Welcome back! Hopefully, by this time you’ve had an opportunity to purchase some balloons (260Q), purchase a pump, and inflate some balloons, and try twisting a simple dog. Now we’re going to add to your repertoire. Continue reading
Welcome back! We’re now at the point where the rubber meets the road (pun intended), and start learning how to actually twist balloons. Actually, it’s the latex meeting the road, not the rubber, since the balloons we’ll be using are made of latex — this is what makes them more malleable, and able to survive being ‘twisted.’ Having gotten that tidbit out of the way, we’ll need the following to begin with: Continue reading
Editorial review of Slapstick Encyclopedia courtesy of Amazon.com
A veritable gold mine of rarities and little-known treats, Slapstick Encyclopedia lives up to its title as a stupendous compendium of silent-era comedy. Spanning the entire spectrum of slapstick from 1909 to 1927, this definitive collection (curated by film historians David Shepard and Joe Adamson) dutifully credits Keystone Cops creator Mack Sennett as the founder of the slapstick phenomenon. But it reaches far beyond Sennett (who alienated most of his popular stars) to acknowledge nearly every major and minor slapstick star and style. The development of slapstick, which had its roots in vaudeville, is witnessed chronologically, mixing the manic pie-fight sensibility of Sennett’s Keystone hits with the lesser-known, more sophisticated parlor-room comedy of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew, while legendary black vaudevillian Bert Williams plies his popular trade in a Biograph short from 1916. Continue reading
One of the basics about clown performances that often bet overlooked is the need for warm up exercises beforehand, and cool down exercises afterward. Athletes know about the need for both warm up and cool down exercises – and we don’t typically think of ourselves as athletes, but a clown performance can be just as physically demanding. When clowning, we tend to use muscles that we forgot that we had—and those muscles tend to remind us of that fact afterwards. In addition, there tends to be a lot of bending, stooping down to the children’s height, etc.—and if our muscles aren’t ready for that, they’ll hurt afterward. Continue reading
I’ve been a long-time fan of the original Twilight Zone series – this episode is an excellent example of why. Something that Rod Serling tended to do multiple times throughout the series was to take a comedian/clown, and puts him in a unusual, dramatic role, to great result. The first time that he did this was with Ed Wynn in the second episode for the Twilight Zone season 1,One for the Angels, who puts in a wonderful performance.
As Mr. Serling narrated at the beginning of the episode, “Street scene: summer. The present. Man on a sidewalk named Lew Bookman, age sixtyish. Occupation: pitchman. Lew Bookman, a fixture of the summer, a rather minor component to a hot July, a nondescript, commonplace little man whose life is a treadmill built out of sidewalks. In just a moment, Lew Bookman will have to concern himself with survival, because as of three o’clock this hot July afternoon he’ll be stalked by Mr. Death.” Continue reading
The Ultimate Balloon Book: 46 projects to Blow Up, Bend & Twist, by Shar Levine & Michael Ouchi
The Ultimate Balloon Book: 46 Projects is a very good book, which lives up to its’ title — it includes 64 projects, made with 1 or more balloon animals. Okay, maybe it’s not the ‘Ultimate’ balloon book, but it is very nice. In a nutshell, it combines the best elements from two other balloon animal books ‘series’ – Aaron Hsu-Flanders‘ books, which are heavy on step-by-step photographs, but short, and Captain Visual’s longer, more detailed books, which rely heavily on line art. The Ultimate Balloon Book falls in the middle of these two quite nicely. At 96 pages, it’s much longer than Hsu-Flanders’ books, but doesn’t attempt to be the one-volume encyclopedia of twisting of Captain Visual. It does include dozens of color photographs, typically showing the finished creation, as well as numerous diagrams showing the construction of each creation. It also includes a difficulty rating for each creation, from 1 (easy) to 5 (challenging). Continue reading
I’ve been a long-time fan of the original Twilight Zone series – this episode is an excellent example of why. Something that Rod Serling tended to do multiple times throughout the series was to take a comedian/clown, and puts him in a unusual, dramatic role, to great result. The first time that he did this was with Ed Wynn in the second episode for the Twilight Zone, One for the Angels. Here, he does it in The Night of the Meek with Art Carney in the role of Henry Corwin, with another wonderful performance in a wonderful story. Continue reading
For the past 3 years, my wife and I have been fortunate to clown at the Willman Industries company picnic in Cedar Grove, Wisconsin. In addition to “clowning around”, my wife spends the bulk of her time face painting the children there, while I make a lot of balloon animals. A comment that my wife made on the way home was that, “I need to learn Spanish.” Continue reading
Isaiah Edwin Leopold, known around the world as Ed Wynn, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA on November 9, 1886. As a teenager, he ran away from home and used his middle name, Edwin, as his stage name—Ed Wynn. Although he eventually became a headliner in vaudeville, his early years were less successful. At one point, he worked as an on-stage assistant to (then) comedy juggler W. C. Fields. The curmudgeonly Fields caught him “mugging” for the audience during Fields’ “Pool Room” routine and knocked him unconscious with his pool cue. Ed Wynn went on to become a headliner in vaudeville in the early-1910s, and was a star of the Ziegfeld Follies starting in 1914. In the same year he married his first wife, Hilda Keenan. Continue reading
Peggy Williams, while a speech pathology major at theUniversity of Wisconsin where her focus was on working indeaf education, thought clowning might sharpen her nonverbal communication skills. She became interested in Clown College and became the first female graduate of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circuses Clown College in 1970. Following completion of the program of study, she went on the road with The Greatest Show on Earth, distinguishing herself during her nine years of travel with the circus. In 1973, she was asked to join the teaching staff at Clown College where she assisted students in nurturing the relationship between performers and the public. Continue reading