Conversations With Clowns

We are all staring into the mirror trying to shake hands with ourselves.

Wavy Gravy Merry Prankster/Woodstock Emcee/Beat Poet Hugh Romney/Ben & Jerry’s Flavor

As a friendly neighborhood folk journalist, I’ve been lucky enough to meet and interviewed people in public as well as inside a radio studio, from Bob Newhart to Eli Broad, Vidal Sassoon to Bill Viola, Wavy Gravy to Avner the Eccentric. For the BBC, CBS, NPR, APM and BAI, which is WBAI in NYC, a Pacifica station like KPFK in Los Angeles and KPFA up in Berkeley.

In radio, you have to look face-to-face, even it means tilting your head to get through all the equipment in between the two of you.

So the face becomes part of the conversation. [See CHAPTER TK: HOW THE DEAF DO IT]

And I’ve been asked, Does a folk journalist ever get tired of hearing someone’s story?

Heck yeah!

Many’s the morning at say, a Peet’s in North Berkeley, where every confab you overhear takes on elements of as Hamlet puts it in Hamlet: “… it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.”

Yuck, right?

Which is why watching much of the culture carrying on via Facebook, folk journalists still prefer best the face-to-face back-and-forth.

Here’s an example. Interviewing clowns in New York City, I asked Dr. Meatloaf (Stephen Ringold), the following:

“What’s it like to be a clown in today’s world?”

First thing he taught me? How my microphone is like his face paint – a prop mask which acts to free up the persona. Lets it come through.

“Hmm.” I said.

Then he said: “My clown parts lately seem to be coming together.”

“Really? In what way?” I asked.

“Like the lovers at end of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale,” Dr. Meatloaf said. “Melting ice and redemption, welcoming what comes, welcoming the wounds of love, you know, opening up to the anima and learning to more and more embrace the part of the clown persona of vulnerability, of suffering laughter.”

Well said. For a clown. (Kidding; I’ve done shows with Mr. Ringold in Germany, the Netherlands, and New Jersey, so he understands.)

Dr. Meatloaf clowning with family on Cape Cod — Try this at home: Dr. Meatloaf family

Yes, I admit it: some of my best friends are clowns. Dr. Noodle (aka Ilene Weiss) is another hilarious pal. I’ve always dug Wavy Gravy’s definition of one as, “A poet who is also an orangutan.” Dr. Meatloaf, in realizing this persona, uses his long experience and craft in places like the “Clown Care Unit” where he and Dr. Noodle played with stricken children in hospitals and at Paul Newman’s Hole-in-the-Wall Gang camp in Connecticut.

http://www.bigapplecircus.org/clown-care

http://www.holeinthewallgang.org

Classical Clowns — by Gregory L. Blackstock

Ringold also does a mean Ebenezer Scrooge every Christmas in New York’s Morgan Library, where they have the original text of Christmas Carol:

http://www.themorgan.org/collections/works/dickens/ChristmasCarol/62

Another wonderful clown, Avner the Eccentric Eisenberg is from Maine by way of Atlanta. I interviewed him at McHale’s theater bar on 45th Street in New York (no longer there). Avner explained his practice of humor as healing. A holy goofing healing method involving breathing. Yep, it works medicinally, and has grown continentally, with people starting their days in Laughter Clubs from Mumbai to Middletown, USA. And feeling revivified afterward. http://www.laughteryoga.org/english/club/find_club

Folk Journalist Activity

Learn to carry a microphone like wearing a mask.

Interview clowns.

Try wearing clown face and taking part in street fairs, whether in San Francisco, Europe, Burning Man or the Catskills. Or simply to entertain ill relatives. Here a new feeling comes live: You find yourself free to say anything to anybody. And as it begins conversations, draws conversations out, it also draws new conversation. Imagine dressing up and chatting with fellow “cosplayers,” partaking in all kinds of fantasy confabs at comic-conventions where instant myths get created right in front of your face. Or if you’re not game, attend and just observe. Nothing’s better than being close enough to get some giggles out of it.

Bonus!

One of my favorite new clowns is Mr. Clown, who helps toddlers close the “30 million word gap”

http://mrclown.tv