Clowns of Enchantment, Part II
Mike Smith
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Our three-part exploration of the horror of New Mexico's nascent clowns continues.
(To read part one, click here.)
With winter finished in New Mexico, very little remains to keep the clowns indoors.
They seem to sense the warming temperatures, to hear the increase in foot traffic, and to find excitement in the fear and annoyance of our state’s largely non-clown population.
In Artesia, in eastern New Mexico, Shriner clown “Pa Pal” emerged from a winter of anonymity, carrying sacks of salable onions, with his actions no doubt soundtracked in his own mind by the eerie strains of an off-key calliope.
In Capitan, in southeastern New Mexico, two members of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Posse milled about during a festival, their faces smeared with demonically fixed grins, their gloved hands waggling floppy stuffed bears at passersby.
And in Truth or Consequences, in south-central New Mexico’s Sierra County, an ominous figure made an appearance at the 2008 Truth or Consequences Fiesta, an annual celebration that began in 1950 when the town first changed its name from Hot Springs.
Photographs of the May 2, 3, and 4, 2008 event—printed in the May 7 Truth or Consequences Herald—depict a festive happening, with costumed event-goers, some sort of bonnet competition, women dancing to live music, a high school band enlivening a parade, and a teenage boy eying a pretty cheerleader as she throws a ball at a policeman in a dunk tank.
The fiesta’s official website, TorCFiesta.com, adds accounts of outdoor karaoke, on Friday, May 2. It tells of the parade, a motorcycle rodeo, an office chair race, the dunking booth, a duck race, stilt walkers in giant puppet heads, live music (including legendary singer-songwriter Dan Bern, who later made some really hip paintings of the town), a boat race on Elephant Butte Reservoir, and a rodeo, on Saturday, May 3. And it continued with more of the same, on Sunday, May 4.
Overall, the Herald's photos and the event’s website suggest the fiesta was a happy one, a fun one. They imply that most of the people who attended had a genuinely good time.
But the fiesta had a darker side as well—a side with a painted-on grin, a side that all the worried looks of all its attendants could do nothing to erase.
No matter how much spirit the Hot Springs High Tiger Marching Band played with during the Saturday morning parade, the knowledge must have loomed almost tangibly that that afternoon a clown—a rodeo clown—would come out to the Sheriff’s Posse Arena, just east of the city limits, to perform goofy antics involving horses, bulls, sheep, a greased pig, and some kind of yellow pom-poms.
No matter how hard the New World Drummers played that Saturday night, there was still the likelihood of there being someone in the very crowd they were playing to who had spent his afternoon hiding under face paint and sunglasses, his neck swathed in a flag bandanna, his legs half-concealed in a miniskirt.
No matter how much the fiesta-goers must have tried not to dwell on the thought, the possibility must have always been in the backs of their minds that they might run into this clown at any time, without warning. He had been at both rodeos—so why not at the refreshment stands? In line for the bathroom? Or walking through a parking lot?
At any moment, someone might have thought, he could step out from behind a sign, and pull a coin from my ear. No, wait... Maybe he’s not that kind of clown. Or is he? Oh, I hope he's not....
The tension must have been unbearable.
The clown in question was Wyoming-based professional rodeo clown Timber Tuckness, a nationally-known traveling entertainer, with a seriously impressive career as a Hollywood stunt man and bullfighting champion. On both May 3 and 4, at the arena near Truth or Consequences, Tuckness performed as part of the two days of the Fiesta Rodeo.
Perhaps some of the people in attendance—those, of course, with coulrophobia, a.k.a. fear of clowns, or just that large majority of Americans who tend to feel uneasy around adult men wearing lots of makeup—felt a bit more accepting of watching a rodeo clown such as Tuckness than they would of sitting through the bike-horn-and-seltzer-bottle antics of the more conventional sort.
This tendency to be more willing to endure this sort of clown’s performances might be explained at least in part because, for one, rodeo clowns at least do some brave and dangerous stunts and, for another, the experience of watching a rodeo clown carries with it the implicit possibility of seeing a clown gored by a bull, or trampled by an angry steer, or dragged by one foot back and forth across an arena behind a panicking horse.
This admittedly less-than-newsy series continues and concludes here.
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