SHOPPING CART
SHOPPING CART
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A NOTE FROM DAVID CARLYONDan Rice and I were both clowns. When I began writing about him I assumed we shared nothing but the label. I was a clattering Ringling/ Barnum clown in baggy pants and a big red nose, paid little to join cavorting bumblers in the three-ring spectacle. Rice was a glittering star--the Johnny Carson of the 19th century--standing alone in his show's one ring. The spitting image of Uncle Sam in stripes, a top hat and the most recognized goatee of the age, he was a talking clown, quipping spontaneously, booming out Shakespeare, singing about bloomers, feuding with Horace Greeley--and running for President too. He was Robin Williams, Rush Limbaugh, and John McCain rolled into one. The gap seemed even larger as I investigated antebellum performance. Rice triumphed in a bubbling stew of circus, theatre, minstrelsy and lectures, all full of the adult fare of sex, violence and raw politics. Increasing the excitement, audiences voiced their opinions in a noisy public conversation across the footlights. Ironically, Rice fell from fame because of ideas his fame helped foster. Proclaiming that he "aspired to something higher," he helped propel a new idea, that art and entertainment are not merging ends of a performance spectrum but distinct categories, inevitably opposed. With amusements forced into a hierarchy favoring quiet decorum, circus slid low, boisterous crowds became redefined as boorish, and Rice, the Great American Humorist, tumbled to being merely clownish. Yet it was in Rice's discredited partnership with the audience that I discovered a link between us. I had struggled as a clown until I found that I was not performing for the audience, but with them. Any challenge, insight or amusement I might provide only flowed if we were equals. I learned a new aim: To connect. Before me, Dan Rice had grown to supreme fame because he connected supremely. |
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PAPERBACKISBN 978-1-58648-239-8 Pub date: 04/23/04 Price: $21.00/25.50 Canada 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 528 pages b/w illustrations throughout Carton Quantity: 20 Biography, History Selling Territory: W Pub history: PublicAffairs hc |
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