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Stratford, Cactus and Stinnett in the Texas Panhandle were dates Prendergass & Fellini was supposed to play back in March, exactly six months ago, except a freak blizzard blowing down out of Canada snowed the circus in. Ben, RTT and the dogs holed up for three days watching Clerks, Dark Knight and the complete Season 2 of Monk. Milo's still not sure Heath Ledger deserved that Oscar. Robert Downey Jr. was just so-o-o good in Tropic Thunder.
Back in spring these towns were flush with natural gas money.
Not so much now. Pre-sales in Stratford were exactly two tickets; in Cactus, fourteen.
In Stratford Brandon sighted a car with this bumper sticker: Got a wild Negro problem? Start lassoing!
If hell exists, it's a lot like here -- an arid desolate plain where only bullheads grow, high winds blow, every man made thing is a ugly.
In other words: I don’t like the place.
But at least it has a laundromat, I thought watching Tontolino set out on bicycle, a basket of dirty clothes bobbing behind him.
Tontolino does the sideshow. He stands there with his megaphone before the show, after the show, and during the intermission: Tis the Strangest Thing! The Strangest Thing ye’ve ever seen. Opportunity only knocks once and when tis finished knocking, it vanishes – who can say where. Opportunity is knocking on your door now –
He works hard for his money. And he doesn’t make much.
I like the guy but I gotta say he scares me.
For one thing he has this weird accent, kind of like the leprechaun in those Lucky Charms commercials. When you talk to Tontolino for any length of time he drop it, but he keeps right on sprinkling this very dated Brit slang into the conversational mix. He grew up in Illinois -- in fact Prendergass & Fellini played the town where he grew up while I was in Rochester, picking up RTT. Ben spoke to an old geezer who'd known Tontolino growing up when his name was something different; the geezer remembered him affectionately. "Was always different, said the geezer. "Dreamy-like. Didn't like football."
I guess the years Tontolino lived in the UK – studying clowning and puppetry, busking on street corners – were the high point of his life.
Main reason Tontolino scares me though is that he’s kind of the poster boy for Aesop’s grasshopper. Since increasingly I see myself as the poster girl for Aesop’s grasshopper, my life as a kind of cautionary tale – Kids, Don’t End Up Like Her! – any natural affinity I might feel towards Tontolino seems like self-destructiveness.
###
Tontolino knew where the laundromat was. I didn’t. I loaded 10 days worth of dirty clothes into the Veedub and trailed him down to Main Street. Made a brief detour to check the town out: fugly houses. Couple of tortured-looking trees. Blighted downtown. Can’t blame Walmart for that – the closest Walmart is 30 miles away in Dumas, and even in Texas I can’t imagine people make 60 mile trips just to save ten cents on a pack of batteries. Nah, this has got to be the recession in action.
The public library had a big sign on it: Closed Monday 9am – 1pm.
O-kay.
Did that mean it was ever open?
(Later in the day RTT and I wandered back over. The library was open. And it had wifi! But the wifi needed a password.
“I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout no password,” said the librarian.
“How do people use the wifi then if you can’t give them the password?”
“Ain’t nobody never wanted to use no wifi,” said the librarian. “And I been here twenty-three years.”)
Tontolino’s bicycle was parked alongside a stucco shack. I walked in. Eight ancient Maytags were lined up against the wall like prisoners awaiting execution. Two inches of standing water. Scum and dead cockroaches floating on the water.
Guess Stratford doesn’t get many travelers. At least not clean travelers.
Oh, I had adventures in that laundromat! But laundromat adventures rarely make good reading. Eventually my soiled unmentionables were sudsing away in the only two machines that didn’t stink like gasoline, and Tontolino and I began to chat.
Tontolino was once Prendergass & Fellini’s clown but this year Jenni replaced him. This last minute decision from the always mutable Chance left Tontolino in deep shit. He’d been depending on the Prendergass & Fellini gig, hadn’t lined up anything else.
Early in the spring Tontolino found himself driving through a remote back woods town, and happened to notice an old peeling roadside attraction sign in the back of an ancient gas station.
“Shall I have a look then, luv?” he asked the lady behind the counter.
“It’s not really open to the public anymore –“
“I don’t mind –“
I won’t give away the secret behind Tontolino’s Strangest Thing. Suffice it to say it was something akin to Jake the Alligator Boy and it left in Tontolino’s trunk after money changed hands.
Tontolino had also salvaged the most little beautiful pipe calliope from the field where it had quietly sat rotting after accompanying the Lippzanzer Stallions on a triumphant tour of up-state Illinois forty years before. He refurbished it lovingly. He did a good job.
Also he found a unicorn skull. Well. It’s a skull with a horn on it. Supposedly it’s one of only seven licensed from the Irish government for exhibition.
Then he called Chance and pitched the sideshow idea. He doesn't get paid for the sideshow, and he has to give Chance a percentage of the take. But Chance likes the calliope organ, let Tontolino eat at the cookhouse and pays for his gas.
Still three attractions do not a flourishing sideshow make.
“I want to ask you a question,” he said to me in the laundromat. “I ask everyone this question. You need not answer if you do not want to. How do you think I can attract more people to my show?”
“Well, it’s not you,” I said. “Your pitch is very good. I think what you need is different attractions.”
“Different? How different?”
I thought of the mounds of bones and dismembered engine parts cluttering the porches of Stratford’s houses. “Beautiful doesn’t work in a place like this,” I said. “Fantastical doesn’t work in a place like this. What you need is something grotesque.”
“Grotesque?”
“Grotesque. Like – well... A mutant mammal! Something with two heads!”
“Something with two heads?”
“There was a two-headed calf on sale at a taxidermy store in Sheridan, Wyoming,” I said. “I think it was even real. But there’s also a taxidermist who specializes in sideshow gaffes operating out of Minneapolis. If you had the money you could design something, order it from her –“
“Grotesque,” Chico repeated with a rueful smile.
“Can’t you work anymore as a clown?” I asked.
“The jobs are few and far in between,” he said. “I send out letters. Letters and performance tapes. But the people don’t get back to me.”
“What will you do this winter?”
“There’s a festival I do every year in Sarasota,” he said. “I do my puppets. Punch and Judy. You know when I lived in Britain, I used to do Punch and Judy on the streetcorners. We had a little area cordoned off for the children to sit and the grandparents used to beg us, ‘Can we just stand in back and watch the show too?’ They’d grown up on it, you see. Hadn’t seen it in years. They don’t do puppt shows much anymore.”
“No,” I said. “I imagine they don’t. Television has replaced traditional cultural entertainments.”
“Aye, television,” he said, with another sweet smile.
I looked at him then and he was such an anachronism I wanted to weep.
But then I suppose I’m an anachronism too.
Back in spring these towns were flush with natural gas money.
Not so much now. Pre-sales in Stratford were exactly two tickets; in Cactus, fourteen.
In Stratford Brandon sighted a car with this bumper sticker: Got a wild Negro problem? Start lassoing!
If hell exists, it's a lot like here -- an arid desolate plain where only bullheads grow, high winds blow, every man made thing is a ugly.
In other words: I don’t like the place.
But at least it has a laundromat, I thought watching Tontolino set out on bicycle, a basket of dirty clothes bobbing behind him.
Tontolino does the sideshow. He stands there with his megaphone before the show, after the show, and during the intermission: Tis the Strangest Thing! The Strangest Thing ye’ve ever seen. Opportunity only knocks once and when tis finished knocking, it vanishes – who can say where. Opportunity is knocking on your door now –
He works hard for his money. And he doesn’t make much.
I like the guy but I gotta say he scares me.
For one thing he has this weird accent, kind of like the leprechaun in those Lucky Charms commercials. When you talk to Tontolino for any length of time he drop it, but he keeps right on sprinkling this very dated Brit slang into the conversational mix. He grew up in Illinois -- in fact Prendergass & Fellini played the town where he grew up while I was in Rochester, picking up RTT. Ben spoke to an old geezer who'd known Tontolino growing up when his name was something different; the geezer remembered him affectionately. "Was always different, said the geezer. "Dreamy-like. Didn't like football."
I guess the years Tontolino lived in the UK – studying clowning and puppetry, busking on street corners – were the high point of his life.
Main reason Tontolino scares me though is that he’s kind of the poster boy for Aesop’s grasshopper. Since increasingly I see myself as the poster girl for Aesop’s grasshopper, my life as a kind of cautionary tale – Kids, Don’t End Up Like Her! – any natural affinity I might feel towards Tontolino seems like self-destructiveness.
Tontolino knew where the laundromat was. I didn’t. I loaded 10 days worth of dirty clothes into the Veedub and trailed him down to Main Street. Made a brief detour to check the town out: fugly houses. Couple of tortured-looking trees. Blighted downtown. Can’t blame Walmart for that – the closest Walmart is 30 miles away in Dumas, and even in Texas I can’t imagine people make 60 mile trips just to save ten cents on a pack of batteries. Nah, this has got to be the recession in action.
The public library had a big sign on it: Closed Monday 9am – 1pm.
O-kay.
Did that mean it was ever open?
(Later in the day RTT and I wandered back over. The library was open. And it had wifi! But the wifi needed a password.
“I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout no password,” said the librarian.
“How do people use the wifi then if you can’t give them the password?”
“Ain’t nobody never wanted to use no wifi,” said the librarian. “And I been here twenty-three years.”)
Tontolino’s bicycle was parked alongside a stucco shack. I walked in. Eight ancient Maytags were lined up against the wall like prisoners awaiting execution. Two inches of standing water. Scum and dead cockroaches floating on the water.
Guess Stratford doesn’t get many travelers. At least not clean travelers.
Oh, I had adventures in that laundromat! But laundromat adventures rarely make good reading. Eventually my soiled unmentionables were sudsing away in the only two machines that didn’t stink like gasoline, and Tontolino and I began to chat.
Tontolino was once Prendergass & Fellini’s clown but this year Jenni replaced him. This last minute decision from the always mutable Chance left Tontolino in deep shit. He’d been depending on the Prendergass & Fellini gig, hadn’t lined up anything else.
Early in the spring Tontolino found himself driving through a remote back woods town, and happened to notice an old peeling roadside attraction sign in the back of an ancient gas station.
“Shall I have a look then, luv?” he asked the lady behind the counter.
“It’s not really open to the public anymore –“
“I don’t mind –“
I won’t give away the secret behind Tontolino’s Strangest Thing. Suffice it to say it was something akin to Jake the Alligator Boy and it left in Tontolino’s trunk after money changed hands.
Tontolino had also salvaged the most little beautiful pipe calliope from the field where it had quietly sat rotting after accompanying the Lippzanzer Stallions on a triumphant tour of up-state Illinois forty years before. He refurbished it lovingly. He did a good job.
Also he found a unicorn skull. Well. It’s a skull with a horn on it. Supposedly it’s one of only seven licensed from the Irish government for exhibition.
Then he called Chance and pitched the sideshow idea. He doesn't get paid for the sideshow, and he has to give Chance a percentage of the take. But Chance likes the calliope organ, let Tontolino eat at the cookhouse and pays for his gas.
Still three attractions do not a flourishing sideshow make.
“I want to ask you a question,” he said to me in the laundromat. “I ask everyone this question. You need not answer if you do not want to. How do you think I can attract more people to my show?”
“Well, it’s not you,” I said. “Your pitch is very good. I think what you need is different attractions.”
“Different? How different?”
I thought of the mounds of bones and dismembered engine parts cluttering the porches of Stratford’s houses. “Beautiful doesn’t work in a place like this,” I said. “Fantastical doesn’t work in a place like this. What you need is something grotesque.”
“Grotesque?”
“Grotesque. Like – well... A mutant mammal! Something with two heads!”
“Something with two heads?”
“There was a two-headed calf on sale at a taxidermy store in Sheridan, Wyoming,” I said. “I think it was even real. But there’s also a taxidermist who specializes in sideshow gaffes operating out of Minneapolis. If you had the money you could design something, order it from her –“
“Grotesque,” Chico repeated with a rueful smile.
“Can’t you work anymore as a clown?” I asked.
“The jobs are few and far in between,” he said. “I send out letters. Letters and performance tapes. But the people don’t get back to me.”
“What will you do this winter?”
“There’s a festival I do every year in Sarasota,” he said. “I do my puppets. Punch and Judy. You know when I lived in Britain, I used to do Punch and Judy on the streetcorners. We had a little area cordoned off for the children to sit and the grandparents used to beg us, ‘Can we just stand in back and watch the show too?’ They’d grown up on it, you see. Hadn’t seen it in years. They don’t do puppt shows much anymore.”
“No,” I said. “I imagine they don’t. Television has replaced traditional cultural entertainments.”
“Aye, television,” he said, with another sweet smile.
I looked at him then and he was such an anachronism I wanted to weep.
But then I suppose I’m an anachronism too.
