Letter 18

Monday, December 07, 2015           2:02 p.m.

Provo  Utah

My Dear Noah;

Boy, did I just have a good lunch at the Senior Center! Lemon Pepper Chicken, mashed potatoes, peas, and a white dinner roll. I even went back for seconds! (When they have leftovers the head server yells out “Seconds!” and you have to hurry back up if you want to get any – I usually beat out everybody else, cuz I can still walk pretty fast and most everybody else can only shuffle along with a cane or walker.)

I took the enclosed photograph on the Culpepper & Merriweather Circus back in 2005. These men are the tent crew – responsible for putting up and taking down the tent each day. It took about 3 hours to put it up and 2 hours to tear it down and pack it away. I remember at the beginning of the season we ran into an ice storm in New Mexico and the folded tent on the truck became frozen stuck. The tent crew tried hacking at it with picks and shovels and tossing hot water on it. At one point they built a huge bonfire near the truck to see if they could thaw it out. But nothing worked, so we had to cancel that show date.

 They all came from Mexico and had families back there that they supported with their meager earnings while on the road with the circus. I think they only made about $200 per week. But the show fed them and housed them and gave them working clothes, so they never spent a dime of their salary here in the States. They worked hard for 40 weeks each year and then took a bus back to Mexico to rest up at home with their families until the next season began.

Did you know I lived in Mexico for a year before I went on my mission?

It was way back in 1972. (Gee, I hope I haven’t told you this story before!)

I decided to learn more about pantomime from the mime teacher we had at Ringling Clown College. He had a performance studio in Mexico, and it was really cheap to live down there so I enrolled and found myself in Patzcuaro, Mexico!

His name is Sigfrido Aguilar, and he still has his studio. He was native Aztec, with a broad brown face and straight black hair that he kept cut like Moe Howard of the Three Stooges. He was short and lithe and had a ready smile. As a boy he had smuggled himself onto a banana boat to France so he could study with Jacques Lecoq, a very famous pantomime artist. When he returned to Mexico ten years later he was an international celebrity. The Mexican government gave him a grant and set him up in his own studio, which was originally a Catholic nunnery that had been taken over by the Mexican Revolution back in 1919.  

Sigfrido was exploring what he called “clown pantomime”, combining elements of slapstick and broad humor with the elegance and balletic grace of pantomime. He didn’t wear any funny costumes, just a traditional white blouse and leotards. But he worked with real physical props, which classical mime eschews.

He was awful fun to work with. I admired his artistry and discipline greatly. He never took himself or his art too seriously.

 He would go out to lunch with us, his students, on the Plaza in Patzcuaro, where you could buy a plate of pork tamales swimming in a pond of refried beans for about 25-cents. A lime sherbert in a sugar cone cost a nickel. The Plaza was full of old eucalyptus trees planted by British railroad engineers years before. Their trunks were painted white, and we would lie under them to talk about trivial things until we would all fall asleep for an hour or two. That was normal down there; everybody had a big lunch and then took a siesta.

 He loved to talk about new ideas with us for the show he wanted to put together and tour the world with. One idea he was obsessed with was juggling toilet plungers. He also bought a pair of huge leather clown shoes and put metal knobs on the soles so he could learn to tap dance in them.  

My favorite pantomime had him portraying a lowly street vendor, selling tacos. No one wants to buy, so he starts to eat them all by himself and comes down with a furious attack of farting. I have never seen another pantomime artist who could silently mime a fart!

He put his wife and his son into his shows, but, quite frankly, they weren’t all that good.

He invited me to go on his world tour as a performer in his show, and I was very eager to do so. But I didn’t – I went on my mission to Thailand instead. But that’s a story for another day . . .

Yer pal,

tt