Well, old girl, how's tricks? Between work, family, church, and school, I imagine you must meet yourself coming & going. I hope Mom continues to be a big help to you, as you mentioned the last time we spoke.
I was thinking of calling you today but I'm having so much trouble with my throat lately that I decided against it. I don't know if it's a lingering cold or the smog out here or what, but every morning for the past three weeks I can only manage a husky whisper, no more. There's not much pain, but a lot of phlegm (oh great, the old man is going into nasty detail!) My voice gets better as the day progresses and I drink a lot of fluids. But then in the evening the huskiness returns and I sound like a rusty winch. It's an inconvenience more than a health issue to me, so I won't bother to see the doctor about it.
More worrying was this morning I woke up to use the bathroom and experienced a great wave of nausea and dizziness -- something that has never happened to me to this extent before. I couldn't get out of bed for a while, and when I finally did I staggered like a drunk. The attack, or whatever it was, lasted for 2 hours before starting to clear up. I feel much better now, but am wondering if this will be a reoccurring problem for me now. Just to play safe, I don't plan on venturing far from my apartment today -- I 'll just stay home reading and writing. I've looked at some medical websites, and they all say my dizziness and nausea could be the result of a sudden drop in blood pressure. That seems the most likely cause to me. But what could have caused it Ihave no idea. After all, I'm taking meds for high blood pressure, not low blood pressure. Oh well, like any man worth his salt, I'll ignore it in the hopes it will never happen again.
I had lunch with Sarah and Lance and Brooke yesterday at a very trendy cafe called Guru in downtown Provo. The food was really good (and expensive) and the grand kids were just so cute and affectionate. How come you were never that cute and cuddly? :)
I can't believe how fast little Brookie is growing! She's developing her very own personality and is pretty fearless in dealing with new people and situations. And now Virginia is giving me another grand daughter any day! Sarah tells me that Virginia is going to keep the actual birth a secret for a day or two. For no apparent reason, except she is a dork, I guess. So chances are you'll hear about it before I do.
I've decided to finally cave in to the nagging about writing another autobiography I get from some of my professional writer friends. But I won't be doing a linear narrative, from point A to point B type of thing. Instead, I'll continue to write two-thousand word vignettes about different events and aspects of my life as a clown, radio announcer, and English teacher in Thailand -- which is what I've been doing for the past several years in a very desultory manner. When I get about 30 of them done I'll string them together and send it out to a publisher to see what happens.
Have you been reading any of them? I post them on my Facebook page, also on my Family Search memories page. I wish you would let me know what you think of them.
I would have loved it it my mom and dad had taken the time and effort to write down a few memories about their lives. But, like most people, they never felt the need to do so -- and that leaves them very much a mystery to me in many ways. I'm hoping that I become less of a mystery to you and the other kids as I continue to write about 'my life and hard times'.
Well, take care, my little peony bush. I think I'll take a little morning snooze now -- I'm feeling pretty tuckered out after my fun times last night . . . .
Love, dad
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Friday, November 11, 2016
A Vigilante Action in Clown Alley
A young boy's definition of 'hygiene' is rather flexible. At least mine was. I was constantly at loggerheads with my mother over her insistence that I change underwear every day. At the time, this seemed rather drastic to me. Who would ever see my underwear, or ever be offended if it began to reek a teeny weeny bit? Changing it once a week seemed the saner course for a young man busy with long sweaty bike rides in the summer and intense ice skating sessions in the winter.
The constant washing of face and hands that were demanded of me prior to each meal at home were also an onerous and certainly unnecessary burden imposed by a germaphobic parent. Her high-handed approach to cleanliness was not next to godliness -- it was next to torture!
But as I matured (or at least my body matured -- there is still some debate in academic circles as to whether my mental abilities have ever extended beyond the capacity of an eight-year-old) I found that soap and water, and a good deodorant, were not the incredible imposition I had once thought; indeed, I realized if I was ever to snag a girl friend I would need to be as clean as a hound's tooth, if not as sharp. So I brushed my teeth and combed my hair and lathered up once a day -- and much good did it do me in the romance department. Girls not only wanted a sanitized boyfriend, but one with money and a car. Pfui!
It was a bitter lesson, one that I took with me to the Ringling clown alley in the year 1971 -- along with my by now entrenched habits of normal cleanliness.
Maintaining hygienic standards in clown alley took some doing. First there was the daily application, and then removal, of the heavy greasepaint. We didn't use any of that namby-pamby powdery stuff you see in stage productions, but good old Stein's Clown White -- a thick and oily white paste that stayed on despite sweat and strain -- and that came off unwillingly only with industrial-strength mineral oil. And even then there'd still be streaks of it in odd corners of the face and around the ears when vigilance was lax.
My costumes were constantly under siege from animal fluids -- everything from tiger urine (they could direct a stream with unerring accuracy up to ten feet away from their cage) to the watery feces of the elephants after they had raided a handy dumpster. Not to mention the gallons of white goo that were flung around during the ring gags. It consisted mostly of shaving soap and glycerin, and it dried to a thin white crust that was as hard to dislodge as cement.
We were all kept busy washing, scrubbing, and brushing. The hobo clowns, like Otto Griebling and Mark Anthony, were doubly jealous of their personal sanitation; they kept their fingers rigorously manicured and doused themselves with pints of Old Spice. Even then, audience members would sometimes wrinkle their noses at one of them and exclaim "Pee-yoo, does that bum stink!"
But there was one holdout in clown alley who did not follow accepted hygienic practises. I'll call him 'Kyle' for the purposes of this narrative. He was a First of May, one of my fellow students from the Ringling Clown College in Venice, Florida.
Kyle disdained the use of mineral oil for makeup removal. He used Ponds cold cream, not very effectively. The outlines of his Auguste makeup were still clearly visible when he quit clown alley each night. He did not shower because, he claimed, he caught cold very easily. He shaved only intermittently. He rarely trimmed his nails, and the grime underneath them was as potent as night soil from any Third World country.
In other words, he was as filthy and smelly as a goat. How he ever got a contract with the show is a mystery on par with what actually started the infamous Hartford Circus Fire back in 1944.
And he kept his roomette on the circus train in the same squalid shape as himself. These roomettes had originally been the premier accommodations on the crack train lines between New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, back in the 1920's and 30's. But by the time Ringling Brothers purchased the cars they were practically slums on wheels. So we clowns had our work cut out for us just to keep our roomettes one step above a ghetto. They were dusty, drafty, and uncarpeted, but with a little elbow grease most of us managed to keep them somewhat civilized.
But not Kyle. He never changed the sheets on his Murphy bed; loved to eat fried chicken in his room and scatter the bones around like a Norman baron feeding his mastiffs; and he used his fold down sink as a urinal. The consequence was a new herd of cockroaches every few weeks, which would stampede out from his foul den to the surrounding roomettes -- including mine!
As spring swiveled to summer, Kyle's personal hygiene grew worse -- or at least the cumulative effects of his existing state of filth grew more offensive. There was talk of vigilante action.
When the show reached Anaheim in July Kyle was unceremoniously removed from his noisome roomette late one night for a complete hosing down. I was not part of this posse, but I heard that they were not very gentle with him. The group also cleaned and scrubbed out his roomette, smashing family photos and other keepsakes while in the grip of their Lysol mania.
The next day Kyle showed up in clown alley sullen and bruised, but very clean. For the rest of that season Kyle kept his nose, and everything else, clean. If he began to slip he was grimly reminded that another midnight ablution could be arranged.
Today such brutal and direct action would certainly be condemned and probably prosecuted as a hate crime. I look back on that episode myself with lingering discomfort and guilt. But what else could have been done? We all asked him to please clean up his act prior to the outrage; our requests met with nothing but a grimy sneer. In the close-packed and volatile world of clown alley Kyle was just asking for trouble.
He did not get invited back for a second season with the circus. Many years later, at a Clown College reunion, I saw him sitting by himself in the corner of the hotel Hospitality Suite, smoking a cigarette. He would not make eye contact with me, so I didn't go over to say hello. He was wearing a light yellow polyester sports coat and white slacks and looked perfectly normal and clean to me. Somebody told me later he worked in Las Vegas as a lounge singer in some of the second string casinos. I remembered then -- he always had a pretty good baritone and used to sing cheerful Broadway show tunes a lot -- before the Night of the Hose.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)