Behind the Scenes Minis: Sad Clowns, Sad Trees

Tracy talks about how Grimaldi's memoirs read more like a Dickens novel than a source of biographical information. Then, Holly and Tracy talk about plant diseases. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Fry talked about Joseph Grimaldy, sometimes called
the first modern clown. This week, I sure did. This

(00:23):
episode came about I alluded I think in our previous episode.
I recently had COVID and that it's derailed. I'd had
to take sick time, and each of us had other
already previously planned time off, and then also some unexpected
stuff happened. But there's just a lot going on. And

(00:46):
so I was in one of those places where I
was like, I've got to find something that is doable
in the amount of time that I have to write
an episode. Yeah, And often something that is doable is
when somebody has an autobiography or a memoir or something
similar that is in the public domain. That can be
a big part of the research, and like we can

(01:06):
reference their own words directly in that kind of thing.
Like that is one of the tools when we have
to fill a gap in this way sometimes. Uh. And
so I had been like, all right, I'm gonna I'm
gonna do something like that, and then I used almost
none of Grimaldy's memoirs because they even though they are
in the public domain, they do not read like a

(01:27):
memoir at all. They read like a Dickens's novel, as
we talked about, and so there's just like only I
think one or maybe two quotes from it in the
entire episode. So it's uh. While the episode did get
written in the amount of time involved, it did not
have as much reliance on that memoir as I had
thought it was going to. Also something that I did

(01:49):
not put in into the episode. Charles Dickens, as we said,
had seen some of Grimaldy's performances when he was a kid,
seemed to really like the pantomime. Seems to have made
not been as much of a fan of Grimaldy later
on when he was actually working with this memoir and
writing sketches from bass and stuff like that. He also

(02:10):
has a couple of creepy clown appearances in some of
his other writing, including one that some people think is
a specific reference to Grimaldy's son JS. It can't have
been a reference to Grimaldy because this book was written
like before Grimaldi's death, I think, so people think it

(02:31):
was proudly about JS and that's it's the Pickwick Papers.
Oh yeah, so I'm going to read this little passage
from the Pickwick Papers about this time, and when he
had been existing for upwards of a year. No one
knew how. I had a short engagement at one of
the theaters on the Surrey side of the water. And
here I saw this man whom I had lost sight
of for some time, for I had been traveling in

(02:52):
the provinces, and he had been skulking in the lanes
and alleys of London. I was dressed to leave the
house and was crossing the stage on my way out
when he tapped me on the shoulder. Never shall I
forget the repulsive sight that met my eye when I
turned round. He was dressed for the pantomimes, and all
the absurdity of a clown's costume, the spectral figures, and

(03:16):
the dance of death. The most frightful shapes that the
ablest painter ever portrayed on canvas never presented an appearance
half so ghastly. His bloated body and shrunken legs, their
deformity enhanced a hundredfold by the fantastic dress, the glassy
eyes contrasting fearfully with the thick white paint with which

(03:38):
the face was besmeared, and the grotesquely ornamented head trembling
with paralysis, and the long, skinny hands rubbed with white chalk,
all gave him a hideous and unnatural appearance of which
no description could convey an adequate idea, and which to
this day I shudder to think of. His voice was

(03:59):
hollow and tremulous as he took me aside, and, in
broken words, recounted a long catalog of sickness and privations, terminating,
as usual, with an urgent request for the loan of
a trifling sum of money. I put a few shillings
in his hand, and as I turned away, I heard
the roar of laughter which followed his first tumble on
the stage. So that maybe could be Grimaldi, Maybe could

(04:22):
be Jeff JS. Most things that I saw were like,
it's probably about JS, because it seems, I think, if
I'm remembering correctly, it was written not long after JS
died a very young age. I love that clowns have
always been a delight to some and terrifying to us. Yeah, yeah,
And I like, I don't think that the dickens edition

(04:46):
of his memoirs was necessarily like the first time ever
that there was this dichotomy of like the sad clown
and the clown with the tragic backstory and like the
person who's outwardly funny and inwardly depressed and grief stricken
all the time. But he sure did like cement it
with that book. Well, and now right now they're they're

(05:07):
recognized like four different types of clowns, like the white face,
the Augusta Tramp, and the character and yeah, yeah, yeah,
this is kind of the modern genesis of that. Yeah.
I had thought about putting in more about sort of
the history of clowning and that development of like the

(05:28):
the white face, Auguste Tramp, and character that you just mentioned, like,
and part of it was that it just felt like
like there are so many things in so many cultures
around the world that can fit into the big umbrella
of clowning. Yes, for sure, that part just seemed like
it was like it was getting too big. But then

(05:50):
also I found the specifics of the like progression of
clowning sort of being at least here maybe in Europe,
to like include these four types. I found a lot
of like the sourcing on that really vague, and I

(06:11):
was like, Okay, I don't want to I don't want
to put this in here when it when I think
it might be a little more nebulous than some of
these sources make it sound like have I ever told
you the story of when my clown association terrified my husband? No? So,
as some folks know, Brian and I got married very quickly,
so like, there were a lot of times where we

(06:33):
were many years into our marriage and discovered something completely
new about one another. And at one point we were
at a party at our mutual friend Lily's house, and
one of the things she had out was a dish
of like those long, thin balloons you used to make
balloon animals, okay, And I blew one up and I
made a poodle okay. And Brian said, where'd you learn

(06:55):
to do that? And I said, the clowns taught me.
And he said, the clowns taught you. And that was
when I had to explain, like, if you grow up
in certain parts of Florida, yeah, and you were in
you know, theatery circles, you just know clowns because there's
the big clown school there, and they kind of spread out. Sure,

(07:20):
so of course I knew clown's growing up, but it
never occurred to me that other people didn't know clouds. Yeah,
so I was like the clouds taught me. I think
we've talked before about how when I was a kid,
I was in a summer musical theater program and one
year the show that we did was Barnum, which is
a musical about the life of P. T. Barnum. That's

(07:43):
not the same as the movie. That's not that old, right,
and so all of like what would be the chorus,
We were all clowns, and so we learned a number
of like very basic clowning things and different types of
clown makeup. And I learned to juggle badly, and uh

(08:06):
there was something else, Oh, balloon animals. I can also
make a balloon noodle. It's not very it's not Yeah,
it's not that. It's not that difficult from uh like
once you knew the base with how to do it.
So yeah, like that's that's my one very brief brief
for a into clowning was being part of the chorus
in uh summer middle and high school production of the

(08:31):
play Barnum. The Clowns taught me. You had asked me
before we started this, was he on your list? And
the answer was no, and the reason was depressing. Oh yeah,

(08:55):
this is one of those things, right. I was talking
to a friend of mine about this the other day,
and again I'm obviously not a psychologist or psychiatrist, but
it is one of those things where we had just
discussed and it applies to this, that thing where it's like,
you can do so many things in your life and
have so many experiences, but at the end of the day,

(09:18):
your childhood trauma drives the bus. I think that you
have to always be working on whatever those formative experiences
are that otherwise you just end up kind of falling
into weird habits that kind of perpetuate the same problems.
And I feel like Grimaldi is such an example of that, right,
Like he obviously had a very difficult childhood with a

(09:42):
parent who did not treat him well. And it's like
you then see him spending his entire life trying to
make people happy and make people like him. Right, It's
that thing of like, I only want to make you happy,
and also you will like me and that will make
me happy, and like, at the same time, he is
having breakdowns in his dressing room. It's like and it's like, oh,

(10:05):
I just want to go back and get him a
therapist and hug him, make him some nice tea and
let him just sit quietly. If that's yeah, a therapist,
then maybe also like a trainer or a competent doctor, right,
like somebody to talk about some body mechanics and maybe
if there were some physical, muscular or skeletal issue going on,

(10:29):
to like maybe address that, because it seems it does
seem like, uh, he was just constantly pushing himself, yeah,
in a in a way that was harmful to his body. Yeah.
So yeah, I will also say, on a funnier note,
I'm glad that for the most part, we have gotten
away from titles of things that are the blobbery, bloop

(10:51):
or or the like. There's a lot of things too many,
too many words, and clown church service has now gone
on my bucket list, I think, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't.
As a behind the scenes secret, I was supposed to
read that line and for some time, for some reason,

(11:11):
the very idea got me so choked up that Tracy
had to read it. Yeah, the the clown church service,
I don't know why that hit by heart, So yeah, aggressively.
There's a biography of Grimaldy called The Pantomime Life of
Joseph Grimaldy Laughter Madness in the Story of Britain's Greatest

(11:32):
Comedian by Andrew McConnell Stott, which was one of like
a bunch of different sources that were part of this episode.
It's got just it's much longer than this episode, obviously.
It has just a ton of detail that we did
not talk about at all, and I if I'm remembering rightly,
it starts with his effort to get to that church

(11:55):
service and there was a flight delay and it was like,
is it gonna happen or not? So yeah, yeah, I
recommend that book if you want tons more detail than
what we talked about. So yeah, we talked about apples

(12:19):
this week, Tracy. We sure did. I love apples. I
do too. I don't bake with them as often as
one might think, but I sure do you like to
eat them. I just love a little chopped apple and
just about anything. One of the things I wanted to
call out and mention we mentioned at the end of
that episode that there has been you know, at various

(12:43):
times there have been efforts for people to try to
get the Ontario government or even the bigger Canadian government
to do something to really recognize the Macintosh and its importance,
because you know, it obviously not only is a delicious
thing that many people like, but it has been a
big part of the economy of Ontario and and really

(13:06):
around the world for a lot of growers. At this point,
that hasn't happened. But Sandra Bextad, who we mentioned in
the course of the thing. She's is the woman who
owns the orchard where the last of the first generation
trees recently died. She has her own little mission where she,

(13:29):
you know, has they have a store at their orchard,
like many orchards do, and she includes a lot of
historical information. She invites school groups to come and she
talks about it. They talk about the Macintosh and its heritage,
but also like other apples that came from it, and
and how that all relates to local history. I just
think that's cool. I want to give her a shout
out for being like a grassroots educator. There was also

(13:52):
an interesting thing that came about when the sale of
the Macintosh farm issue came up recently you know, that's
only been a few years ago. It got picked up
by a lot of news outlets like the BBC and
CBC both ran multiple stories about it, but one particular
detail kept getting confused and relayed in completely opposite ways.

(14:18):
One was that the owner, mister Scoff, had put up
a lot of no trespassing signs because a lot of
people would kind of try to sneak onto the property
for pictures or just to see stuff or whatever, and
he was getting frustrated, understandably. But the other is that
there were some that were like, he would love to
give tours if you just asked him, and it's like,

(14:41):
I know, he's say one of these is potentially correct,
but both didn't really work because he seems to not
want anybody to bug him. So I don't know what
the scoop is there. If you, if you dear listeners
are looking up anything about it and you're like, wait,
we don't know either, that's very unclear. I will, once again,

(15:03):
as I often do in our behind the scenes, will
confess my own ignorance and a thing that I didn't
know for a really long time. Okay, that it's often
better to use, you know, apples that are not sweet
in your baking. Yeah. I was well into my adulthood

(15:25):
by the time I learned that, because I kept being like,
why why is this mushy? And it's because the sugars
make them break down and get mushier. It's kind of
like how we said the macintosh breaks down more quickly
so you don't have to bake it as long. Right,
But that's also why it is, or it's related to
the fact that it is sweet when you eat it

(15:48):
raw versus right, the bramley, which is tart and retains
its shape better. Yeah, I didn't know these things. No,
I was honestly surprised at what sounds to me like
kind of herculean efforts to keep the original brandy tree
alive in the face of it having a fungus that
can spread. And this is partly like, I have no

(16:11):
idea what steps they may be taking to try to
keep this fungus from spreading to other trees or plant
life nearby. And I don't think I've told this story
on the show before. When we bought the house that
we live in, there were several rose bushes planted. Oh yeah,

(16:34):
you had witches broom. Yeah, yeah. I went out one
day to deadhead the roses and I was like, why
this Wow, this plant looks weird, and I was like,
obviously this is disease. So I'm gonna do what I
know is like what a step to take, and like
cut away all the diseased part. And then later I

(16:54):
was like, I think I need to look up, Yeah,
what just happened, And what it was was this thing
called rose rosette disease, which is spread by mites. And really,
like there are people who will try to save a
rose bush that's in like really early stages of it,
but like by the time it has spread to the

(17:16):
root area, you can't. It's not something you can really treat,
and you really need to like dig up the whole
plant down to the root and destroy it to keep
it from And it was a huge bummer. Like the
rose bushes were there when we bought the house. It
wasn't like I planted them, but one of them was
this little rose bush that really reminded me of one

(17:37):
at my parents house that my mom had planted. So
every time I saw this rose bush blooming, it like
reminded me of my mom. And I had to dig
the whole thing up down to the roots. And then
I realized that it had also infected the one next
to it, and I went ahead and dug that one
up also. And so having had that whole experience the
idea of like keeping a tree with what sounds like

(18:02):
a fungus that can spread and harm other trees, I
was like, really, okay, I'm I mean, I don't know
what what stuff they have in place. I do know
I'm pretty sure they have like a ground barrier so
the roots can't infect other things. I will say I
also have had witch. I call it Witch's Broom because
that's the that's one of the yeah I have had it.

(18:23):
And I had a very different reaction to you, which is, oh,
that looks amazing. It looks like a demon. It looks
really cool. It makes your rose bush look very halloweeny.
It does. And I my reaction was, could I just
let it happen? Oh? Yeah? But I also had to
dig up an old and very established rose bush in

(18:46):
my yard, which is just a pain in the toukist mane.
It is a big pain. I was more concerned about
like the neighbor's plants than my own plants, Like I
was just like I don't want to keep a plant
in my yard that could hurt my neighbors plants. Yeah,
ours were. I mean, I have roses and I love them.
We've talked about them on the show before. So I

(19:07):
also was like, oh, I just planted a really nice
rose bush. I really don't want that to get this
because even though it looks cool, I don't want it
to die, you know, I want my Twilight Zone roses
to live and flourish forever. The other super annoying thing
about my whole experience is that whoever had planted these

(19:27):
two rose bushes in our front yard had planted them
what is, in my opinion, perilously close to the gas line.
Oh yeah, we called the dial before you dig number
to have the gas line marked before I got the
shovel out to like dig up these rose bushes, and
I was like, it's literally right there. Yeah. Yeah. We

(19:48):
inherited a lot of rose bushes with our house and
I love them. But like, there have been some errors
in judgment along the way, and I don't know if
it's just like an inexperienced gardener, I can't say I
would have done any better. At various points in time.
But whoever owned our house before us planted these beautiful,

(20:09):
very prolifically blooming red rose bushes, which I love. But
they are right in front of the house, on either
side of the stairs, and they're climbers, so literally in
the summer. There have been times where they've had a
very healthy year and I have to clip them every
single day because they are coming for you, like you

(20:32):
can't get up and down the stairs without them snagging
your clothes, right, I love them, Yeah, I do want
to get rid of I call it a filthy name
we couldn't say on the show because I don't like it.
We have a wax leaf privet also that's right by
the house that I don't like, and I keep saying
I want to hire a grown up to come and

(20:53):
take it out and put in rose bushes that are
meant to be full like privet style bushes. Sure, I
don't know if we'll get to that at any point
in the near future. Not. I don't like that privet
though at all. And also we have my least favorite
plant on the planet, Virginia creeper. Oh, you're right, because

(21:17):
you're allergic to it. So I'm one of those random
people who got the luck of the draw to be
very allergic to it, and I have had to go
to the emergency room because of reactions to it. It's
not cool anyway, plants, Yeah, I am. I will say
this too. In pictures of the Bramley Tree. You would
ask during the show, if the clone that they put

(21:40):
next to it, and I'm air quoting next to it,
how close it is? It's not because if you see
pictures of the tree, it's not. You don't see the
other tree. And I will say, I don't see a
lot of other plant life around it, Like there's like
some grassy groundcover, I think, but it's not like there
aren't any super close by things. And I think they
are monitoring it so closely that it has kept most

(22:02):
of the above ground fungus managed in at bay. Like
when you look at pictures, you can see some of
the tree is dead, but like you don't see the
white that white sticky film that I associate with something
like that. So I think they're probably being pretty arduous
about keeping it as controlled as possible. And we'll see

(22:24):
how long the Bramley Tree lasts, But as of right now,
you could go visit it. They let people visit nice
that might go on my bucket list for my next
trip to England. I know that this weekend, for what
I have of it, which is not much because I'm
doing some traveling and prep, I need to take care

(22:45):
of my yard and do some mowing. So this is
all a very timely discussion. If you have a weekend
ahead of you, I hope whatever you do it's delightful.
I personally like mowing, so that doesn't sound bad to
me at all. Whatever you have, whether you have time
off or not, I hope that you are able to
take some time to take care of yourself, not only

(23:05):
take care of other people, although that is also a
good and noble thing to do, but you also need
to be recharged. And we will be right back here
tomorrow with a classic and then on Monday with a
brand new episode. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit

(23:26):
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