Quaking in Place

Quaking in Place

By Charles E. Kraus

Seattle ---   I moved to the west coast just about 45 years ago.   When I think of New York, I envision the city as it existed in 1970.  In those days, if you wanted to encourage someone to talk about themselves, you said, “what’s shaking?”

Recently, The New Yorker Magazine, of all publications, told us what’s shaking here in Seattle.   According to Kathryn Shultz’s article, The Really Big One, what’s shaking, or will be soon, is a long stretch of California, Oregon and Washington coast, the Cascadia subduction zone.  She singles out Portland and Seattle for special deconstructability.

Shultz’s piece cannot be dismissed as sensationalism.  It is published in a magazine that fact checks and verifies everything from commas to continental drift.  It is not only a respected magazine, it is evidently a very well read one.  More than a dozen people, folks I met in Seattle, Portland, LA, people I spoke with from New York, Baltimore and Texas, have brought up the quake story.  Some ask, ‘so, what are you going to do?’  It’s a reasonable question, but not an easy one to answer.

Obviously, individual responses to news that staying put just might be lethal, is going to vary depending upon a person’s situation.  Single, married, employed, home owner, parent, elderly.  Part of a community, someone who’s spent a lifetime perfecting a house, a business, a reputation.  If I were 25, just getting a foothold on my future, I’d move that future to higher less potentially unstable ground.  Such a decision would be prudent.  At that age, you have less stuff, fewer commitments, and a belief in nice long tomorrows.

My wife and I are 70, or close to it.  Our home is literally on a hill.   It is unlikely that a tsunami will wreak havoc on the property.  It’s a wood frame house, well anchored, and though it might just ride out a 9+  Big One, we’d have to be home to benefit from any potential protection.  Not downtown.  Not by the harbor, not visiting in Portland, shopping in Edmonds.  Not frequenting any of the places that comprise our Seattle lives.   Now that I think about it, we are pretty close to Lake Washington, a mighty body of water.  Will it jump the shoreline?  And what would that look like?  Maybe we shouldn’t picnic down by the lake.

Evidently, many of the facts that Shultz reports are not newly minted.  Though I’d never read ­about subduction zones, seismologists are familiar with the concept, and with Pacific Northwest’s unstable situation.  OK, so why did it take a New Yorker article to bring the topic to the local dinner table discussion circuit?

Realtors tell you property value is all about location.  Evidently, so do seismologists.  It turns out that when you are trying to decide if you should move because the kids are about to enter school and you want to find a “good” school district, you need to think about more than test scores.   Have you ever even discussed earthquakes with your kids?

Years ago, when Boeing found itself in bad times, people left this city without saying goodbye.  Houses were abandoned, personal property stacked at the curb.  Leaving is an option.  It’s been done.  I suppose the question becomes, is staying an option?  And if we stick around, are we merely waiting for the inevitable?  Wondering if tonight, or next month, or perhaps not for a hundred years, this place is going to experience a massive adjustment.

Do we turn our backs on reality, just go on living our lives, heads in the sand, magical thinking a group process.  Or will our city and state governments declare a state of potential emergency, install the early warning systems, move schools to higher ground, keep the conversation going.  Will the public, you and I, treat the situation as anything more than a passing headline?   What’s shaking?

The Theory of Early Silliness Education

The Theory of Early Silliness Education
By Charles Kraus


I've been performing comedy routines for children since .. oh, let's not go back prior to 1957.   Initially, I was a kid magician attempting to project a very serious attitude.  I wanted audiences to take me in ernest --  Boy Wonder and all.  But it turned out, I was funny, so I went with it. Eleven thousand shows latter, I'm still performing.

People often ask if audiences -- meaning the kids -- have changed, if children laugh at different things.  My response is that what was funny "then" is funny now.

Entertainers, philosophers, scientists, psychologists, essayists -- Aristotle to Steve Allen, (from A to A) -- have all taken stabs explaining "funny."  Their conclusions are more complex than mine.  If it makes you laugh, it's funny -- that's mine.

Round about 1958, there was a gag in my routine where I tried to 'magically' link two solid steel 18" rings together -- stop me if you've seen this -- and by "mistake," one of the rings fastened itself to my suspenders.  Being twelve, I looked quite out of place in my boy-sized tux, more like a short head waiter than a child magician.  Freed from the right suspender, the ring ended up stuck on the left suspender.   My audiences were composed of five and six year olds.  They loved the foolishness.

Laughing and pointing, the boys and girls found my unfortunate situation hysterical.  The kids were laughing at a classic comic moment -- when a person who thinks he knows what he's doing gets himself into harmless trouble.  From time to time, I dust off the old rings and put this routine back into my act.  I've embellished it -- after the suspenders, the ring now gets linked to my wristwatch. Brings down the house.

Kids like it best if the person who mistakenly proceeds against his own interests happens to be an adult, perhaps an authority figure. There is an unspoken agreement between the entertainer and the audience -- comedy situations are not dangerous. Odd behavior and absurd situations don't lead to real-world consequences.  There is no humor in a slip and fall routine if the fallee bleeds.

Audience's love it when I'm baffled by something and the solution is obvious to everyone but me.   They chuckle if a word has two meanings and I'm operating with the wrong definition.  And mostly, they laugh if I am about to get myself into a silly jam.  Anticipation can be very humorous.

More and more young children are being exposed to foreign language immersion classes.  There is some evidence that introducing dual fluency early on sets up high end brain patterns that are uniquely formed at this stage of development.  I hereby submit my early silliness education theory.  Learning to laugh when you are a toddler sets up brain patterns that will upgrade the quality of your entire life. They will help you cope, teach you to see the big picture, and produce endless joyful interactions.

Getting the joke feels good.  When I perform at bedside in a hospital, my puppet begins speaking with the child long before I do.  "Listen, I'll tell you why I'm here," Biscuit The Dog Puppet says to the kid.  "You're a doctor, right? And I happen to have a head ache in my tummy ... once I had a tummy ache in my head instead.  Should I eat chocolate pot pie, or do you think that'll make me cry?"

Somewhere during Biscuit's soliloquy, we can expect a little gleam to appear in the child's eyes. Sickness has been momentarily subdued, crowded out by an attack of funny.

If you've ever looked into someone's eyes to sharing a joke -- communicating soul to soul, you know certain joyful interactions are spiritual.  Helping a child to realize he or she has the ability to experience delight in this very natural way opens a door to options that will come in handy.

Even the most enlightened people fall back again and again into stereotyping others.  Color, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, accent, regional bias, financial or educational stigmas.  But fill a room with every variety of individual, then introduce an outrageously funny joke.  Not political.  Not intellectual. Something basic to the human condition.  For a moment, but with traces that last forever, everybody is infected by the humor bug, everyone is connected.

I ask Bones The Dog Puppet if he can count, and he tells me he can count all the way to one.   "Of course," he admits, sometimes he forgets how to do that.  "You forget how to count to one?"  "Yep, so I skip it and just do two."

That joke worked both before and after New Math.

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Watch Charles The Clown videos online at charlestheclownvideos.com

BY A SHADOW

BY A SHADOW

By Charles Kraus

It is possible to find the view inconsequential, when the next mountain is a problem that reaches beyond the sky.

Even in the bright light, this peak of burden casts a shadow.  And so we are sad, and we do not bother looking out from picture windows.  Some mountains can not be climbed, or moved, or circumvented.  Some are walls, cages, barriers of intensity standing as tombstones, marking our place in the story.

Into this, see a rabbit -- swift, surefooted, small, unimposing.  It rushes forth, fighting its way past troubles that would still some of us.  Under.  Over.  Around.  He does not know the trip is impossible.  He carries my lament in the quickness of his heart.  

I am here, beneath tomorrow, awaiting my cue, poised on a hill, the sun ablaze, the breeze a chorus, the view a dream dashed by a shadow which is the sum of my future, until now.  Listening for the call of a rabbit who races infinity.

Heaven Application / short form

Heaven Application /  short form

By Charles E. Kraus

1.  Why do you want to become a member of our community?

2.  Names of three references (please, no relatives).

3.  Your Good Works history (those of the Jewish persuasion may substitute Mitzvah history).

4.   Religious affiliation(s) (those of the Humanistic persuasion may respond: Ethical Culture,      

      Agnostic, Atheist, Deist or recovering Scientologist ).

5.   Do you have a fear of heights?

6.   Will you be staying with family members?

7.   Do you sing?

8.   Name your favorite author.

9.   Will you be joining a support group, and if so, what issues are of particular interest to you?

10. Do you believe in sex after death?

11  Have you been out of the country in the last 21 days?

12.  Are you conversant with Excel? 

14.  Would you like to be put on the waiting list for reincarnation? 

15.  Do you smoke?

16.  In 30 words or less, tell us something about yourself that makes you proud to be Heavenly.

17.  Summarize your death bed thoughts.

18.  As you expired, did you see a white light?

19.  If your death was not by natural causes, explain the circumstances.  Provide names of all individuals involved, and with regards to perpetrators, indicate whether or not you have forgiven them.

20.  If Hollywood decides to remake The Last Temptation of Christ, how would you cast this feature?

21.  Rate the following people in descending order of significance:

Pope Francis, Albert Einstein, Lenny Bruce, J.D. Salinger, Ethel Waters, Norman Vincent Peal, George Burns, Mel Gibson and Brian Williams.

22.  Tell us how we can make the world a better place.

23.  Do you have an opinion about Gay angels?

24.  Favorite animal

25.  Favorite flower

26.  Favorite televangelist 

BONUS QUESTION:

Discuss — is Noah more famous for the Ark or for bagels?

Upon completing this form, please retain a copy for your records and burn the original.

Downsizing Your Life

Downsizing Your Life
By Charles E. Kraus

The kids want us to downsize.  Each time they visit, they look around – eyes landing on the books and records, the CDs, the tchotchkes lining – filling, really -- the living room shelves, and they open the overflowing hall closet.  Just curious.

Have you removed anything?  They want to know.

And my wife answers that just yesterday, she donated a box filled to the brim with ancient gloves (mostly singles, missing mates)(she’d been waiting to see if the absent partners showed up), some gently used undergarments, several combination locks for which we no longer remembered the combinations, and … they’d be happy to learn, four books – duplicate copies of Robert Crais mysteries.  That guy sure can write.  She even gave ‘em the box that held these treasures.  Goodwill is erecting a statue in our honor.

As we ease into our 70s, the kids feel we should either discard all the stuff we no longer use, or need, or we should establish a trust fund authorizing a professional estate sale service to hold a mega sale as soon as we’ve been hauled away to the nursing home, or returned to sender, which ever comes first.

I don’t blame them.  This is a large house.  And having lived here for more than a quarter of a century, my wife and I have had an opportunity to stock it with lots of interesting, useful, or potentially useful trinkets.  You never know when you are going to need a snakebite kit, or a carton of rather colorful feathers (for art projects).  We don’t do art projects, and our kids have already rejected the craft supplies.  But, when our granddaughter gets a little older, she may become interested in gluing feathers onto costumes, formulating collages, perhaps feathering the walls of her room.  Someone went to a great deal of trouble to collect these … actually, lets start even further back.

God, nature … whatever your evolutionary speculation – thought up birds and added them to the list of species.  The birds grew feathers, a few of which got dislodged during long flights.  Then a guy, or a woman, spotted the feathers on the ground, retrieved them, brought them home, collected them, and eventually got them into our storage room.  After all that effort, do we have the right to simply heave these efforts into the trash?

It is true that the storage room contains two cartons labeled “collected art work of Danielle and Rebecca.”  The masterpieces represent our daughters’ best efforts during their preschool years.   The girls don’t even want to look at this stuff.  Actually, it’s not particularly exciting.  But the samples represent a sliver of who they were back when.  They are artifacts, if not art, of personal history.

I’ve been collecting books since I was a preschooler.  That’s a lot of years, and a lot of books. Thousands, actually.  I’ve read about half of them, and have plans to get to the rest as soon as time permits.  Well, some of the rest.  Once you start calling yourself a collector, you have certain obligations.  You see yet another John Updike tome (he wrote about a trillion of them), you feel obligated to add it to your collection.  I don’t think I’ll read his book about golf, nor the art criticism. Mine is an impressive library, not easily reduced.  I’ve been meaning to find a foundation, or a university, perhaps some student with reading habits similar to my own, to whom I can bequeath these volumes.  The kids use Kindles.

Downsizing requires reducing more than what you own.  It requires reducing your interests, your expectations, and hopes and dreams for the days that remain.


You get to that downsizing, dad?

Yea, I’ve started by eliminating a few items from my ‘hope to do’ list.  Crossed off prospecting, hiking the Appalachian Trail, and learning to play the piano.  I’ll donate the electric keyboard, but I’m keeping the boots.

KIDS SAID THE DARNDEST THINGS

KIDS SAID THE DARNDEST THINGS

By Charles Kraus - sometimes CharlesThe Clown

I’m setting up the last of my props at a recreation center in LA. The kids are already seated on the floor, about a hundred of them. I’ve been giving shows at this location once or twice a year for over two decades.
            “It’s him!”
            “No”
            “It is him!”
            “No it’s not!”
            Two boys in the audience are arguing about me.
            “It is him …. He got old!”
            I have a sense of humor – it’s sort of required in my business.
            Some of what kids say is constructive – “I wish you looked at our row more.” Some is mere age appropriate skepticism – (after a magic trick) – “I know how he did it! It’s a trick!”
Mostly, what I remember are the silly, funny lines offered by children who have their own ways of seeing the world.
A few minutes after a birthday party show one of the kids wanders back into the living room and finds me packing up.
"Will there be an encore?"
I put the make-up and costume on during my performances.. It’s a comedy routine where things get kind of mixed up. I have trouble finding the powder puff, which has ended up on top of my head. The kids … all of them …. help me to locate it. They shout, “it’s on your head!” so loud, it falls off my head.  

 Once, after appearing at a father-son elementary school event, I was in the men’s room washing up and changing back into my civilian outfit. A dad and his young son entered. They stopped to look at me standing by the sink removing my makeup.
            “Oh,” the kid explained to his father, “that’s Charles. He’s putting on his person so no one will know he’s a clown.”
            A woman I know gave me as a “gift” year after year for her God daughter’s birthday parties. According to this God mother, the child came for a visit to her house, roved about searching for something, then finally said, “so where does Charles sleep, in the bath tub?”
            Last week, after a camp show, a kindergartner came up to me and said, “can you please repeat the show?”
            Bones The Dog Puppet is my sidekick. It takes children a few minutes to warm up to a strange performer, but only about a second to warm up to a large, fuzzy dog puppet. Once, after a program, a mom who was gripping her child’s hand approached me. Her daughter looked uncomfortable being so close.
            “I’ll step back,” I volunteered. “Sometimes children are frightened of clowns.”
            “I’m not afraid of you,” the girl said. “I’m afraid of dogs.”
            About two days ago, after a library performance in Portland, a little guy came up to me.
            “You know that girl, Loretta?”
            “Gee, there were lots of kids in the audience.”
            “She’s the one, helped you with the balloon trick.”
            “Oh, sure I remember her.”
            “Well …. I was her brother.”
            I got my start in “show business,” back east when I was a teenage magician. At birthday party appearances, I did a magic act. Then, using 6 or 7 of those old fashioned, fat, 3 foot long balloons, I created a giant balloon dog birthday present. Upon finishing a particular show, the mom instructed me to make similar animals for each of the guests. In those days, I was lucky to come up with enough air to inflate balloons to form one dog. I had neither the air, the balloons nor the desire to provide creations for twenty guests.
            The mom said she would not pay me until I made a balloon animal for each kid. I said I couldn’t do that.
            It was a standoff.   
            Finally, my father, who was my designated driver, rang the bell. I was going to be late for another party show. What was taking so long? .
            “I’m not paying him a cent until he makes more balloons!,” the outraged mom said.
Sizing up the situation, dad told me to forgo the fee and head for the car.
            As I did this, the appalled mom shouted --- “you’ll never work again in Teaneck, New Jersey!” 

 Perhaps that is why I ended up moving to the west coast. Anyway, my point is that kids aren’t the only ones who say the darndest things.

Inside Out - Talking to My Kids

Inside Out – Talking to My Kids

By Charles E. Kraus

I’m getting along in years and would like my kids to hear my other stories, the ones about the life I’ve experienced deep within.  But I find that words are not particularly useful tools for expressing the tone and impact of events that have transfixed and altered my journey.   Some situations are so vivid it seems impossible to limit their retells to language.   

I want my kids to know about, to somehow pass along to them, the electricity in the air, the anticipation, the heat, the sounds, of an armory packed to the bursting point with excited, enthralled, shrieking supporters, the night, three hours late, candidate John Kennedy arrived for a brief campaign appearance.  And a few years later, the shock and sorrow and jolting sobriety of the President’s assassination.  To know as we did, with certainty, that everyone, everywhere, absolutely everyone, absolutely everywhere, wept uncontrollably; that our anguish was magnified by its universal pervasiveness.

      Is there any way I can share the things that occurred inside my head, and then in every aspect of my perception, on that autumn day when,  as I was seated next to my girlfriend in a college auditorium, the lecturer posed a complex math problem, one far beyond my skill level, perhaps beyond those of any of us?  Yet somehow, influenced by a desire to impress, by an excitement that filled my mind, wheels and gears whizzed round within my head.  In mere seconds, almost screaming, more than declaring, I performed the uncharacteristic act of rising from my chair and shouting out with an unexplainable confidence, an answer so correct and complete that a silence composed entirely of amazement filled the lecture hall?

      Can I really use words to describe what it was like identifying with millions of kids, my generation, my peers?  How we were possessed by delusions of invincibility and altruism?  How, guided by a sense righteousness and moral smugness, propelled by hallucinogens and misconceptions, we abandoned our homes, heading for places such as Haight Ashbury?  Or a kingdom called “on the road”?  Can I ever explain how my generation created a genuine, if impermanent, festival of the ‘alternative path’? 

      I have tried unsuccessfully to describe how I felt on a certain extremely dark, fierce Rhode Island evening.  This was after stowing my gear and cleaning up, when I set out alone through the numbing night, hearing the sounds made as boots sink slightly into the crust of ice that forms on New England snow.  Alone, quietly heading for the bus stop, thinking that just a plane ride ago, I’d been experiencing the monsoon season and a military exercise called Nam.  Realizing how in the span of two days, the war had become part of my past.  The walk had a feeling.  Actually, the feeling returns whenever I recall my steps through the snow, the quietest, calmest, most serene journey I believe I have ever made.  Words cannot capture these sensations.

Such moments are extraordinary.  We all have them.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our kids could catch a glimpse of the indescribable peaks and vistas that defined our journeys?   Sons and daughters will have their own unique, remarkably vivid and meaningful moments.  If we cannot share the specifics, at least we accept the concept that our lives are lived beyond words.  Perhaps some aspects can be transmitted by the intensity of the telling.