MEET SKEETER

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September 13, 2017 - 12:00 AM

 

 

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.”

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