucarachas. After a few days of dealing with Montezuma’s revenge, we boarded a Tres Estrellas bus for Pátzcuaro, in the province of Michoacan, where Sigfrido personally met us at the bus station, which smelled strongly of roasted coffee and cacao beans, to escort us to our living quarters on a quiet side street, next to a pig slaughterhouse, with a fortress-like Catholic nunnery across the calle.  

(to be continued)

Uncle Louie

These are the stories of my life and my family, reconstructed from direct memory and from fleeting snatches of conversation and observation. Plus a little creative guesswork. As the years ripen I grow more determined to take charge of my own history, to leave behind a narrative that informs my children, and their children, and maybe the whole damn world, that there once was a man named Tim Torkildson, and what things befell him and his family . . .

My Uncle Louie Hedges was married to my mother’s sister, Aunt Ruby. How they met, how they fell in love, how he courted her -- of these things I know nothing. What I do know is that Aunt Ruby was a fastidious housekeeper and upholder of the bourgeoisie faith, while Uncle Louie was a rowdy, somewhat loudmouthed gambler -- always bright red in the face. A chain smoker, he trailed cigarette ash all over Aunt Ruby’s house, and liked to call me “Bowtie” because I once was dragooned into visiting them right after Mass, still dressed in my Sunday best, which included a bright red bowtie. I despised him for attaching that nickname to me.

They lived in a large house on a large piece of land in the suburb of Edina. Before the freeway came through, it was a long tedious drive out to their place from our home in Southeast Minneapolis. I spent those long drives in the backseat, counting trees. I once got up to 654 before letting out a scream and punching my sister Sue Ellen in the small of the back -- for which I was hauled out of the car and threatened with being abandoned by the side of the road. I don’t recommend counting trees as an effective game for children on long road trips.

Coming from our cramped 3-bedroom home, which housed 2 adults and 4 children, with only one bathroom, Ruby and Louie’s house seemed immense. The upstairs had 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. And they only had one kid. In the master bedroom was a spacious walk-in closet, in which there was a ladder that led to a trapdoor in the ceiling -- which opened into a tremendous attic under the peaked roof, lit by round mullioned windows at each end. The attic smelled of camphor and fried dust. It contained steamer trunks and leather suitcases and gateleg tables and precariously leaning stacks of National Geographic and The Saturday Evening Post. There were cribs and toothless old radios and a rusty black Singer treadle sewing machine. A creaking mahogany wardrobe brooded in one corner, filled with three piece wool suits and floppy Easter hats; the floor was littered with brittle leather high button shoes and some weirdly shaped things I took to be dead bats but which I later learned were spats.  

In our own house back in Minneapolis we didn’t have a real attic -- just a low space under the roof that had a mattress of spun asbestos laid down. It was of no consequence. People of consequence, like Aunt Ruby and Uncle Louie, had big jumbled attics, with enough stuff in them to start a thrift store. When I grew up the idea of an attic of consequence stayed with me -- I wanted a dark and musty and unheated attic at the top of my house where old magazines and morris chairs with the horsehair showing could be stored. But the only house I and Amy ever owned with a decent attic, on Como Avenue in Minneapolis, had been invaded years before we bought it by pigeons and squirrels -- who claimed squatter’s rights until I poisoned them with little plastic bowls brimming with bright green antifreeze along with some rodenticide pellets. But by then the accumulated guano was more than I wanted to deal with, so I sealed the holes and locked the trapdoor and we never kept anything up there -- branding me and my family, in my own eyes, as people of no consequence.

Uncle Louie had a fawn-colored Great Dane, named Tiny. The dog was extremely patient with me, letting me mount and ride it around like a pony, or pull its ears when it displeased me. I was never afraid of it -- rather, I treated it like an idiot companion, taking it around the backyard and pointing out obvious things it probably didn’t understand.

“See there, Tiny” I’d say to it, “that big tin tub? That’s where Uncle Louie keeps his grub worms for fishing. Let’s take some out to throw on the porch roof.” Or in late summer when their plum tree was full of succulent ripe fruit that the wasps guarded jealously from my questing fingers, I’d command Tiny to go pick me some, and when the poor dumb brute just looked at me, wagging its tail, I would fly into a rage and box its ears.

Uncle Louie owned a Ford Dealership in Edina. He did very well with it for many years until, so I was told by my mother, he lost it in a card game. He then wangled a job as train conductor on the Great Northern’s Empire Builder run. Back in the early 60s this was considered a peach of a job, since conductors not only punched tickets but facilitated round robin card games for big spenders out of Chicago, and provided cooling adult beverages when the club car was padlocked for the night -- all for a hefty fee. Louie enjoyed the job immensely -- in fact, he enjoyed it too much; he gambled with the high rollers and lost his shirt, and he always took a convivial drink along with those he was serving liquor to. When he died of liver cancer at the age of 59 Aunt Ruby had to sell their big home in Edina to pay off his gambling debts. She moved into a very modest home, with no attic, out in Eden Prairie. And there she met Bill, a retired school teacher, who liked what he saw, pitched some woo, and relieved her of her widow’s weeds. His ample teacher’s pension provided for both of them very well. Once she was remarried she never spoke of Uncle Louie again, at least not in my hearing. My parents never mentioned his name again, either. It was like he had never existed.

********************************************************
My nephew Rob Torkildson sent me a FB msg with a few corrections and observations of his own:

SiffyandTor Torkildson A few things that are in question. Louie had a towing company, not a Ford dealership. He played for the Green Bay Packers, which I have verified and I remember him showing me his leather helmet. He was pretty old when I met him, but, he liked me because I played sports. He liked the hand slap games and would tell me about chasing deer, pinching their asses, before he killed them. I thought Louie a great character. Tork and Louie swilled many nights away downtown at the Annex and Auggies. Yes, he was a gambler, drinker, and lost everything is what I learned. His son, Bob, became a high ranking Officer in the Air Force, and Ruby retired in luxury. 900 19th Ave was a weird set up, that damn tiny bathroom and kitchen. Why? I preferred washing myself in the limestone soaked basement sink. Enjoyed your Story! Keep them coming Tim, Rob

The Awful Tuna Fish Casserole

There is something terribly wrong with the concept of a baked tuna fish casserole. It grates against every aesthetic sense that mankind possess. Like antimatter, it is not meant to exist in this solar system.  Yet my mother insisted on serving it to me as a child, creating some of the most harrowing scenes of domestic anguish and melodrama this side of Sarah Bernhardt.

Let me set the record straight. I like tuna fish sandwiches, in moderation. And I can tolerate a salad nicoise with some tuna fish in it, as a garnish. But rather than ingest a single mote of baked tuna fish casserole I would cheerfully undergo a season of waterboarding at Gitmo.

To begin with, unless canned tuna fish (for that is all my mother ever dealt with, and all I can afford today) is painstakingly disarmed with a flood of condiments, such as red wine vinegar, lemon juice, salt, pepper, tabasco sauce, brown sugar, and a dab of sesame oil, it smells and tastes just like the cheapest kind of cat food. And I am NOT being persnickety about this; quoting from Wikipedia, on the subject of Canned Fish, under the heading of Tuna: “ . . . with the dark lateral blood meat often separately canned for pet food . . . “  So there.

And that’s not all, boychick. Even though tuna fish undergoes hours of pressurized steam cooking in the can, which kills all sorts of nasty germs, it does not guarantee the absence of histamines that can produce an off putting fetid tang.

Yet many a night at our dinner table, even though I moaned “Oh, the rancid histamines!” my cruel mother would shove a large gooey portion of tuna fish casserole onto my plate and insist I at least try it.

Try it? I couldn’t even LOOK at it!

My mother’s recipe for baked tuna fish casserole was fiendishly simple, and calculated to raise the gag factor in any discerning child way beyond the “choke a goat” factor.  Fill a casserole dish with boiled egg noodles, top with a can of green peas and a can of tuna fish, pour a can of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup over it, sprinkle with parmesan cheese and bread crumbs, and bake in the oven at 350 degrees for an hour. The resulting abomination was always served with a side of warmed up canned lima beans -- adding severe insult to injury.  

Like many other misguided souls of that era, my mother believed that simple hearty meals, the kind that were imagined to ‘stick to your ribs,’ were good for children -- that filling them up with cheap starches and carbs and processed pet food produced happy and healthy children. What it actually produced, for me anyways, was a persecution complex and an early hint of ulcers. The holy kitchen mantras of my childhood were “clean your plate” and “starving children in China would love to have this to eat!” When my older brother Billy challenged the second one of those axioms by brazenly asking “Oh yeah? Name two of ‘em!” he was chased down the street by my mother with a broom. Good thing he was fleet footed or he’d still be picking broom straw out of his hide.

The final showdown came one winter night in 1961, when I was a very stubborn eight years old. My mother had tried withholding dessert as a motivation to get me to try the tuna casserole. No soap; I turned up my nose until I looked like Bob Hope. Then she tried the opposite tack, offering me TWO helpings of her luscious lemon meringue pie. No dice; I was still not interested. So now it was time for direct action. No more beating around the bush or pussyfooting around. The ukase was clear and simple: You don’t leave the dinner table until you eat some of that tuna casserole. You can stay there the whole night through, if you choose.

I sat, arms folded in silent dissent. The hours dragged by. Dad came home from Aarone’s Bar and Grill, where he worked as a bartender. He had a glass of buttermilk and some crackers for dinner. (What injustice! HE didn’t have to eat the tuna casserole!) My sisters were put to bed. Johnny Carson came on the TV. Still I sat. But my rear end was getting sore, I was terrifically bored, and I needed to pee.

“Mom!” I yelled into the living room. “I’m gonna take one bite, that’s all!” Barely concealing her brazen air of triumph, my mother came back into the kitchen to gloat over this historic occassion. The casserole, naturally, had long ago congealed into a cold disgusting lump. There were no such things as microwaves back then, to warm it up in. I took one small bite, chewed, swallowed, and immediately threw up.

The resulting hullabaloo was uncomfortable, to say the least. But ever after, the dreaded tuna fish casserole was interdicted and never darkened our dinner table again. It is one of the very small number of childhood victories that still warm the cockles of my heart.

frost took you away

frost took you away

just as I planned our future;

you and I, one fruit

slow color of green

slow color of green

so patient and comforting

when seasons collide

Movie Review: A Dispatch from Reuters.

For a great weekend movie about journalistic integrity, I recommend Edward G. Robinson in “A Dispatch from Reuters” on YouTube. It’s streaming for free at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgLrcO5hF1A&t=215s

The film was made at Warner Brothers in 1940, with an original score by Max Steiner. It was meant to be, and still is, an uplifting biopic about Paul Reuter. Like all the great Warner biopics, it mixes truth with fantasy to produce a portrait of a heroic man -- in this case, a man who started out in Germany with homing pigeons bringing him stock exchange prices and then became a world renowned journalist in Great Britain who guaranteed his news dispatches were always completely factual and up to date.

In this paltry era of fake news and cold algorithms, it’s a refreshing film (if only as a fairy tale.) So put some popcorn in the microwave, turn off your smartphone for an hour and 29 minutes, and enjoy!

. . . and it came to pass that I did read many things to them . . .

. . .  and it came to pass that I did read

many things to them . . .

First Nephi. Chapter Nineteen. Verse 22.

Whenever I am read to I must fight my stubborn pride

That I could read it better by myself, without a guide.

Unfolding of the scriptures can be done by anyone

Who seeks for the perfection that is promised by the Son.

Unclog my ears and clear my heart to hear the word of God

From any of His servants, though their accents may be broad!

“When God directs us to do one thing, He often has many purposes in mind.”

Dale G. Renlund

“When God directs us to do one thing,

He often has many purposes in mind.”

Dale G. Renlund

What to us may seem one hope

To God is more kaleidoscope.

Our narrow minds cannot conceive

All that the Christ can spin and weave.

So do do not baulk at new commands;

They give us wings like angel bands.

Memories of Marshall-University High School in Minneapolis

I was born with the desire to make people laugh. I practiced funny faces in the bathroom mirror when I was three. In kindergarten I used my brother’s pajamas as a clown costume and swiped my mother’s lipstick for greasepaint when we put on a circus for the PTA. By sixth grade I had perfected a sliding pratfall, so when the janitors were mopping the hallways I would blithely stroll past them and then let my legs slip out from under me, land on my rear, and glide several yards into the nearest wall.

In high school I continued to blossom as a buffoon. Marshall-University High School was located at 1313 15th Street Southeast in Minneapolis. It was the smallest high school in the city; the MPS department finally closed it in 1982 for efficiency reasons. I started there in 1964 and graduated in 1970. I did not much enjoy high school, refusing to have a senior photo taken for the yearbook.

The place was infested with bullies and embryonic thugs; the vice principal’s office carried a large collection of cricket bats and steel ping pong paddles that were in constant use on the backsides of nogoodniks. Being a peace-loving coward, with no pugilistic tendencies, I would have been fair game for every ruffian there if I had not started carrying a used nine iron I bought at the Goodwill Store in emulation of Bob Hope. He always had a mashie niblick or some such golf club with him during his monologues. The Marshall-U criminal element was unsure of my prowess with the club, so they left me alone for the most part.

I shared my risible instincts with some of the teachers there -- those that would not box my ears and frogmarch me down to the vice principal’s abattoir. I fondly recall my English teacher Mrs. Goetz, the wife of Peter Michael Goetz who acted at the Guthrie Theater. Pert and petite, she encouraged my literary zaniness, going so far as to allow me to present a scene from my original play “A Day at the Hospital” in class for extra credit. My play was a homage to the Marx Brothers. All that I can recall of that infantile opus now is that at one point Groucho is operating on a patient and calls for sutures. The nurse tells him they have no sutures, to which he waggles his eyebrows and replies “Then suture self!” I wrote the whole thing out in longhand and a merciful providence has insured that it disappeared a long, long time ago.    

Then there was Mr. Chen, the school’s Chinese teacher. Yes, I said Chinese. For reasons that I have yet to discover, the Minneapolis Public School system hired a student at the University of Minnesota, a denizen of Taiwan, to offer classes in Mandarin as an elective course. Since the only other elective was Shop, I took Chinese. Mr. Chen was not so much interested in leading us through the intricacies of calligraphy and proper tones as in denouncing mainland China and its communist hierarchy. It was a small class -- only six of us. I used the time trying out various comic horns and rattles that I acquired from thrift stores or from ads in the back of comic books. Whenever Mr. Chen had his back to us, writing on the blackboard, I would whip out a wooden train whistle or a mini klaxon horn for a quick interruption. Initially irritated and tending to denounce me in a high shrill voice, Mr.Chen eventually became first curious and then charmed with my collection of noise makers. When I presented him with a siren whistle (which I fished out of a box of Cracker Jack) he honored the quid pro quo by giving me an ‘A.’

Another memorable instructor was Lyle Rockler -- a shirttail relative of the furrier L.A. Rockler; my mother stored her red fox fur stole with his company every summer.

Lyle (he insisted we call him Lyle and not Mr. Rockler) taught the theater class and put on the school plays. No Shakespeare or Samuel French farces for him! He preferred contemporary and controversial dramas, such as “Indians”, by Arthur Kopit. He cast me as the Grand Duke of Russia in that play -- where I scored a dazzling comedic coup on opening night by pulling out my belt instead of my sword in act one, letting my pants fall down and bringing down the house as well. Lyle let me keep that bit of business in. God bless him.

During my senior year I collaborated with fellow student Mark Frost, the future co-creator of “Twin Peaks”, on an original play we presented to the entire student body (all two hundred of them.) I should have better recall of such a seminal event in my comedic career, but honestly all I can remember about it is that I choreographed a dance between a ballerina and an atomic bomb to some music by Delibes, and that in the show itself I played one half of a pair of Siamese twins. I do remember the show bombed; the student audience threw pencils, spiral notebooks, and odd wads of bubble gum at us. Although scheduled for three performances, we only gave one. I recently looked at Mark’s website, bymarkfrost, and notice he doesn’t even mention that particular episode in his biography. I wonder why?  

Sixty four years ago I was born with the desire to make people laugh, and I’ve been pretty lucky to have spent most of my adult life as a professional circus clown. The sound of a belly laugh is meat and drink to me. Now that osteoarthritis and hyperparathyroidism have slowed me down, I’m angling for the chuckle with my pen, instead of my pratfalls. In the past six years I’ve sent hundreds of humorous poems to journalists via email, commenting wryly on their various stories. Has it paid off? Well, you be the judge. I recently wrote a poem about a bookstore article by the New York Times reporter David Streitfeld, as follows:

The book stores where I lulled away

My youthful angst from day to day

Are gone like gravy from my plate --

All licked away by cyber fate.

Where half price tomes once beckoned me,

With dull remainders almost free,

And clerks with glasses read on stools,

There’s now a Zales with chintzy jewels.

Ecommerce, you’re a villain sure --

Closing bookeries demure.

Without book havens made of bricks

I’ll just stay home and watch Netflix.

Mr. Streitfeld instantly replied to my email thus:

“you might have a future writing ransom notes.”

What comic needs anymore encouragement than that?  

My New Profile on Facebook

HEY FACEBOOK:

Since you  keep track of everything I post and don’t actually delete anything I pull off of you, and since all my personal data that your damn algorithms have collected is available for the right price to any busybody who wants it, here is my new profile:

Handsome, vigorous thirty-something metrosexual with impeccable taste in clothes, food, wine, and companions. I own most of Silicon Valley. Bill Gates mows my lawn. I have so much money in the bank they let me use it for toilet paper. I invented Bitcoin. Tom Hanks wants my autograph. I look like that guy in the Dos Equis Beer commercials. I am moving the entire population of Kiribati Island to South Dakota, which I have leased for 99 years. My breath smells like bubblegum. I produce movies in which women beat the crap out of men. And Angelina Jolie is my biological godmother.