Last year we went through three bags of giveaways and this year we barely made it through one. I think that a lot of this was caused by the fact that there where fewer students coming through and that our table was located off of the main row of tables. Because of this I was asked to make balloon animals to try and attract people to our booth.

As usual I had a really good time making balloons. I am pretty sure that the ideal group for me to make balloons for is college students. Working with college students allows me to make jokes that I normally wouldn’t be able to get away with. My favorite type of balloon sculpturing is when I get to make balloons while using my own brand of smart ass humor to keep the crowd going.

The best way to describe it is stand up balloon art. I think that this method of balloons is more fun to watch because it is less of a: What do you want? Here you go! Next!, which seems to be what a lot of balloon artists do when hired to make balloons. I like to think that when I am hired to do an event I am hired to entertain and, as a secondary activity, make balloons.

One thing that was great about making balloons for college kids is that they are still into having fun and they allow themselves to be entertained. So often when I have made balloons for older non-college aged crowds I find that they consider themselves above balloon animals and they are pretty sure that balloon animals are stupid. Well I got news for you non-college crowd: Balloon animals are AWESOME!!!!

The funny thing about making balloons for work is that the people that I work with have an idea in their heads about how I act. They all think that I am a little bit of a hard-ass and not very much fun. When I bust out the balloons you can tell that they don’t quite know how to act. Should they laugh? Should they ignore it? Should they continue to work? I love watching the conflict as it goes though their heads.

I hope that if you are part of that non-college demographic that you will allow yourself to enjoy balloon art next time you encounter it. The balloon art is fun and if you encounter the right artist you will have a good time.

I recently got asked to start making balloon animals at the local TGI Fridays on Saturday evenings. This means that I will start obsessing over balloons again. Which is good because they are awesome. They have changed a lot since I first started. Electric pumps are now super expensive and fancy, there is a whole company dedicated to aprons and the like and there are twice as many colors offered by the company I use for balloons as well as three other companies. Here is a video about balloon dogs, it is a little sad but is quite enjoyable. So enjoy.

One of the things that I have heard said numorous times online is that it is easier to learn to speak without speaking if you have a puppet to play with. That way you get used to interacting with the puppet as well as getting the movements down, thus giving the illusion of life. That being said I am trying to figure out what kind of puppet I would like to get. As per Sarah’s instructions it cannot be anything that is human like as there has been to many movies with dolls and the like coming to life.

I have “narrowed” the search down to a “few” choices so let me know what you think.

This Bear puppet is quite large and I think could be funny and a great story teller for birthday parties and the like.

The Rooster Puppet is another one that I think could have a great personality I think that I would use the Agadore Spartucus voice that my Mom loves so much to voice him.

Vern the Bird is awesome. He is funny looking and I think would be a great puppet to use while clowning. Another great thing with some of these bird puppets is they have a 3rd arm illusion so it just looks like the bird is pearched on your arm.

 I think that this flamingo would be hilarius for the Agadore Spartucus voice as well. He just looks so classy. I am afraid that he may not lend himself to my clown charactor as much but I do find him hilariuos.

This puppet is just plain funny. I think that she would be a great puppet to promote exercising in kids as well as just being a funny puppet to interact with. I would have to do the Hennifer Lopez type voice for her.

Tucker the turtle is the puppet that appeals to me a lot. Helping kids get over being shy since he would be shy to meet them.

So there you have it the six puppets that I would like to get. What do you think? Which on will lend itself best to clowning? Let me know as I am hoping to order a puppet in the next few weeks.

I am currently an auguste clown. This, in the grand scheme of clowning, means that I am the jokester to the white face’s straight man. This is all well and good but I am lacking a white face to play with. The tramp clown on the other hand tends to be more of a loaner as well as being, I think, more fun to play. There are two types of tramp clowns: The Happy Hobo and The Sad Tramp.

For some reason I am drawn to the sad tramp type. I think that so much of my current routine is built around planned failure that playing a down on his luck tramp might be fun. The happy hobo seems to be almost the same as my current character, just more down on his luck.

I am trying to develop a Character bio and make decisions based on that. We will just have to see.

This is a picture from the Mooseburger Camp Hobo Stew, basically a chance for all of us non-tramp clowns to tramp it up a little bit. I am in the middle in the tux. I would probably do similar makeup to this, just refine it a little, and would also wear that same tux and wig.

About that time I had had to design a brochure for one of the properties that we manage. It was a full color job with all sorts of fanciness. I designed the whole thing in Photoshop and then called up a copy shop that we used to manage properties for. I got a quote on prices for color copies and was shocked by the affordability per page. For 8.5″ x 11″ color copies on card stock it is .80 per page.

I then started fooling with designing a card in Photoshop. I started by making a 2″x2″ mini card to hand out while making balloons. Just a throw away to give to kids that isn’t very big and is very bright. I could fit 20 on a page and so I made 10 copies at a cost of just under $10. Something like that, since it is an odd size, would have cost two to three times that online. After cutting those out I was ready to tackle making a larger more professional looking card.

I came up with about 12 designs which where narrowed to two which I then printed on 11″ x 17″ paper allowing me to fit 24 regular sized business cards per page. Printing 5 pages cost me just over $5 for 120 cards. This is 250 cards for around $10, they are full bright color and they are not constrained by the annoying interface that was vistaprint.

I have now cut them out and will start using them ASAP.

The only problem we had is we got a pretty crappy sound set up. This wasn’t a problem for a lot of the day except when we had dance acts. All of the dance groups understood except for one who I am not sure quite understood what I was saying.

It was nice this year because I didn’t have to perform very much other then introducing the acts. The previous years I have had to fill one to three slots when acts wouldn’t show up. This year I just had to fill in when people got done early.

I had a really great interaction with one of the little ballerinas, right before her group went on stage. I had her teach me some ballet moves and over all it was rather amusing. I got yelled at by the entire audience to point my toes when I do turns and what not. Good times.

So I went to the Salvation Army and I found the greatest pair of shorts that I could use as clown boxer shorts. I have worn them for about 5 years and have never encountered a time when I was able to do a pants drop. It dosen’t help that I wear suspenders and a vest or jacket. This makes slipping the pants off in a non obvious way quite tricky. Also most of my clown pants, while looking baggy, fit my waist really really well.

So make sure that you go through your costume every now and then and stop wearing extra clothing that might be uncomfortable or constricting or just not needed.

Recently my friend John has started to learn coin magic, some of the stuff he does with the coins is quite fascinating and he has learned all of it from a book that I need to get. It seems to be the kind of book that mostly teaches the important sleights of coin magic as well as a few of the classic tricks.

I have also decided to learn some rope magic, I think that it will apply very well to stage clowning as well as any birthday parties I might do. There are a lot of really funny rope magic tricks and it will be cheap since all I will need to buy is rope. So I went on a Google search for magic rope to find out what kind of rope would be best to buy from the local Ace Hardware.

This brought me to this(not real work safe)site. I was shocked since it is the first link from Google. I was confused and hurt by Google leading me astray on my search for magic tricks. But hey what can you do. I think I will instead just go talk to the hardware professionals or research more later using more specific key words.

• New juggling balls
• New juggling clubs
• New walking globeor a mini bike

This was fine until I realized that in two weeks I have my annual perfomance at the childrens festival. So I need to bust out the juggling clubs and unicycle and start practicing…A LOT.

I also need to get my clown costumes together and make sure my makeup already to go. I am hoping that this year it goes really well and all the acts show up and all the performances go well.

I am hoping to possibly work in some of my magic this year, I will need to adjust all the card tricks so that they play well on stage. That I think is the only draw back to doing card tricks, they are small and don’t show real well on stage.

Here is hoping.