Beloit College Magazine: Send Them In…
The Beloit Clowns
VALERIE REISS
03/01/06
We were surprised when the circus clown photo arrived, a submission to Beloit College Magazine, intended for publication alongside alumni wedding and reunion photos. There was Luke Brechtelsbauer, in full clown regalia, surrounded by several 2001 classmates after a circus performance in New York City. The submitted caption said he was fresh out of clown school and that friends joined him in support of his new clowning endeavor.
We thought: A clown? We knew Beloiters were daring, creative, and often unconventional, applying these propensities in any number of fields from anthropology to zoology. But we were fascinated by the life of a circus clown, and we had a hunch that other Beloit alumni may share this line of work.
After checking College records—and being sent on a couple of wild goose chases by alumni who were just clowning around on their homecoming questionnaires—we found several others in the business. One enlists clowning as a way of reaching out to people spiritually. Another learned to perform magic tricks by age 5, after being born into a family that counts a dozen clowns among its ranks. Yet another has taken clowning into the kindred theatrical realm of stunt-performance. And of course there is Luke, a bagpipe-playing, carrot-topped, kilt-wearing circus clown with the Greatest Show on Earth, who, above all, is enjoying himself immensely.
A Young Ringling Clowns All Around
In character as “Luke MacClown,” Luke Brechtelsbauer’01 is in perpetual motion on stage. When he’s not performing with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, he is criss-crossing the United States by train with a menagerie of people and animals from around the world.
Imagine living in eight square feet. Now picture that room on a train filled with 300 acrobats, trapeze artists, animal handlers, and clowns from all over the world. Add 10 elephants and about a dozen horses and you have Luke Brechtelsbauer’s home on the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus train.
Though many of us might find this life confining, Brechtelsbauer, 27, likes his home on wheels. “It’s actually nice to travel around by train,” he says, “because you get to see the back door of every city in the country. You don’t come in on the interstate, you don’t come in with the billboards, you come in by the old factories and the old papermills.”
In the year and a half he’s been with Ringling—the only circus in the United States that still travels by train—Brechtelsbauer has gotten to see friends and relatives all over the country. After reaching its destination, the string of cars parks “on some train tracks that aren’t too busy” and stays for about a week. One of the downsides to this life of constant motion is that “It takes a fair amount of energy to find a store, find a bank, find a post office,” he says. “I ride my bike, so I go around looking for all that stuff.” He checks his email at public libraries when he can.
Brechtelsbauer’s fascination with the circus and clowning started in his junior year at Beloit. A theatre class that assigned readings about circus, ballet, and mime inspired him to visit the extensive library at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wis.—the site of Ringling Brothers’ original winter circus headquarters. His class project (for his performing arts minor) was a sort of variety show/mini-circus with jugglers, unicycling, dance music, and “some monsters.” It was so successful that he did another the next year. Though he hadn’t actually been to a circus since childhood, when he graduated, the circus sirens sang. After moving to San Francisco, he wrote letters to circuses until finally landing a job on the ring crew of New York’s Big Apple Circus. He raked sawdust, worked backstage, and did a little performing. After six months, though, he moved to be with his girlfriend in Seattle, where he worked at a bike shop and played harp on the street for a living. It’s an instrument he took up in the fourth grade. He also plays the bagpipes and accordion.
After a couple of years, it was time for something new. “I wanted to break out from behind the harp,” he says. He enrolled in the country’s only dedicated clown school (Ringling’s prestigious Clown College closed in 1997), The Clown Conservatory in San Francisco—a “casual, non-profit, low-budget” part-time, nine-month program where “you have to put buckets out to catch the drips when it rains.” He learned skills like juggling, skits, unicycling, hand-walking, and “two highs” (standing on the shoulders of fellow clowns). “My body was pretty wompy at first,” says Brechtelsbauer. But gradually he learned to control it. For his final project, he and another student created an act with a giant hammer and anvil made of foam. They pretended the tools were heavy, dropping them on each other to big laughs in small test audiences.
Once the program ended, he and his partner created another act and a demo tape. Impressed, the school’s directors put in a call to Ringling. Both were hired. Brechtelsbauer was asked to put his bag-piping skills and naturally fire-colored hair to use as a Scottish clown in a baggy kilt and argyle socks. For more than a year now he’s been Luke MacClown, talking in a Scottish brogue on stage—when he’s not madly unicycling as the delivery boy in a pizza-making gag. “It’s pretty fun,” he says.
It’s also pretty exhausting. On Saturdays they do shows at 11:30, 3:30, and 7:30. “The hardest thing is to keep yourself excited about it—especially when you know you have to do it again in a few hours,” he says. There are also the hazards of that close-quartered train. Brechtelsbauer dated a fellow clown last year, and now their future looks uncertain. But delicacy is required. “She lives a few train cars down, and we see each other all the time,” he says. “You have to go into it with sensitivity to that. I mean, there’s no running away.” Recently the flying trapeze artist married someone who works with the elephants; babies are born on the road with some regularity.
It’s all thrillingly culturally expanding for a guy who grew up in Sioux Falls, S.D., and “the mountains of Virginia.”
“I hadn’t had a whole lot of exotic stuff in my life,” he says. “I thought it was kind of cool to see elephants from Asia and animals from South Africa and people from all over the world.” What he loves most about the circus, though, is its equalizing effect. “Everybody can come to the circus,” he says. “People that have never been to high school, people that have Ph.D.s.”
Brechtelsbauer isn’t sure what his clowning future holds. He’s thought about going to China for serious acrobatics training to “raise the level a little bit.” He also admires the intimate, community-oriented circuses he saw during a recent vacation in Germany and Switzerland. In the latter country he met a clown in his 50s named Gastone who had been clowning for 40 years. They chatted before he went on. In the show, Gastone did things like crunch down into a suitcase and later swung from a chandelier. Brechtelsbauer was awed—and even moved—but it’s not clear if he wants that extended clown life for himself. “I still don’t know if I want to do it forever,” he says. “But it’s a really exciting place to be.”
“Bucky” Juggles a Clowning Legacy
When Becky Smith Carter was 5 years old, she learned a few simple magic tricks. Then she had to give herself a clown name. Like most of the 12 or so other members of her family who have been clowns, it needed to start with the letter “b,” a tradition that began with her mother, Bingo, who was inspired by a love of the game. There was also an uncle Buster, sister Bojo, and, later, a baby niece called Booties. “I picked Bimbo,” says Carter, now 33, naming herself after an ice cream truck in her hometown of Milwaukee. Her mom tried to dissuade her, “but I insisted on it,” she says. A few years later, she “realized this was probably not the best name” and has been Bucky since.
By age 7 or 8, Carter taught herself to twist balloons into animals. At 11, she learned to juggle. During high school—before she could even drive—her father dropped her off and picked her up at gigs. It wasn’t until the summer she spent working at a restaurant, though, that she fully appreciated this as a way to support herself. “It made me realize how lucky I was to be able to do a clown show where I had fun, and it didn’t seem like work.”
In addition to working weekend and holiday clown gigs with her family throughout college, Carter integrated clowning into her schoolwork, giving speeches and demonstrations on juggling, applying clown makeup, and magic. Sometimes she would miss class for clown conventions (her professors were “always so accommodating”). At these events, Carter competed in skit contests and makeup competitions—”basically a beauty contest for clowns,” she says. She raked in first-place awards, earning points toward her ultimate goal: Her senior year, she became the youngest member inducted into the Midwest Clown Hall of Fame.
After graduation, she worked in the Beloit College development office for a few years and spent another several in banking. Then, three years ago, Carter returned to school for a master’s degree in education—while raising two young kids and working full-time. Now she teaches fourth grade in Janesville, Wis. Though she doesn’t juggle for her students, she uses her sense of humor to make class fun. What she likes most about teaching, she says, is “giving kids a sense of confidence and letting them know that you believe in them.”
When school’s out though, Carter clowns professionally, doing birthday parties and corporate events. She also teaches summer clowning workshops to kids in Clinton, Wis., where she lives. Carter still loves it. “It’s fun to see kids that come from really difficult situations, and when they’re watching your show, they forget about all the bad things that are happening and can just enjoy being a kid.” When Carter inevitably encounters kids who are afraid of clowns, she either gives them space or shows them her hands. “I don’t wear gloves. I say ‘look, I have hands just like you do!'” Clowning enchants her own daughter, Alison, age 6. She has her own costume—”frilly and girly, pink and purple”—and her own self-chosen non-“b”-word clown name, Tutu Cute. Her son, Jackson, 4, is happy just watching the excitement like his “laid-back,” non-clowning father.
When Carter graduated from high school, she almost skipped college to clown. But after filling out a seven-page application for Ringling Brothers’ school, the institution’s director asked her what she would do if she didn’t get in. “I’d go to college,” she answered. “Go,” he told her. She’s glad for that advice. In addition to all she got from Beloit, “I’m not moving from town to town,” she says. “I can have a regular job and do the clowning, and still be a good mom.”
Spreading Joy, Balloons, and Christ
When Martha, a.k.a. Marty, Weigle Jewell was a student at Beloit, she thought she would change the world through her major, environmental biology. Until she took invertebrate zoology.
“I absolutely hated it and got an “F” in the course,” Jewell, 55, says. “It just devastated me, and I thought, ‘Oh no, this isn’t working, what am I doing wrong?'” As she walked from Chamberlin Hall, dazed, she had her epiphany. Contemplating the disparity between her biology studies and her dabbles in theatre and the campus radio station, WBCR, she considered “the happiness factor.” “And all of a sudden I thought, ‘If rather than saving the world … I could make people smile …'” she says, trailing off, the dawning of the moment still in her voice.
Her first shot at fulfilling this new smile-making destiny wasn’t quite what she had in mind. After graduating and doing some unsatisfying theatre work in the Chicago area, Jewell took a production job at Playboy. While there, a guy she was dating told her she had to meet his church’s new youth pastor. Having pretty much dropped out of church at Beloit, Jewell was reluctant. But when she finally met Stan the Pastor, it wasn’t quite what the first guy had in mind: “It just transformed my life,” she says. She and Stan quickly started dating and soon married. “Then, once I got back into the church, I realized the Playboy philosophy wasn’t working, and I got pregnant and it all happened,” she says.
What she means by all is the makeup, miming, and balloon-twisting that tumbled into her life like clowns on a mat a year after having her first child. Bored and looking to get back to work, at 29 Jewell attended an event at her church in which a Lutheran minister dressed like a clown.
She was instantly inspired by the notion of “using clowning as a means of evangelizing and worship,” she says. She began with simple white-faced miming in churches and for women’s groups. When she started getting called to do birthday parties, she realized she needed a speaking clown character—thus Ruby Cool, or “my split personality,” was born. She learned to twist balloons into animals from a library book.
Then, when her family moved from Illinois to Denver, Colo. (where they still live), her clowning eyes opened even further at a gathering of the Fellowship of Christian Magicians. “I didn’t know there was an international organization of Christians who did clowning and magic and puppets and ventriloquism and chalk art and juggling and all those other fun visual arts,” she says. The classes she took from them expanded her repertoire—and helped her take more breaks from the shyness she suffers when out of costumes and makeup. She now has four clown personae: her original Valentine the Loving Mime, Ruby Cool for parties, Marty the Magic Jewell for magician gigs, and a Youth Fairy for adults’ parties.
When she’s not at her day job as Ronald McDonald’s driver and assistant, Jewell performs two or three birthday parties a month and entertains three nights a week at restaurants. The most difficult part of the job is dealing with the kids who sometimes attack her, she says. They pull her wig, hit her, and step on her toes. “In history, the clown’s purpose was to be mocked and made fun of, a scapegoat for anxieties,” she says.
But mostly their cruelty astonishes her. She is thoroughly nourished, though, by the scores of smiles she gets, especially in the work she does with autistic children.
Though she keeps her act secular at most events, she has a small badge on her balloon pump that reads “Fellowship of Christian Magicians;” she strikes up conversations with people who ask about it. The main way she promotes her faith, though, is to be as “joyful and gentle” as possible, she says. To people who ask, “How can you be Christian and do magic because magic is from Satan?” she explains that “God does miracles, I do illusion … Jesus uses parables to illustrate, I use magic to illustrate.” She also leaves her wand at home for her gospel gigs because, she says, “The magic is not in the wand, it’s in the spirit.”
Fire-eating! Sword-swallowing! Impossible Escapes! A Stuntman Sculpts a Genre
There are two basic styles of theatre, explains Harley Newman, a clown-turned-stuntman: Greek-inspired drama with plots, conflict, and resolution and “the show-offy stuff.” Unlike most performers of his ilk—he lays on nails, swallows fire, and escapes from cocoons of suffocating plastic wrap—he likes to combine the two. “In the show-off approach,” he says, “… you announce what you’re going to do and you do it and you beg for applause. I absolutely hate that.” Instead, Newman, 54, writes scripts for his outrageous acts: “I need something that leads people along the garden path up to a certain point where the actuality of a stunt is a solution to a problem.”
One such “solution” is his variation on an ancient routine called “human blockhead.” In the traditional version, the performer tells the audience, “I’m going to take this nail and pound it into my skull,” and the nail goes up his nose. In Newman’s blockhead, though, he tells the crowd about his sinus problems, and asks about theirs. As he explains that he’s looking for a holistic remedy for his stuffed-up nose, he dramatically pulls out a woman’s high-heeled shoe, eventually screwing the spike heel into his nostril. But “of course that’s not enough,” he says, “so that’s when I move on to the power drill.”
When Newman started at Beloit, his dreams were more sedate: He wanted to be a doctor. But he “couldn’t get the chemistry right.” And then one day he and some friends attended a circus in Madison, Wis., where they saw a tightrope-walking clown named Pio. He “…had this incredible ability to make us laugh while we were on the edge of terror,” Newman says. “That had a major effect on me.” Within a couple of months, Newman switched his major to theatre. After graduating, he became a mascot for a baseball team, then joined the Hoxie Brothers Circus as a clown, where he shared a trailer with a sword-swallower, a fire-eater, and “a midget.” “It was a good place for me because I’ve always been kind of a misfit,” he says.
After years of clowning and an unmisfit-friendly stint in human resources, Newman started working on his current career as a “professional lunatic,” doing solo and group shows for mostly college audiences. Years of stunts have brought both joy and injury: “I’ve cracked ribs a few times. I’ve usually got a pulled muscle somewhere and cuts and abrasions and burns,” he says in his Zen-like voice. “I ripped my eyelid open one time—I only needed one stitch to put it back together.”
What the rural Pennsylvanian loves about taking audiences “through an increasingly bizarre set of improbabilities up until the point where I’m scaring them about death,” is the authentic interaction. “In an age where almost everything in our lives is completely edited,” he says, “I can walk on stage and within five minutes people are going to be laughing or cringing or something as a completely honest response.”