|
He smiles like a clown. His whole face changes -- the lines all change directions, his eyes widen and the corners of his mouth nearly reach his ears. You wonder if that smile is part of an hereditary Big Top demeanor; if, sometime a few generations back, his ancestors ran away to the circus because their huge, bulbous feet could only be comfortable in those really big shoes.
Joshua Jay Waffleman used to be an architect in New York City. But the world of blueprints and drafting couldn't contain his aspirations forever. In the early '70s, Waffleman came to the Berkshires on an architectural project. He liked rural life so much he just couldn't leave. Finally, after more architectural jobs, he ended up in a rustic house out in the woods of New Salem and gave up work as a full-time architect. So that he has time for artistic pursuits, Waffleman has basically made ends meet by living on the cheap, sometimes renting out his own house, designing houses for people and making some money as a performer.
Even so, Waffleman's place is quite a pad. A four-foot toy car hangs from the ceiling beside an enormous mirror ball; a Statue of Liberty, inside a bird cage, holds an orange electric torch. Old signs and show bills lie aslant in corners; a skeleton wearing a placard--"Is this what democracy looks like?"--hangs by the neck. It's a rustic cabin gone berserk, the closet at the back of the Big Top turned out, literally spilling its skeletons into the room.
Waffleman, known primarily as Joshua Jay Waffles, but a.k.a. J. J. Waffles, Waffles T. Clown, J. J. Jester, Cousin Sammy, Fat Cat -- the list goes on -- inhabits this three-ring retreat to take his convictions about American culture to their logical conclusion.
"I'm attempting to walk a talk ... How do you survive in a culture that is so materialistic and governed by the money imperative and [still] be a free spirit?" Waffles said.
His answer is to cut down on expenses like crazy so that having less can still mean having enough -- "[It's] the old Benjamin Franklin thing, 'a penny saved is a penny earned,' that, multiplied 10 million billion times." Somehow that notion doesn't sound all that crazy in the Pioneer Valley, especially in the vibrant presence of this age-defying 60-year-old mad scientist of the red nose and big shoes world.
It takes more than wanting a career change to uproot a life the way Waffles has done, leaving behind family and friends in New York for something very different, not to mention financially difficult. The depth of the convictions that brought him here becomes clear when Waffles talks clowning.
Sure, clowns are funny guys who wedge into tiny cars and slam each other with over-sized props. But that's only one limited incarnation of the clown as Waffles sees things. He ties the clown in with old-fashioned funny guys like royal jesters and storybook tricksters whose roles are seldom purely laughter; think Wavy Gravy meets Abbie Hoffman, not just Bozo.
After all, as Waffles said, it was the jester who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes. Only the jester could do it and keep his head on his shoulders, and that's an important thing. The clown is there to make us laugh, but make us laugh at ourselves, at our sacred notions and venerable traditions and to show us what we might not otherwise admit.
Waffles puts it this way in his manifesto, called My Job is "Clown": "The clown parodies the stated norms and values of society, their ridiculous side, their pretension to certainty. The clown shows the absurdity of a patriotism that breeds war or the ambition that motivates presidents. ... And finally, the clown enacts acceptance of the human condition, all of it, the absurdity, the grotesqueness, the suffering, the tragedy. The clown's acceptance is open-hearted, stepping out of the ordinary sequence of events and into the transitional space of illusion ... ."
It's high-flown rhetoric, but it's also an adept description of just what happens when he dons the white makeup and instigates laughter. And Waffles doesn't just believe in the words of his philosophy as an abstraction; he puts his wide definition of clowning into practice in a big way.
Waffles the Clown was born after Waffleman opened a waffle stand in Greenfield in the late '70s. The kids needed entertaining while their waffles cooked, and Waffleman, not yet officially a clown, was happy to entertain them with songs, puppet shows and stories. Before long, he was clowning to promote good nutrition for the kids in school as well. The name Waffles could hardly be avoided.
His early act, a more educational variety of clowning, included a surefire hit: He helped kids design their own playgrounds. It was the perfect meeting of his architecture and his clowning, the sort of convergence of mental disciplines that Waffles revels in.
Waffles still has a big repertoire of purely entertaining antics which he performs all over western Massachusetts at parades, fairs, parties and shindigs of all description. In one routine, he causes quite the stir by sitting around forlorn with a butterfly net but, alas, without a buttefly in sight. Inevitably, a kid or three has to inquire about his sadness. Before long, the kids have volunteered to be butterflies and Waffles chases them around madly, trying to snare a few with his net.
Sometimes Waffles offers kids a face-wash for a nickel, and through his madcap expansion of the standard washcloth scrub that kids hate, he hoodwinks his willing victims into putting on a showercap and submitting to a ridiculous but thorough cleaning.
But there are many more characters in Waffleman's bag of tricks, characters who aren't afraid to unsettle audiences. It often takes the form of what Waffleman calls "guerilla clowning," a subversive form of chicanery that throws audiences, witting or unwitting, into uncertain territory, stuck, just as his definition of clowning says, in the moment of pure emotional response. At its most extreme and least conventional, that kind of clowning has gotten Waffles into some pretty odd situations.
Once, he trimmed his long hair to a buzz cut, donned a suit and conned his way into what he describes as a "weapons bazaar," a defense-related conference in Boston. Waffles explained what happened when he, armed with a zucchini, made it all the way to the podium: "The person at the podium backed off. I took over the mic, held up the zucchini, greeted the people, and I had a minute and a half, two minutes before security grabbed me."
His clownly message? "Zukes, not nukes."
In 1993, Waffles and some other protestors parked a school bus across the path of a truck carrying a generator from the Yankee Rowe nuclear plant in Rowe, Mass. on its way to a burial site in South Carolina. He explained to police that he had run out of gas, lost the keys, and accidentally handcuffed himself to the door of the bus. One can only figure this was suspicious to the police, since Waffles was in full clown regalia.
It's that kind of provocation that has earned Waffles his fair share of disorderly conduct charges (exactly what resulted from the school bus incident). He sees himself as a cheerleader of sorts, too, offering levity and a dose of courage to picketers. While lifting spirits at a 1986 protest against nuclear submarines in New London, Conn., Waffles delivered a one-two punch -- he was arrested, this time for pulling out a toy popgun, but his sentence of 100 hours of community service enabled him to go to schools in his clown suit and talk to kids about war toys, which he strongly opposes.
Waffles so opposes war toys, in fact, that convincing kids to think about what their missiles, planes and guns mean was his main cause for a while -- he would set up his waffle stand and offer to give kids a free waffle in exchange for their violent toys. Though the G.I. Joe fanbase was frequently unwilling to give up its heroes, Waffles considered himself victorious if he got the kids to think about what their toys represented.
He also helped them transform their war toys into something non-violent with a little artful rearranging and decorating. It was just that kind of transforming of toys that got Waffles into one of his current projects.
Just out from the main house, Waffles has what he calls his studio, a sizeable outbuilding that he designed and built. It's a slightly off-kilter orchestration of wooden beams and rounded windows, and despite being largely a storage building, the interior is lofty and cozy, with plenty of light. And light is in order, because it is here that much of Waffles' work takes place, in what seems an awful lot like Santa's workshop.
Atop several plain and unpainted wooden tables, the toys reign supreme. Not just a toy here and there, but the kind of excess that the greediest kid could only dimly comprehend. Dolls, eyes wide, lie scattered in piles of plastic limbs; clowns cavort atop a huge toy tank; doodads, geegaws, bric-a-brac, things that whir and honk and beep, they're all here. And Waffles shows off what lurks beneath the tables -- an EBay dealer's dream, bin after bin of brightly colored plastic. Toy nirvana.
Working intuitively with this overflow of toys, Waffles assembles sculptures, one of his primary current occupations. The sculptures gradually coalesce, islands of order in the midst of chaos. Waffles calls this sculpture series Messages from the Toy Box.
These are not subtle works of art. This is, after all, an extension of the clowning instinct, not an MFA thesis exhibition. In one, a curvaceous doll rides a huge shiny bullet (actually an Avon after-shave container). In another, a doll holding a tiny globe perches atop a slide. Below the slide is a clear, locked box with a toy grenade inside.
Obvious, perhaps, but who cares when it's such exuberant fun? These sculptures are, like the flamboyant clown himself, a good time. You can marvel at the insanity and excess and glaring colors, not just receive a message. That can't be all bad: It's been a while since the message of the left has been delivered with fun. It's been nought but despair for years, and the gloom is only growing.
Waffles is having a great time assembling these sculptures, and seems unconcerned about whether they qualify as high art, political art, clown props or whatever. It's just another vehicle for saying what must be said and holding up the funhouse mirror to those who dare to enter the midway. Waffles is happy to have another outlet for his message in the post-Sept. 11 world.
When your business is provocation, surprise and civil disobedience, it makes sense that last year's terrorist attacks would change your perspective.
"When I clown, it usually triggers a lot of emotions both ways," said Waffles. "It inspires people, but it also triggers them in an angry sense. I realized that triggering people in an angry sense would put my life on the line." The unfortunate example of the shooting of environmental activist Robert Woodward in Brattleboro in late 2001 ("No Asylum," Dec. 13, 2001) confirmed to Waffles that his concerns were justified.
Some of Waffles' acts of clowning could indeed get him in a lot of trouble -- blocking the route of nuclear waste in transit, even in protest, might well fall within Attorney General John Ashcroft's vague definition of terrorism, and might result in more than a disorderly conduct charge these days.
So what's a clown to do? Waffles was pragmatic about the situation. For now, he's foregoing the edgier limits of his clowning entirely, though he still performs and still talks about his concerns, choosing his venues carefully.
Instead, he's focused all his energy in new, primarily visual directions. In addition to developing a one-man performance for art galleries and displaying his toy sculptures, Waffles is producing his own line of postcards.
Waffles points out that postcards are apparently the only sort of mail that makes it to the White House anymore, what with last fall's occurrences of anthrax powder in envelopes. What's more, they have visual impact on the front, and room for a succinct political message on the back.
To make his cards, he started with an old-fashioned character we all know: Yankee Doodle.
"'Yankee' was a term used by the native indigenous people -- 'Indians' -- who were describing the early settlers. And then 'Doodle' or 'doodler' was a citizen who would travel around the colonies fixing things," Waffles said. "And while they were travelling around fixing things, they would bring the news of different locales." He explained that early cartoonists used the character as a rabble rouser and an issue-maker, a trend that continued till the mid-19th century.
Waffles took the revolutionary elements of that well-known character and incorporated them into his own striped-pants troublemaker, Cousin Sammy: "[He] reflects the fact that we're all cousins together, and our uncle, Uncle Sam, is sort of a relative. Dysfunctional, but still a relative."
Waffles sees Cousin Sammy as just the fellow to raise awareness of something he thinks is readily observable but largely ignored: when Uncle Sam goes to war, the rich benefit, the poor get a bum deal, and most of us are caught in the middle of it all, not quite given a raw deal, but certainly not helped. Cousin Sammy doesn't claim to have a ready answer to that situation, but he thinks we should all at least be aware of it.
It may not be an answer per se, but Waffles wields a mighty power in response: "If I as a clown can pull [the politicians'] pants down and have everyone laugh at them, at least we'd have a good joke on the way out."
Waffles says similar things about why he tries to transport new views about our cultural and political dilemmas into people's heads: "People begin to think that there's no solution. That's not true. The solution is in creativity ... I say this all the time -- everyone is an artist."
Waffles clearly has no lack of ability in the realm of visual impact, but the postcard project demanded more than pencil and paper; he had to hire a photographer and a graphic designer to make his visions tangible. Waffles, who usually performs solo, described the long process of collaboratively making the scenes a tangible reality as painstaking -- "like passing a kidney stone!" Now that the process is complete, though, he has a set of images with which to continue his provocations without putting his well-being on the line.
Cousin Sammy is a fearless provocateur, mocking American arrogance and quite literally airing the dirty laundry -- in one image, Sammy stands beside an old-fashioned washing machine with a box of his favorite detergent, "Denial." The Stars and Stripes hang out of the top, dripping blood. Sammy's head is always framed by a TV set, and his happy-go-lucky face sets up a strange counterpart to his disturbing imagery.
Perhaps the strongest stirring of the pot occurs in Sammy's image which appears at first to be only bald-faced mockery: He holds a flag and a 40-ounce Bud Light and he straddles an enormous and entirely phallic missile. The back explains that Sammy is reflecting "the image of the USA held worldwide. A 'compulsive power addict' determined to dominate and control the global community with threats and violence. Our militarism has gone beyond self defense. Open your eyes and see!"
Most of Cousin Sammy's provocations, but particularly this one, raise a similar issue: Is this kind of move effective at convincing those with more conservative views to reconsider their opinions? It's the same issue raised by many left-wing activists: How can someone who wants to make people aware of bad things overcome the negative reaction raised by airing the dirty laundry in the first place? Often, the result is entrenchment of already-held views, a defensive reaction to unpleasantness -- the very source of Waffles' concern for his own safety. Of course, Waffles gets to them before they're calcified, bringing softer-toned but no less important messages to children.
That defensive reaction may also mean that the political message of Waffleman, Waffles and Cousin Sammy is most effective when he plays cheerleader to those already at the leftward end of the political spectrum. Not necessarily a bad thing these days, when the left has largely become a humourless place, populated by the frustrated and disenfrachised, a beleaguered lot who could use the motivation of a Waffles' face-changing clown smile. Everything else is gravy. Gravy, or at least waffles.
What does the future hold for this red-nosed defender of justice? Current plans include a major bookstore tour -- across the country and into Mexico in an old bus -- to support his new postcards (available at www.products4allages.com as well), forays into the straight-laced art world with toy sculptures, and of course, plenty of old-fashioned clowning.
Waffles sees his mission as a big one, and he sees it clearly. "A clown hero for the 21st century?! Can this be?!"
Then that enormous clown smile returns. "I think it can be."
Copyright 2002, 2007, New Mass Media. All Rights Reserved.
Home Page
|
