This Rabbi is a Clown

Gellman, Marc

THIS RABBI IS A CLOWN How-and why-one rabbi plays down-for-a-day on Thanksgiving MARC GELLMAN Every year, on Thanksgiving, I leave my rabbinic duties to become a clown for Macy's. Or is it that...

...Every year, after the parade, as I wipe the white paint from my ruddy face in the cluttered make-up room, my silent musings turn to what I do on the other days, and how truly close to my work as a rabbi is my work as a clown...
...And I confess: I feel the awesome idolatrous pull of the cameras when we reach the Square...
...I was running too fast to see...
...for the rest of the three and a half miles, we belong to the streets, to the tangible people who line the route...
...Or is it that 364 days a year I leave my clown duties at Macy's to become a rabbi...
...sometimes, words get in our way...
...the sexuality was innocent, blushing...
...And no play, no spontaneity...
...The elevator takes me to the makeup room on the seventh floor...
...nature re-arranged, commercialized...
...His midrashim—for adults and for children—appear frequently in these pages...
...Children, for example, learn that their parents were also children once, and have not entirely forgotten how to be, as their parents voluntarily suspend disbelief and enter into the unfolding fantasy...
...I remember coming up to a little kid and his sister who hadn't asked me for any candy and...
...Glee unites, innocence connects...
...Thanksgiving is as close as I can come to America's heart...
...Perhaps that is why some people resist entering it...
...Those who do play reap handsome—though necessarily fleeting— rewards...
...The shared sweetness forges out of these isolated monads, each normally bent on securing his/her own private future, a community, however ephemeral...
...Even the Macy's parade, as playful as it is, is tinged by idolatry...
...Maybe because my real world is words, my craft and calling are the fashioning of words to praise God, I have chosen silence as my mode of address on this great day...
...The company clowns, by contrast, are made up by a hard-working crew of make-up artists who always seem to be on the verge of hysteria, owing to the fact that they have to make up hundreds of us in a few short hours...
...they are drawn to the crowds...
...I couldn't give every person a candy...
...Oh yes, without the balloons it would still be a parade, and even without the floats, and maybe even without the clowns—but never without the bands...
...It is the same elevator that at ground level disgorges literally hundreds of already-ready bees, elves, princes, maidens, dancers, pirates, animals—and clowns...
...I think the crowd ate the kids in its rush to get to the candy...
...That is the truth of parades...
...There is something bizarre about a grown person in a ridiculous costume and painted face coming over to make chit-chat...
...Today, assimilation is not so odious...
...I was ready to quit and go back to being a rabbi (where you sort of expect the curses...
...My first clown year, 1979,1 was so insecure and excited and nervous I thought the red, white and blue polka dots of my costume would have a yellow streak down the leg...
...I remember the look on the face of the 8th Avenue drunk as he staggered out of his nightly boozery to a street teeming with bees and elves and Marc Gellman, a moment contributing editor, is rabbi of Temple Beth To-rah in Dix Hills, New York...
...Here it is overblown, siliconed, exploitive, another spectator sport...
...The harvest is in, and though I felt nature during Sukkot, the ancient grain harvest of Eretz Yisrael does not touch me as deeply as the arrival of the last pumpkins and squash of this good land...
...The most colorful flowers, the most perfect teeth, smiles and bodies...
...They reflect the best spirit of the amateur clown...
...Some of these— the real clowns—care about the people in the gutters and on the sidewalks, but most are content to walk down the middle of the street on display...
...I cannot, for they are the spiritual engine of the parade...
...The second clown-torah I learned is that you don't need words...
...I leave home at dawn on Thanksgiving Day in order to reach Herald Square by 7 a.m...
...Those of you who've not had the good fortune to attend an actual parade, but think you've seen it on television, should know that there are actually two Macy's parades, one for TV, one for the streets of New York...
...It seeks only, and briefly, to transform the appearance of things, not their substance, and that is why it can be used to glorify this commercial enterprise, that fascist leader, any celebrity...
...Joy and love and thankfulness are the offerings in each...
...Mostly clowns, hundreds of clowns, thousands of clowns, busloads of clowns, trainloads of clowns, constellations of clowns...
...The difference, of course, is that the world of fantasy is a world of play, while the real world is a world of work...
...The roads are quiet with the peace of one of America's few true rest days...
...Here differences in status are entirely irrelevant...
...I have never coveted Christmas trees or Easter eggs, but the true secular holidays of America (well, not quite secular, but non-Christian), of which Thanksgiving is the truest, have always embraced me, lifted me to another place—a place not at all unlike the holy places my Judaism takes me...
...No tights can adequately warm their limbs in the blustery grey winds of a New York November...
...But the one lacks a moral dimension...
...The third clown-torah is that clowns are cooperative, not competitive...
...all these disturb me...
...It's artificial, stage-managed, but that's only one block's worth...
...The clowns say, "Enter this sweet world, stay a while...
...I cajole and entreat people who only come to watch, encourage them to become participants, whether in the holy task of doing God's work...
...That's the only way to bring the parade to the millions around the country, who once included little Marc Gellman in Milwaukee...
...The first thing I learned about clowning is that love is the only trick you need...
...By sheer coincidence, a guy named Bill—from Buffalo—has made me up for the last three years...
...In the work world, the ironclad law of the marketplace rules all: That which has economic worth is rewarded, that which does not is not...
...I have learned more about clowning each of the three years I've clowned in the Macy's parade...
...This is a world in which there are no losers, no victims...
...The face of a clown is painted to reveal itself...
...Maybe it will take her a while, but I know she'll come to understand that if she does slip, even for a moment, there will be a clown nearby to make it all right, to make everything wonderful...
...Our world cannot, I think, accommodate such disparate visions...
...I suspect, though, that she will mainly be concerned with not falling off the turkey...
...those I neglected cursed me loudly...
...The 8th Avenue drunk is a loser in that world...
...Even though it is her first parade, I want her to understand everything, to be at one with the spirit of the parade...
...instead of make-believe, there is hype, Southern California flowers and glamour and glitz...
...There, each floral extravaganza is really a moving billboard for some company or municipality...
...The forgetting is the reason for what I am about to tell you...
...Most of the company clowns are drawn from Macy's employees and their families...
...Our tradition teaches that the messianic age will be one that is "entirely Shabbat...
...So now I share with you enough of my clown-torah to get you started down your own streets...
...The crowd, integral to that point, is replaced by cables and cameras and lights...
...My ruminations are interrupted by the sight of Herald Square at dawn...
...At times, I forget...
...But then, as I settled into the march with nothing left to give, I came to realize that a friendly smile and handshake were better than a bagful of candy bars...
...I am older and must pace myself, but Brent—and Kim and Betsy, his sisters—are always running from kid to kid...
...But I am wrong about that, and every Thanksgiving I need to remind myself of the difference between the world of fantasy and the real world...
...Brent is an indefatigable clown...
...they need to cling to their defeats, they fear the pain of re-entering reality after the excursion into play...
...In haste, I grabbed a bag full of candies available that year for clowns to pass out to the crowd...
...Once upon a time, in small-town America, befpre the homecoming football game, the girls would stuff kleenex into wireforms...
...words are an intrusion, unsuited to the fleeting encounter at the edge of a parade, less honest than touch...
...But on this day, just a few blocks away and over the rainbow, the world of play is given dominion...
...Pasadena is the real made artificial...
...It is only in a parade that a marching band is fully at home...
...Aside from the clowns, it is these high school kids (mostly) tootling their homs, shaking their pom-poms and banging their drums who most enjoy the parade...
...clowns...
...Still, along the serious way to the messianic age, the Macy's parade is a pleasant and even meaningful way-station, at its best even a bit of a foretaste, like Shabbat an advertisement of things and feelings and pleasures to come...
...I, too, have problems reconciling the happy revelry of the parade and the slurry perceptions of the drunk...
...Ach, how much Thanksgiving has become a part of me...
...In short, no clowns...
...dumping a load of Hershey bars on their laps...
...Many "acts" appear only in Herald Square for the VIPs and others gathered there before the cameras...
...Have I left out the bands...
...We read that when Abraham went up to the mountain to bind Isaac, "vayelchu shneihem yachdav, they walked together (in silence...
...my gift of love was all I needed because it was all they wanted...
...Still, they march and smile and shiver— while the Rockettes wait in a heated trailer at Macy's for their two-minute TV stint in the cold...
...I want, how I want, to help people to become more than they are, to reach out and touch another realm, a different ordering of time and space, to invite them to islands of love and of joy, to the possibility of streets transformed, and, for a bit, lives...
...And it's no fun to be a cursed clown...
...Take my friend, Brent Treiger, whose father, Ray Treiger, is a Macy's executive and started me in this one-day-a-year career...
...In Pasadena, the floats are judged, the entire parade is a competition...
...These acts do not walk the length of the parade, though the electronic millions wouldn't know it...
...People liked me just for my being a clown...
...The kind of innocence that is absent from America's other great parade, the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena...
...His mitzvot, here on earth or in the fantasy play of America's time of thanksgiving and blessing...
...No, it's not nice to curse a clown...
...This year, my daughter will ride on the Turkey Float, the first and oldest float in the parade...
...On the cold Thanksgiving days, I feel for the pom-pom girls and the majorettes...
...In the one, frogs and dogs as big as apartment houses float in the sky...
...The clowns are the ushers into the fantasy world that is streaming down the street...
...The star astride the turkey, the floats that celebrate Broadway shows, the growing emphasis on celebrities, Santa at the end of the parade, as if Thanksgiving were not in itself enough, as if it needed to be made into a station on the way to Christmas in order to be valid...
...here levels of sophistication do not matter...
...A fantasy about rabbis and clowns, about the messiah and turkeys...
...We clown together, we encourage and cajole the people together...
...Here, the floats are for joy and for laughter rather than for victory, and it is, of course, the clowns who present the floats, circling them and offering them all along the parade route...
...Not so here...
...In both, I offer nothing that can be weighed or wrapped or sold...
...By now he knows my face, knows even that I don't need a false nose...
...Clowns, the essential ingredient of the Macy's parade, the capillaries who flit in its open spaces and serve as the theme for its endless variations, who reach out from the massive floats and connect to the people on the street, the watchers, touching their hands, communicating love, playfulness, tenderness, making participants of spectators...
...I know that because when they are not playing they are smiling...
...Floodlights for the silent television cameras bathe the square in intense blue-white light that highlights small clusters of people, all heading for Macy's side entrance, each to be transformed by the day and its work...
...in the other, no less fantastically, the wolf and the lamb will lie down together...
...I wouldn't be surprised if he has since become a curbstone preacher against the evils of drink...
...Their sound is perfectly tuned to the streets—too loud in an auditorium, not loud enough in a football stadium...
...I like that—but I wouldn't mind just a touch—maybe, say, once a year—of Thanksgiving as well...
...All, children and adults, share this candy for the spirit, this reminder that joy and gladness need not be postponed for the millenium, but can be tasted even now...
...The parade has its share of soloist clowns who bring their own makeup, who walk the route alone...
...But I'd hardly walked five blocks when the harrassment of parents and children demanding candy from me became just too much to bear...
...Lest there be any doubt about this last: yes, I do understand the difference between the fantasy world of the Macy's parade and the fantasy world of my faith—the messianic age...

Vol. 8 • November 1983 • No. 10


 
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