Clowning as an aid to holy ritual and service
On the darkened stage, a white-faced clown with bulbous nose, orange woolen wig and baggy red-and-white costume sits at a table reading a large book marked Bible. He eats from a box of popcorn as big as a milk crate. Beside him two mimes in blue leotards do their silent best to act starved. When the clown notices, he merely makes the sign of the cross and calmly resumes reading—and eating. Now a large banner unfurls upstage saying FEED THE HUNGRY! At last the clown gets the message and hands small bags of popcorn to the mimes. They give the bags to two members of the audience, with gestures to indicate that each is to put a piece of popcorn into the mouth of his neighbor and embrace him, then pass on the bag so the neighbor can do the same. Soon the audience of 200, nearly all dressed as clowns, is busy munching and embracing.
The audience has just completed a two-mile parade through the Garden District of New Orleans, to the beat of 63 Dixieland tunes belted out by the ten-piece Olympia Brass Band. Children gawked and grownups dropped their weekend chores to watch. One woman clown clad in green and white greeted a bemused bystander with a blue balloon and a smacking kiss on the cheek. Another clown in a striped T shirt and psychedelic wig paused from time to time to give lawnmowers, car windshields, even a motorcycle policeman's helmet a few flicks with his bright red feather duster. Along the way, the clowns stopped off at two hospitals, a mental institution and a nursing home, where they dispensed balloons and hugs to sad-eyed children and old people.
It was not a bizarre come-on for Barnum & Bailey. Not at all. The 200 clowns were a congregation. The popcorn pass-along was part of a two-hour Christian Communion service conducted entirely in mime and gesture by the Rev. Floyd Shaffer, the red-and-white clown, who is really a Lutheran minister from Roseville, Mich. Both services and parades were among the highlights of a weeklong workshop on the use of clowning, mime, puppetry and dance in Christian worship and ministry that attracted some 350 people to the campus of New Orleans' Loyola University. More than 400 attended a second gathering earlier this month in Ithaca, N.Y. The participants spent their time learning how to juggle (concentration is more important than coordination), sew costumes and master the techniques of clown makeup (lots of powder after applying each color prevents smears). They also studied ventriloquism and went to serious lectures by the leading clerical exponents of Christian clowning. "We estimate that about 20% of the participants are ministers or priests," says Tom Nankervis, director of the United Methodist Church's Office of Communication Education, one of the agencies sponsoring the workshop. "And nearly all the people here are very active in their church."