The guest clown was a perennial nuisance for clown alley. The Ringling Publicity Department – known in clown alley as "those schmucks" – combed the local media in each town for the most obnoxious, dimwitted, journalist to drop in prior to the first show for a stint in greasepaint; the idea being that said guest clown would write a glowing encomium about those gosh-darn cute clowns and the crowds would stampede the box office. What got our goat was the fact that the publicity geniuses never tried guest lion tamers or guest trapeze artists or guest show girls. Only guest clowns – as if our stock in trade could be learnt in ten minutes by any apple-knocker who came down the pike.
They just got in the way. Think of Jimmy Stewart as Buttons the Clown in The Greatest Show on Earth; remember how he stands around like a mooncalf making ghastly noises and pointing while Lou Jacobs does his beloved midget car routine? He sticks out like a toadstool in a bed of flowers.
We made short shrift of them. They were given an old yama-yama suit – a one-piece polka-dot monstrosity that was never washed and smelled of musty elephant and burned cotton candy. We slapped on the clown white good and thick. Clown white clogs your skin pores and, to the uninitiated, creates a powerful itching sensation. We gave 'em the old killer kangaroo to ride around the track – it was fondly hoped that this bouncy ball inside a foam rubber kangaroo would precipitate heart failure. And we pied them, but good.
The recipe for clown alley pie goo was as follows: you grate six bars of shaving soap into a galvanized trash can; add six gallons of cold tap water and a small bottle of glycerin; then beat with an electric paint stirrer for fifteen minutes. Colored dye is optional. When it's good and stiff it will peak like meringue and stay that way for about an hour. Then you fill up your instruments of goo-flinging, such as pie tins, icing bags, turkey basters, buckets, old felt hats with a hole in the top (when you shove the hat onto a clown's head it makes a lovely geyser), and so on.
At the end of the show we made sure the guest clown was posed, gaping smugly at the newspaper photographer that was assigned to the story, before we unloaded the artillery. The shaving cream/glycerin mixture, while ultimately harmless, does sting the eyes and is not as pleasant tasting as, say, chocolate truffles. Momentarily blinded and sputtering in rage, the guest clown would be led away, stripped, toweled down, and sent on their merry way to write whatever the hell they wanted. We clowns didn't care.
Surprisingly, there were very few negative stories in next day's newspaper. Our malice was seen as good, old-fashioned, merry Andrew hi-jinks. It just goes to show that reporters never could get to the bottom of anything.
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