I spent all day at the hospital with my mother today. Her doctor was worried about her heart, which was fast and arrhythmic. After multiple blood tests, two EKGs, and a chest x-ray the doc gave her a clean bill of health. He smiled and said, “There’s a reason your mother has lived to be 91-years old.” I guess her heart, lungs, and blood are all in amazing condition.

The tragedy is her Alzheimer’s disease. I’ve watched her extraordinarily bright mind slowly dim in recent years. To witness a woman who was a pioneer in education and psychology, have trouble remembering whether she ate breakfast is heartbreaking.

Luckily I recorded her life stories before Alzheimer’s began stealing her precious memories. Currently I’m writing a book based on these recordings called, The Mother of a Clown.

Stay tuned…

Photo by Marc Norberg

Photo by Rosie Cole:

My thoughts go out to my fellow performers and artisans at the Carolina Renaissance Festival that didn’t open last weekend due to Hurricane Joaquin.  Weather has always ruled our lives on the Renaissance circuit. Sun brings a full hat during the day, and a full stomach at night, while rain leaves you with an empty hat and belly.

We are all, “Beggars to God.”

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I spent the afternoon packing-up Witchwood Stage. All the windows and doors a bolted and locked, ready for winter.   There is a lot of history inside this old building. The original structure was built in 1974, and replaced board for board in the early 1990s. Last year the Festival changing the thatched straw to cedar shingles, and replaced the asphalt shingles in the back with a new rubber roof. I’m told that it is one of the few buildings strong enough to easily be moved to the new MN Renaissance Festival location. I like to think that by bringing along this small piece of history it will somehow plant a seed of magic wherever the Festival takes fresh root.

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In today’s post I will look back and reflect on what inspired me during each of my decades during my 40-year career at the MN Renaissance Festival.

In the 1970s mime was at the peak of its popularity in the United States. I received my training at The Valley Studio, which the New York Times described as, “The center of mime training in the country.” It was an age of innocence at the Renaissance Festival….     except after hours.

In 1980 I became a red nose clown after seeing Jacques Lecoq’s famous lecture demonstration on the Art of the Mask at the Festival of American Mime. He concluded by putting on a red nose, which he called the world’s smallest mask.

I was hooked.

In the 1990s Rosie and I came into our own as a husband and wife comic team. The MN Renaissance Festival was our springboard for the national festival circuit. We toured our red nose show from New York to Florida, and as far west as Arizona. During the 90s Renaissance Festivals popped up in almost every major city in the United States.

In the 21^st Century our two millennial children were raised on the road by parents who played chickens on stage. During the Renaissance period Shakespeare wrote about King Lear’s wise fool with a cock’s comb, and even earlier medieval fools were always pictured wearing a cap with a rooster comb top. We simply took the spirit of this idea to the extreme.

In 2008 we secured a US Trademark for our Emergency Clown Nose®.

Stay tuned…

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Photo by Linda Brant-Malm

Performing for 40-years at a single venue is an extraordinary experience.   Having a home to be able to return year after year is a rare gift as an artist.

I wish a deep thank you to the MN Renaissance Festival for supporting my work with Rosie for all these many years.

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Photo by Michael Sullivan:

I first met Michael Sullivan at a party in in the spring 1976 when he was in the planning stages of building the first Hobbit Hole at the MN Renaissance Festival. I had no idea what a Hobbit was, but I was planning to audition for the MN Renaissance Festival that same summer.  We spent the evening talking about the philosophy of Buckminster Fuller, and the mathematics behind the design of the geodesic dome.  At the end of the evening he invited me to camp behind his new Hobbit Hole if I got accepted into the show.

I passed the audition, and set-up my tent behind the Festival’s original Hobbit Hole located near the Crown Stage, but I still didn’t know what a Hobbit was.  On that first weekend I gleaned that Hobbits were short like my friend Michael, and lived inside a hole in the ground with a round door.

At the time I was living at the family home of Robert M. Pirsig the author of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  The house was wall–to-wall books.  I was living with Pirsig’s youngest son Ted, who was my best friend from High School, while his parents were off on a sailboat he bought with the royalties from his first book.   His second book, Lila chronicles this time that Pirsig was sailing, and I was living at the house.

As soon as I got home from the Renaissance Festival on Monday I asked Ted, “What the heck is a Hobbit?”

Ted pulled JRR Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring off of his shelf and said, “I will let you read it if you mow the lawn first.”

For anyone who knows me, I hate mowing the lawn, but I was outside as fast as I could to start that lawn mower. By the end of the week I had finished the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, plus the lawn looked beautiful, his mother’s garden was completely weeded, and the all the floors were thoroughly cleaned and waxed.

I returned to the Festival the next Saturday with a heightened sense of reality and purpose. That is the day magic became the stock and trade of my life.

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Photo from Puke & Snot website:

Joe Kudla who played Snot in the famed comic duo of Puke & Snot died in 2008 just before the MN Renaissance Festival opened that season.   I remember the opening day when John Gamoke took over as Snot Jr., Rosie and sat in the audience as Joe’s words still got laughs from beyond the grave through John’s capable voice.

I have fond memories of traveling on the road with Puke & Snot as their opening act. One winter driving to an American Legion Hall in Elgin, Minnesota stands out with the most clarity. I was riding in the back seat of Mark Sieve’s Audi, enjoying heated leather seats, and listening to his surround sound music system, while Mark talked about the dangers of rural Minnesota, claiming, “This is where the crazy people live.”

After the show when Mark was looking to back out from the alley behind the American Legion Hall, he discovered a deposit of human feces had been unloaded on his driver’s side door blocking the view to his mirror. After indignantly cleaning off the fresh poop from his precious Audi, Mark silently drove while Joe could not stop laughing all the way home about, “The mad crapper of Elgin.”

The last time I performed with Joe was for a benefit I produced at the Jewel Theatre above TC Magic, to help Mikael Rudolph in his fight against cancer. It was the last Puke & Snot show that Joe performed in Minnesota.

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