Of Clown Wigs and Barbers

The author's natural hair; of which he is very vain.

The New York Post ran a stimulating article the other day, which began thus:

California is poised to become the first state to ban discrimination against people with natural hair, according to reports.

This sentence caused me to jump up and splutter "by the great horn spoon!" while nibbling on a slice of sprouted wheat bread toast. This in turn brought on a fit of violent coughing when I inadvertently inhaled a few crumbs. I live alone, so there was no one to give me a good pounding on the back -- I had to do it myself, with a broom handle I keep around to beat off paparazzi. Once I caught my breath I finished the toast, then began flossing -- and reminiscing. The reason that particular newspaper sentence had agitated me so much was because it brought into sharp focus an episode from my motley past. A time when I had donned the cap and bells for Ringling Brothers as one of their clowns, and felt I was being persecuted for using my own natural hair.

At that time, some forty years ago, most professional circus clowns wore a wig -- usually something fiery red that stuck up like pampas grass, or else a bald wig made of cotton t-shirt material. Only a few clowns, like Otto Griebling and Dougie Ashton, used their own locks while performing. Being veterans in clown alley of long standing, they could get away with it. A martyr to craniofacial hyperhidrosis (excessive head sweating), I also used my own hair when clowning. This did not go down well with the big enchiladas of circus management. 

At first it was merely a passing remark from the boss clown, LeVoi Hipps, or from the Performance Director, Charlie Baumann. Hadn't I better get a professional wig, they asked, now that I was in the big league and making good money? Since a professional wig, made of yak hair, would set me back a month's salary, I politely ignored their comments. How could anyone not like my naturally wavy brown hair?

 Then my old pal Tim Holst, who had started as a First of May with me in clown alley and was now nimbly climbing up the Ringling corporate ladder, put me on the qui vive:

"Tork" he said, "you gotta get a wig; Kenny Feld [the circus owner's son] hates your hair -- he says it looks like a rat's nest. He's gonna make sure you don't get a new contract in Chicago if you don't get one soon!" Chicago, I should add, was where the show played in the fall, and where all the seasonal contracts for the clowns were renewed.

This scared the bejabbers out of me; I loved clowning and intended to make it my life's work. Where else, I reasoned, could I get paid so well for goofing off -- outside of a government job?

So I asked Prince Paul, a Ringling warhorse and whiteface, to sell me one of his cotton t-shirt bald wigs for a test run. He kept dozens of them in his clown trunk, laundered, perfumed, and starched like handkerchiefs in a chiffonier. But I couldn't stand wearing it for more than one show -- the sweat streamed down my forehead in unrelenting rivulets, eroding my greasepaint.  

Next I decided to dye my own hair fire engine red -- that should do the trick, and keep those bossy honyockers off my back.

  Ever the pinch penny, I refused to go to a beauty parlor to have it done. I simply bought a bottle of Rit Dye and blithely did the deed myself in the men's room of the Von Braun Civic Center, in Huntsville Alabama. That particular brand of dye, lamentably, is meant only for fabrics, not hair. I had skimmed over the instructions. The resulting botch forced me to find a barber with jittering dispatch and have him shave my insulted mane down to the nubbin. 

And that is what finally turned the tide. That natural cue ball effect, without benefit of a confining bald wig, went splendidly with my clown makeup -- like chicken with waffles. The next time I saw Kenny Feld he stopped to chat with me in a most affable manner -- asking me if I was ready to re-up for another hitch when the show hit Chicago. 

 I spent the rest of the season getting scalped once a week. Back then you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a barber college, where fifty cents got me scrapped to the bone. And for an additional half dollar I could get a shave with a hot towel wrapped around my face. I don't know how they perfumed that warm lather that purred out of a white enamel dispenser, but it always put me in mind of a Turkish harem and the Taj Mahal.  

 Today, long after my big top rambles are finished, I've let my hair grow out again. Because I'm still a pinch penny, and haircuts around here are now going for twenty bucks a pop. 

Me with my long brown locks, back in the day.

Your Comment on How Big Mike, a Barbershop Painter, Broke Into the Art World is Posted in the New York Times

Your comment has been approved! Thank you for sharing your thoughts with The New York Times community. tim torkildson | utah Big Mike has a feel with his mitts/that cuts through the dreck and the glitz/His style is no style/just absence of guile/You'll never find him at St. Kitts. View your comment If you're having trouble viewing your comment, please copy and paste this link in your browser: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/nyregion/how-big-mike-a-barbershop-painter-broke-into-the-art-world.html#commentsContainer&permid=101189369:101189369 All of our comments are moderated for civility. Have feedback? Let us know. If you would like your comment to be considered for publication as a letter to the editor, please email a copy of your comment to letters@nytimes.com – along with your name, city/town and phone number (the latter for verification only). ABOUT THIS EMAIL  This is an automated notification. Please do not reply directly to this email. You received this message because you signed up for email notifications from The New York Times. Unsubscribe | Manage Notifications | Privacy Policy | Contact Copyright 2019 | The New York Times Company | 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018

The Museum of Invisible Things was located in Spencer, Iowa.

The author, contemplating opening a waxworks.

There's a little bit of carny in all of us -- a smidgen of delight at absurdities on display. That is why I read with much interest a recent article in the New York Times that included this inspiring paragraph:

“The troll museum is probably the silliest idea I had in my life,” she said. “But people responded to it, so I have to keep it going. If more people carried out their silly ideas, then the world would be a more interesting place.”

Yes indeed -- making the world a better and safer place may be the primary goal for most people, but I have always subscribed to the belief that making things interesting first and foremost will inevitably lead to utopia -- where parking meters pay ME and Bismarck herring run in shoals past my front door, free for the netting. 

And that's why I became the proprietor of the Museum of Invisible Things in the town of Spencer, Iowa, back in the year of grace 2007.

I came to Spencer at the behest of radio station KICD, which was in need of a news director -- the previous one having departed for the bright lights and State Fair butter cows of Des Moines. I had passed through Spencer the previous year, fronting for the Culpepper & Merriweather Circus, and left my business card with the radio station manager. He was a fellow Brownie -- a graduate of the Brown Institute of Broadcasting in Minneapolis, which I had also attended. Brownies, like Harvard men, stick together.  He offered me the position at a crisis moment in my circus career -- disgusted that my circus salary was several weeks in arrears, I had vowed to spurn the big top in favor of the saner music and weaker wine of regular employment. 

With my ballyhoo instincts at full throttle, it wasn't long before I had whipped the news department at KICD into a well-oiled machine that ground out local news bulletins like sausage; a few news patties for the morning program at 7, more substantial baloney at noon, and plenty of prerecorded leftovers for the evening news roundup at 6. This left me with time on my hands, which I used to open a museum.

During my years of travel with various circuses I'd run across some fascinating museums in Iowa -- such as the Hobo Museum in Britt; the Squirrel Cage Jail Museum in Council Bluffs; and the Vesterheim Norwegian Museum in Decorah. These are spots to warm the cockles of any nomadic heart. In Spencer, unfortunately, there was only the Clay County Historical Museum -- which featured a large array of the latest calico sun bonnets (circa 1870), corncob candelabra, and a dispiriting display case chock-a-block with cast iron bedpans. Dissecting pudding would generate more interest. 

 So I opened the Museum of Invisible Things in my spacious apartment, above the HyVee grocery store on Grand Avenue. I got the idea from an old Candid Camera segment -- where a large bowl full of water and nothing else was put on public display with a sign reading "Invisible Goldfish." Dozens of people were subsequently filmed squinting into the bowl in a vain attempt to locate the non-existent fishies. 

I had a placard made up which the HyVee produce manager let me tape to the wall next to the staircase leading to my apartment:

TORKILDSON'S MUSEUM OF INVISIBLE THINGS.

Upstairs on the Second Floor.

Open Friday, Saturday, and Sundays only. 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Admission free to children, pet owners, and latitudinarians.

Admission for all others:  $1.00.

I featured the goldfish, of course. I also had an invisible original Picasso, entitled 'Family of Saltines.' There was an invisible diamond tiara from the Romanoffs; an imperceptible shrunken head stolen from the Sea Dayaks of Borneo; the impalpable stuffed carcass of Schrodinger's cat; and a baseball autographed by Babe Ruth (you could see the baseball, but not the autograph -- the Babe had jokingly used invisible ink.)

  I put up a used crib, with a sign reading: PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE INVISIBLE LEPRECHAUN MIMES.

There were other exhibitions as well, as the fancy struck me;  but after six months I had to admit that I wasn't exactly doing a land office business. Even though I had slyly promoted my museum during a few news broadcasts at KICD, my visitor's book showed a grand total of seven names for the past six months -- and two of those had been housewives under the mistaken impression that I was part of HyVee's produce department and could tell them how much red cabbage was per pound. When I left Spencer for greener pastures a year later there was no mourning in the streets for the loss of my treasury of invisible wonders.

Since then I have given brief and fleeting thought to opening a Linoleum Museum, or displaying a Diorama of Paint Drying -- but they all came to naught. With the current administration dispensing so much silliness already, why try to compete?   Today I am content with putting an egg in a jar of vinegar and then showing the results to my grand kids a month later. SEE THE AMAZING RUBBER EGG! 

There's one born every minute.

zen poem #2

A quail feeding on my patio;

the cast off leavings of house finches above.

Does it care where its sustenance

comes from?

Winner winner, chicken dinner.

Words of Advice from an Old China Hand

The author, haranguing a trade delegation from Lower Slobovia

During my morning constitutional I like to amble down Center Street in downtown Provo, to take the pulse, so to speak, of this Western town's febrile economy. The Rent-a-Center store is always filled to the gunwales with improvident dreamers, signing articles of indenture in exchange for a Samsung 65-inch QLED or a solid rosewood dinning ensemble by Ethan Allan. Further along I worm my way through the bustling crowd in front of Hruska's Kolaches, where the enticing aroma of baking einkorn flour pastries stuffed with an assortment of savories and sweets makes my tongue loll out, and my wallet shrink with modesty. Royal Nails advertises that 'Walk-ins are Welcome' and Pioneer Used Books retains its usual somnolent air as absentminded scholars brush snuff off their weskits while they peruse a yellowing tract advocating polygamy by B.H. Roberts or thumb through The Complete Guide to Making Wooden Clocks, Second Edition. 

Then I come to an empty storefront, where the inquisitive stroller can press his nose up against the plate glass window to see the remnants of secluded booths and tattered red paper lanterns in a forlorn jumble. Several Chinese eateries have inhabited this spot over the years; each one, in turn, opening with an oriental flourish worthy of the Ming dynasty, and then drifting mysteriously away without explanation like a mystical verse from Li Bai. This derelict space provides plenty of food for thought, if not for lunch, to a wandering boulevardier such as myself. How to explain the seeming intransigence of the Chinese? And when I return home to my fashionable digs on the Rue de Solecism for dejeuner I am further intrigued by a blurb in today's Wall Street Journal, as follows:

For their part, U.S. officials say they are going into the meeting looking to see whether their Chinese counterparts are willing to pick up negotiations from where they broke off. According to U.S. and Chinese officials, the two nations were close to a trade deal in April when, in the U.S. view, China reneged on provisions. It is up to Beijing, U.S. officials feel, to get the talks back on track.

I am forced to shake my head at this evidence of the age-old misunderstanding and conflict between East and West. If only the Trump administration would let an old China Hand take the helm, these trade disputes would dissipate instanter. Someone such as myself, who managed to squeeze in two full years of Mandarin Chinese while matriculating at Marshall-University High School in Minneapolis a long half century ago . . . 

The big brains down at the Minneapolis School Board decided in their infinite whimsy to offer elective courses at Marshall-U during my tenure there as a student. By some sleight-of-hand they managed to inveigle University of Minnesota students from Taiwan to come explain the mysteries of Mandarin Chinese to us, as an elective course. My only other choice being machine shop class with Mr. Bukowskikov, who kept losing fingertips to the gear shaper on a regular basis, I elected Chinese. My fellow students in the class were most of the Chess Club and a smattering of girls enmeshed in braces; their smiles resembled a display of chicken wire in a hardware store.  

Our first teacher, a Mr. Chow, was a stocky peasant type who earnestly wished us to know that Taiwan was in no way, shape, or form, affiliated with or in any way similar to Mainland China. The fact of the matter is he never got around to teaching us a single syllable of Mandarin -- he was too worked up about the iniquity of  Red China, lecturing us about how noble and brave Chiang Kai-shek was in protecting the island from the depredations of the bloodthirsty Mao on the mainland. His neglect of his teaching duties was okay by me; I could sit in the back of the classroom, feigning attention, while contemplating the latest profundities in MAD Magazine. 

Mr. Chow disappeared midway through the school year, when the Generalissimo in Taiwan started dragooning overseas Taiwanese university students back into the army for one last attempt to invade and reconquer the mainland. When Chow learned he was going to be drafted he hightailed it up to Canada to escape all such military honors, and for all I know is still hanging around Moose Jaw badmouthing Xi Jinping. And not teaching anybody Mandarin Chinese.

We hit the jackpot, to my way of thinking, for the rest of that year, since with the dearth of male Taiwanese students at the U of M we got several attractive native lady teachers instead. I don't suppose any of them were past the age of twenty-three. They, too, hated Mao with all their liver and lights, but had the good sense to keep their mouths shut so the Generalissimo never got the idea of drafting them for cannon fodder. There were three of them, as I recall, and they alternated days with us, since they apparently had very heavy class schedules at the university. Their names escape me, but I do remember they actually taught us a modicum of Mandarin, along with introducing us to salted duck eggs and brewing oolong right in the classroom in a clandestine electric tea kettle. I fell deeply in love with each one of them in turn, but when I tried to press my suit they merely tittered and batted me away with silk parasols. 

During my second year of Mandarin Chinese the proposed annexation of mainland China by Taiwan had been postponed indefinitely, and so we got another male teacher. And once again his name was Mr. Chow. He was much thinner than the first Mr. Chow, exhibiting a flare for educating adolescent ne'er do wells like myself by presenting the requisite vocabulary and grammar to order drinks in a bar and chat up the opposite sex. Now THAT was useful information.

He also brought in parchment, brushes, and black ink blocks, encouraging us to experiment with calligraphy. But with my usual panache I put the kibosh on that by using the brush and ink to ornament my pimply face with a Groucho mustache and eyebrows. How was I to know the ink was indelible? Took me three days to get it all scrubbed off, and in the meantime Mr. Chow was called on the carpet by the principal for allowing such high jinks in his class. Chastened, Mr. Chow took away our calligraphy tools and began teaching us by rote -- repeating words and phrases after him for most of the hour. That made me as popular with my fellow classmates as garlic bread at a Transylvanian buffet . . . 

 So you see, it only makes sense to have someone as schooled as I am in the Chinese culture and language handling our trade affairs for the administration. Just say the word, Mr. President, and I can pack my grip and be on the next slow boat to China. And all I ask in return is a bag of caramel-covered silkworms dusted with sea salt. 

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

I'm going for dim sum.

Wayfair Workers Protest Child Abuse on the Border

Frustrated Americans, spurred on by social media campaigns, have been quick to cut off their spending on big brands as a form of political protest in the Trump era.

That makes an employee walkout at the online home furnishing company Wayfair particularly precarious, as some of the company’s staff loudly objected to its involvement with the detention of migrant children near the United States’ southwestern border.

NYT

Stopping an iniquity

by going out on strike

is like that fabled Dutch boy

with a sponge to plug the dike.

Even boycotts seldom cause

a company to close;

if the product's trendy

people buy and hold their nose.

The only way to hit 'em hard

and make 'em close up fast

is get the White House riled up

so new tariffs will be passed. 

Supreme Leader Says Iran Won’t Back Down From U.S. Ever.

Ali Khamenei

Iran’s supreme leader said his country wouldn’t back down in the face of U.S. sanctions, days after President Trump targeted him personally with a new round of measures to further isolate the country.

WSJ

They huff and they puff 

and they blow themselves out;

these tinhorns who rant

and these dimbulbs who shout.

Religious or not

they are all of a kind;

distressing their people

while losing their mind.

They ought to be shaken,

they ought to be stirred.

They ought to be plucked

like a ripe turkey bird.

If I had my druthers

all leaders who flop

at keeping cool heads

would be cuffed by a cop.

And if they continued 

to rattle their swords

I'd puncture their egos

and dump 'em in fjords.

zen poem 1

sunlight reflecting off a pond

is too simple to be explained;

it has to be seen

but not explored

else the wind

scatter it all

                        思想慢

My Personal Chemistry

The author practicing personal chemistry on thin air

What exactly is personal chemistry, and how much of it do I personally possess? This thought has been weighing on my cerebrum all day, making it assume the dimensions of a Swedish pancake. The cause of all this compressing cogitation is a simple paragraph I happened upon in the Wall Street Journal, to wit:

WASHINGTON—President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will seek to revive troubled U.S.-China trade talks this week, in a test of whether their professed personal chemistry can surmount seemingly intractable differences at the bargaining table.

I have always been fascinated by chemistry, both personal and organic, and so this lead paragraph immediately conjured up a vision wherein the two mighty leaders were at an acid-stained workbench, fiddling with alembics and litmus paper. Which one of these professed master chemists would come to dominate the other, and the world, and just how might they do it? Would Xi pull a fast one, using Diet Coke and Mentos to create a soda geyser that would overawe the local natives? And would Trump be able to top such hocus pocus with something even more impressive, like making a giant borax snowflake with the 20 Mule Team brand and a pipe cleaner? I shuddered to think what the outcome might be if Xi retaliates with dry ice in a flask full of lukewarm water -- the ensuing vigorous bubbling can make the most cynical, hard nosed ruler giggle like a child. Trump might give away the store -- lock, stock, and barrel.

But cooler heads prevailed (I keep several of 'em in my deep freeze for just such emergencies) to wipe away this disturbing fantasy. Surely when the Wall Street Journal refers to the 'personal chemistry' of these two world leaders they are merely using a shopworn cliche to denote their dynamic influence. 

I, of all people, should know this -- since I have been trying to use my own personal chemistry on various personages for a month of Sundays. With how much success you will soon find out, if you care to struggle on through the nearly impenetrable jungle of prose that looms ahead . . .  

I was smitten with Frieda back in second grade. She had golden curls and a Nordic upturn to her button nose that charmed the socks off me, so I turned on the personal chemistry when around her. But she seemed oblivious to my Errol Flynn manner, as I leaned, insouciant, against the jungle gym and asked her if she'd care to share a grape Pixy Stix with me underneath the monkey bars. 

"Buzz off, pinhead!" she snarled in reply. Later on she put a handful of playground gravel in my pudding cup. 

In high school I had the dreaded Mr. Patten for algebra. His dark glowering countenance boded ill for anyone as ignorant of coefficients and rational numbers as I. It was bruited about the lunchroom that he took the worst dullards down into the boiler room for 'remedial' math classes -- and that those who were led into those mephitic depths were never heard from again. It was either use my personal chemistry or become furnace fodder.

Eschewing the hackneyed apple on his desk, I began leaving Mickey Spillane paperbacks next to his attendance book. My dad read them voraciously during slack periods at Aarone's Bar and Grill, and when he finished one he'd bring it home and throw it on the coffee table -- where the lurid covers, featuring busty femme fatales in skimpy nightgowns, offended my mother to the point of tossing them into the trash, where I fished them out for Mr. Patten. I figured he wouldn't mind a few coffee grounds for a bookmark.

But as the school year progressed and I fell further and further behind when it came to variables and equations, it was apparent that the adventures of Mike Hammer held little charm for Mr. Patten, and would not save me from a mathematical auto-da-fe.

What DID save me in the end was not my personal chemistry, but my family connections. Turns out that Mr. Patten was fond of bending the elbow.

"You Tork's kid, then?" he asked me gruffly one day, using my dad's nickname.  

"Yessir" I quavered. I was guessing the time had come to make out my last will and testament prior to being led in chains down to the oblivion of the boiler room, and that Mr. Patten would take the document to my father over at Aarone's.   

Mr. Patten essayed a smile and replied: "Tell him I'll settle up at the end of the week, will ya?"

Sensing a kind providence had suddenly given me the upper hand, I replied nonchalantly that I might do it, if the press of homework didn't drive it completely out of my mind. I won't say I started to receive special treatment from that time forward; it was more like a benign neglect, and I'm happy to report that my final grade in Mr. Patten's algebra class was a solid D. Which was good enough for my parents, who were resigned to the fact that I had a congenital inability to do anything with numerals except stare at them and drool.  

Then there's the Burmese lady who lives down the hall from me here in Valley Villas Senior Housing. I know the country is Myanmar now, not Burma, but she hasn't lived there for more than forty years, so I call her Burmese. So sue me. 

Anyway. She works full time and makes really good chicken curry, so I considered using my personal chemistry to form a congenial bond with her. When a single man reaches his mid-sixties he yearns for the comfort of someone elses' steady income and zesty cooking. So the last time I made Swedish meatballs (only slightly burnt) I took a big bowl of them, with noodles, to her door.

She responded to my knock with a quizzical look and did not immediately reach for my neighborly offering. Even though I was smiling to beat the band, exuding personal chemistry by the ton. 

"Pork in it?" she asked suspiciously.

"Yes, plenty of fresh pork sausage in the meatballs . . . " I began.

"I don't eat pork or beef" she said abruptly, then closed the door before I could say anything else. Well, live and learn, I thought to myself. Next time I'll bring her Betty Crocker fudge brownies. 

"No sugar" was her terse response the next time I showed up at her door.

So I forgot about wooing her with food and decided instead to waylay her in the laundry room, which is right outside my apartment door. I would keep a roll of quarters handy, so when she started a load I could offer her change for the dryer -- and from there we'd have a pleasant tete-a-tete so I could begin worming my way into her heart.

I'm still waiting for her to use the laundry room. And I just spent the last of my quarters over at Fresh Market to buy a jalapeno/cheddar cheese bagel this morning.

Maybe it's not personal chemistry I have, but personal magnetism. I notice that lint pills adhere to me quite readily.    

Exsultate!

. . . and ye shall rejoice in all that ye put your hand unto . . . 

Leviticus 23:40

Rebuke the melancholy pall

that over face and form doth sprawl!

Awake, instead, my timid soul,

rejoicing in what Christ makes whole.

The work ahead, whate'er may be,

can all be done with gaiety.

Crafts and skill, by hand or mind,

should lead to joy that's unconfined!

The workman worthy of his hire

should be our motto to inspire.