Skeeter has a theory. Here it is: the Midwest produces more and better clowns because the Midwest — lovely though it can be — is, for the most part, dull. Kids here, says Skeeter, are compelled, by the encircling boredom into which they’re born, to create their own kinds of fun. Here, when you’ve finished sweeping the floor, what’s there to do but balance the broom on your nose?
Take the most famous of circus clowns, Emmett Kelly — he grew up in southeast Kansas. So did Tom and Tammy Parrish, a famous husband and wife clown pair. Frosty Little is from Nebraska. Chester Conklin is from Iowa. Red Skelton is from Indiana.
Skeeter, too, hails from that great confederation of drab states — semi-rural Ohio, in her case — which gave her all the early advantage she needed for becoming a very good clown. And, at 61 years old, with her big red pants and mousy brown hair pulled into loose pigtails, and with more than 30 years of her life spent on the road hoisting the big top in one small town after another, Skeeter is a very good clown.
SKEETER was just a girl when she first set her sights on clown alley. Since pre-modern times, it’s been the way of clowns to transmute tragedy into comedy, mishap into laughter, and it was Skeeter’s way, too. Even early on. She struggled throughout her youth with a pronounced speech impediment. Those were the days when students had to stand up and address the entire class, recalls Skeeter. “If I couldn’t pronounce something, I would act it out or mime it — which gave me a pretty good start in clowning. I didn’t get in much trouble. I think the teachers knew where it was coming from.”
But when Skeeter was 16, someone told her about Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. For years, the renowned institution — the Harvard of slapstick — trained the country’s best pierrots in a balmy redoubt near Sarasota, Fla. Skeeter applied at once but didn’t get in. The college had only opened its doors to women in the previous year. She tried again when she was 17, and again at 18. Finally, in 1981 — after earning a degree in broadcasting from a less funny university in her home state — Skeeter was accepted into the famous clown college, a move which would, in many ways, determine the rest of her life. Honk! Honk!
CLOWNS TO THE RESCUE
“The clown is the lifeguard of the circus,” explains Skeeter. The mission of clown college, then, is to equip the future jester with a working knowledge of a circus’s many moving parts and with a menu of skills that will equip them for any big top contingency. Similar to the rodeo clown, the circus clown may need to rush into the ring at a moment’s notice in an effort to distract the audience’s attention while circus workers attend to a more pressing matter. “Maybe they need to help someone who has fallen off the trapeze or they need help corralling a loose horse. Or maybe the cats’ wagon has gotten stuck in the mud on the way in, and you have to stall for 15 or 20 minutes.”
For this reason, says Skeeter, clowns are the only circus performers allowed to eat lunch in their make-up. “Everything in the circus is based on music. In the old days, if you heard the ‘Wedding March’ strike up, you knew you had to grab a prop and hurry out there. But a lot of times — especially with the old-timers, who were often out having a cigarette or in the cookhouse getting a cup of coffee — you might find yourself stuck on the other side of clown alley when the song starts playing, and you won’t have time to grab anything. So you just have to work with what’s out there. It might be two or three minutes you have to fill or it might be 15.”
Those moments, says Skeeter — unplanned, unstructured, improvisatory — can be tense. The lonely column of light bearing down on you, a thousand spectators waiting in unison — “make us laugh.” But for the “long clown,” this is heaven. The long clown lives for these moments.
“Now, by ‘long clown,’ I don’t mean a clown on stilts,” laughs Skeeter, who uses this moment to squeeze an invisible clown’s horn and make a semi-alarming hee-honk sound before continuing. “The long clown is somebody who can go in the ring and just with his personality and his instrument — his body — he can hold you for 15 minutes. He commands the attention of the entire audience, whether it’s 500, 1,200 or 45,000 people. Buster Keaton would have been called a long clown. Another long clown would be Red Skelton. Red could entertain you with his hat for 45 minutes.” And Skeeter would know. She knew Red.
Every young clown graduating from Ringling clown college, hopes to score a contract with The Greatest Show on Earth. That is, they want to become a Ringling clown. Skeeter was no different. Following graduation, Skeeter was hired by Ringling to do advance work — meaning she would enter towns ahead of the circus as a way to promote the coming show. But that was the extent of her Ringling work. Skeeter never did get the call to work the ring. Eventually, she would sign on with other big top circuses and make her life on the smaller stage.
But her short time with Ringling did afford her the chance to meet Red.
An old man by then, his star largely dimmed, Skelton used to visit clown alley anytime the circus stopped near Palm Springs. Skelton had begun his professional life as a clown and continued to portray clowns on his popular TV show. But that was all over by the time Skelton began visiting backstage at the circus. Skelton would never announce his arrival on the Ringling grounds. He didn’t want to draw attention away from the young clowns. Occasionally he would perform, but his involvement was never publicized, only the show’s boss clown would have foreknowledge. Mostly, he just wanted to hang out. Skelton, who by that point in his life had lost his 9-year-old son to leukemia and his wife to suicide, would walk down to clown alley and sit with the clowns. He was comfortable there. “In the circus, we tend to think our knowledge and life-experience is very valuable,” explains Skeeter, “so when we share something about our life with another person, we call it ‘cutting up the jackpot.’ That’s circus lingo. So Red would sit down there all day with the clowns and cut up the jackpot.”
WHO WILL RESCUE THE CLOWNS?
The life of a clown isn’t what it once was. The clown’s reputation has taken a bruising in the broader arena of popular culture. There was the “creepy clown” epidemic of 2016. There’s the American serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who would often smear his face with greasepaint and call himself “Pogo the Clown.” Finally, there’s Stephen King’s novel “It,” about a sewer-dwelling clown who snacks on children. “It” was later turned into a wildly popular mini-series. And only last week — in a certain bid to annoy real clowns everywhere — a big-screen version of “It” was released to huge box office success.
“The United States has made the clown a villain,” protested Skeeter during her visit to Iola last Friday. “After almost 35 years on the road, most people tell me they hate clowns, and if I ask why, the number one reason is that they saw Stephen King’s ‘It.’ They watched one movie and now they hate all clowns. I’ve watched movies where the teacher is a murderer, or a dentist, but nobody hates all teachers.”
Skeeter is quick to explain to adults that the clown is one of the world’s oldest performers. She reminds them that the jester and the trickster and the clown were all permanent fixtures in the hierarchies of most ancient cultures. She tells kids that without clowns they wouldn’t have cartoons; that Disney and Warner Brothers used to hire professional circus clowns for their animators to study; that if you watch old Bugs Bunny cartoons or Daffy Duck or Wile E. Coyote — those are all old clown gags.
Even in our own time, to turn away from these funnymen is to ignore the beautiful rituals and system of ethics that underpins the long tradition of the American clown.
For most of her career, for example, Skeeter’s shoes were handmade by the country’s last two full-time clown shoe cobblers. To hear Skeeter tell it, a clown has his choice of three shoes: A hard-soled shoe, ideal for marching in parades or stomping around the ring. A more flexible, soft-bottomed slipper, which is perfect for the more active clown. If you’re balancing on an elephant’s back, for example, and want to feel every bristle — this is your cut. And then there’s your in-between shoe.
Theoretically, a well-made clown shoe should last a performer the bulk of his or her career. But accidents happen. One of Skeeter’s favorite pairs of silly shoes is currently at the bottom of a Louisiana bayou, where it sank, along with the showgirls’ outfits, in a tractor-trailer accident one night years back.
Another tradition of clown alley is the private design of a clown’s painted face. A clown’s face, said Skeeter, is his signature, which makes copying another clown’s makeup a crime of the highest outrage.
And you can dispense with the whole “tears of a clown” cliché, insists Skeeter. “A clown isn’t hiding behind a mask. A clown uses his face to reflect the world.”
CUTTING THE JACKPOT
Skeeter’s real name is Tina. Tina is from a little town outside Columbus, Ohio. After college, she worked briefly in the corporate world, but she soon grew restless. She decided to take a three-month sabbatical from her office job, at which point she lit out for the backroads of America. She met fascinating people. She picked up an odd job here and there. Three months turned into 18 months, and she never did return to work. She was accepted into clown college, graduated, then joined the circus. Along the way, she met a man. They were married. She got pregnant, twice. But it didn’t work out. Both times she delivered her babies stillborn at eight months. “I went through the whole birthing,” remembers Tina. “I did have that, I had that. And because of what happened to me, there’s now a whole new group of people that I can relate to, you know — parents who’ve lost children.” Tina’s marriage eventually broke up. She found consolation in the life of near-permanent travel that the circus requires of its employees. She guesses that if she ever retires, she’ll grow “homesick for the road.” These days, Tina — Skeeter — works as an advance clown for the Culpepper & Merriweather circus. She sleeps most nights in the back of her minivan, in parking lots or, if she gets permission, sometimes in residents’ driveways.
“Everybody has their story,” said Skeeter. “If you’re human, you’re going to experience it all. The clown, though — the clown’s job is to be a student of human life. The clown takes what life brings and he uses it.
“Everybody knows what it’s like to walk down the sidewalk and trip. Well, what’s the first thing you do? You turn around to see what you tripped over.” Skeeter takes an exaggerated glance behind her, knits her brow and scratches her head quizzically. “There’s nothing there. The sidewalk is flat. So what’s the second thing we do? We look around to see if anybody saw us.” Craning her neck like a giraffe, she peers in all directions, then breathes a sigh of relief. “So the clown can take that truth and amplify it. You’re not embarrassing the audience member. The clown takes it on himself. You can laugh at the clown and go, ‘Silly clown!’ But, secretly, you’re thinking: ‘I remember doing that.’
“Or take your first love. A clown can walk around like this” — Skeeter looks up to the clouds, smiles, sighs happily; her hand flutters over her chest to signal the pitter-patter of a full heart. “Then maybe the clown picks a flower.” Skeeter plucks an invisible flower, lifts it to her nose and inhales deeply. “And then I give it to you.” Skeeter reaches out with the flower. “But you don’t take it.” Skeeter’s arm falls to her side. Her smile dies. Her shoulders slump. “Now, in life, we can do one of two things. We can either throw that flower in the grass — which, hey, that might be the mood we’re in that day — or we can take it and put it in our lapel and say” — Skeeter looks down at her new buttonhole flower, smiles a big smile and lifts her chin once more to the sky — “we can say, ‘Isn’t it beautiful,’ and then go on with the rest of our day.”
Culpepper & Merriweather Circus
When: Saturday at 2:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. (each show runs 90 minutes)
Where: Behind Miller’s on Madison
Tickets: Discounted tickets ($10 for adults; $7 for children and seniors) can be purchased before Saturday at the Iola Chamber of Commerce or by calling 1-866-BIGTOP-6 during regular business hours. Same-day tickets ($13 for adults; $8 for kids and seniors) can be purchased at the box office on Saturday. Visit cmscircus.com for more information.
