Posted: 02 Oct 2010 09:58 AM PDT

Published: Saturday, October 02, 2010, 10:00 AM

In an economy this bad, in a city this small, professional performers cannot be too choosy about the work they take. And yet B.J. the Clown's phone rings all the time with calls he's not interested in answering.

Portland's most successful clown gets eager requests from TV producers and independent filmmakers looking for a psychotic or inebriated clown to spice up a scene, as if acting like John Wayne Gacy was the norm is good for business. He gets imperious-sounding messages from parents looking "to rent a clown" for their kid's birthday party, as if anybody in a rainbow wig and a bulbous red nose will do. He gets middle-of-the-night calls from snickering teenagers who think his stage name -- actually just his initials -- stands for something a tad less wholesome.

He brushes those sorts of calls with a roll of the eyes or a certain prickly politeness. Earning a decent living as a professional clown is hard work, especially if you're an independent contractor with no interest in seeing the world as part of Ringling Brothers or Cirque du Soleil. Carving an 18-years-and-counting career out of clowning without compromising your artistic integrity, without allowing yourself to be turned into a professional baby sitter or a professional joke, is even harder. Thus B.J., known in real life as Bretley James Christie, takes his work seriously. He knows his audience, and he knows what it expects.

"The sweet spot is 4 to 6," he says. "They have to understand magic enough to know things aren't supposed to happen. They have to be old enough to understand but not so old they're cynical. The cynical ones are a problem."

In that regard, the toughest part of his job often comes even before the show begins. From the moment he swings his oversized red shoes out of the car, he's gauging the crowd, casting his bright blue eyes over his audience to decipher who wants to participate, who is terrified and who wants to cause nothing but trouble.

"The best defense is a good offense," he says.

***

Clowning was not his first career choice. Years ago, B.J. the Clown was just another transplanted California tech worker, a guy who arrived in Portland on his motorcycle to work for a startup out of somebody's garage. The startup's founder made a fortune. Christie did not, and he instead found himself in the midst of an existential crisis. He was taking architecture classes -- thinking he might build houses for poor people -- when the founder of the Living Enrichment Center in Beaverton, which became the New Thought megachurch in Wilsonville, started a small volunteer clown troupe to cheer up children at local hospitals.

"It was really just dress-up," B.J. says. "Putting on a wig doesn't make you a clown. But I enjoyed it. I was curious enough to want to do it well."

He took courses and began attending conventions, interviewing professional clowns about how they managed to make a decent living. He and his then-wife began doing weekend shows together. They divorced, but he kept performing and working on his act.

Almost two decades after those first hospital shows, he performs a blend of goofball comedy and vaudeville-style magic. The percentage of each has changed over the years. When he started, he spent a lot of time mastering his sleight-of-hand and juggling. But the goal isn't to impress children.

"Kids don't get much live entertainment these days, and usually what they see has an agenda -- whether it's beware of strangers, or look both ways, or whatever," he says. "My only agenda is that kids don't laugh enough. Skill doesn't matter as much as surprise."

And style.

***

Picture yourself in a crowded Portland living room, the children squirmy with excitement, the air ripe with the smells of cupcake icing, Doritos and someone's soiled diaper.

B.J. pulls a small, glittery ball out of his big blue tub. Eyes on the crowd, he tosses it in the air. He reaches into his case and adds another ball. He reaches in again, eyes still on the kids, and pulls out a big rubber spider, juggles all three as if nothing unusual has occurred. The kids scream. He plays dumb.

He reaches into the case and pulls out a magic wand. He hands it to the birthday boy. The wand collapses. "Oh my goodness, I gave you the wrong wand," he tells the kid, snickering along with the rest of the room. "Try this one."

He hands the child a rubber snake, and turns away before noticing. Snickering becomes snorting. He acts shocked.

Much of his comedy is improvisational; the best jokes usually evolve from the constant effort to keep his most unruly audience members at bay. The "zombie vampire" trick -- although it's really less a trick than a shared piece of performance art -- came to him one afternoon with an especially raucous group. His solution: He put the guest of honor on the ground, invited guests to cover him with the brightly colored scarves he sometimes juggles, declared him "dead" and then used a magic wand -- not the collapsing kind -- to awaken the newly anointed, presumably quite hungry, zombie vampire. He led the group as they screamed and ran around in mock horror.

Kids like to laugh. They also like to scream. Clowns know these things.

"It's a fact of life," he says. "When a balloon snaps back and hits me in the rear end, that's funny."

Ad-libbing can backfire. In his sing-song stage voice, higher and faster than his real-life one, he asks older siblings, "Is that your baby sister? Oh, she's so cute. Where did you buy her?" Once a kid answered, "China." Er. Um. Sheepish looks all around.

"The trick is to never make a big deal out of anything that comes out of a kid's mouth," he says. "You just have to keep plowing ahead."

Mostly, that loose quality of his act is what kids respond to. B.J. the Clown, a carefully honed character, is silly, forgetful, innocent and completely out of control, which puts his audience at a unique kind of cake-infused ease. They're seeing comedy in one of its simplest and oldest forms -- the humor of the unexpected -- and unlike so many other interactions with adults, they're in on the joke.

He tells the room he's about to show them something veeeeeeery scaaaaaaaary.

"Close your eyes if you get too frightened. No, really. It's nothing to be embarrassed about. This is going to be terrifying."

Mood suitably built, he reaches into his case, gropes around for a moment or two, and then pulls out ... a plush Nemo.

The children laugh because, really, what is funnier than a middle-aged man in goofy makeup who considers a stuffed fish from a movie to be veeeeeeeery scaaaaaaaary. He frowns at his mistake, waits a beat for them to calm down, and continues: "Oh golly, I'm so sorry. I meant to show you something twice as scary. Are you ready? Do you need to hold your mom's hand? Are you sure?"

He pulls out ... two Nemos.

***

B.J. the Clown's phone rings all the time, with the kinds of calls he will answer.

Even with parents, schools and companies spending less on their celebrations, he stays busy enough to live in a lovely cottage in a gentrified neighborhood a few blocks from Northeast Alberta Street. The sunny front yard is filled with flowers and plants. The back features a deck and a work shed he built himself, plus ample parking for his Honda Gold Wing.

"It's funny to think about," he says. "I live this normal middle-class life, with the mortgage, the bills, the house. But then I strap on my stuff and go do this crazy thing."

Crazy, sure. He once arrived early for a show in a residential neighborhood, parked his car and had the soothing sounds of NPR on the radio broken by a police officer rapping on the window. A neighbor had called 9-1-1 to report "a clown lurking." On another occasion, on his way to perform in a public park, an officer pulled him over for going 15 miles an hour in a 10-mile-an-hour zone. "I think maybe he just didn't like clowns," he says.

That's not unusual. His second wife is an accountant from Ireland. "She had a hard time breaking the news to her family about what I do for a living," he says. "It took her months to sort of roll it out."

You'll love him, Ma. He owns his own business. He works his own hours. He's in the entertainment industry. He's a performer. He performs for children.

OK, fine. He's a clown.

The man himself doesn't love clowns. Except for a few photos on his computer, he keeps no reminders of what he does for a living in the house. He doesn't collect clown art or circus memorabilia. He gives away most of the clown-related paraphernalia he receives as gifts.

Still, clowning has been very good to him. He spends time in a backyard hot tub every morning, plays tennis most days, takes long motorcycle trips when he has the time and has stopped traveling to exotic places in the winter -- photos from Sri Lanka and India hang by the front door -- only because his wife can't get the time off.

He charges $125 for a 45-minute birthday show, less than some other clowns in the region, less than plenty of stressed-out parents in Alameda or the West Hills would pay. But he works as often as he wants; this time of year, he's performing six days a week, school and library shows Tuesday through Friday and birthdays Saturday and Sunday. Even in the winter, dead season for clowns, his weekends stay packed. In a typical year, he plays 300 shows and earns around $55,000.

Plus, his overhead costs are low. The costume -- blue vest, blue pants, white shirt with garish red and yellow detailing -- costs $600. He orders a new one every year. Same with his floppy red shoes, which run $350 and are, thanks to the soft leather slipper hidden inside, the most comfortable things he's ever worn.

His monthly advertising budget, mostly phone book listings, has dropped from $1,200 to $100 over the years. These days almost 80 percent of his business comes from word of mouth and repeat customers. He's 51, now closer to grandparent than parent to the children he entertains. He's old enough that kids who saw his earliest shows have graduated from college. Add up all those birthdays, corporate picnics, library shows and pro bono hospital performances, and the number of children he's entertained hits six digits.

"I haven't done the children of children yet, but it's probably coming," he says. "People bring out the family photo albums to show me when I performed for their older brother or older sister, and I had a kid come up to me not long ago in his military uniform to talk about the time I'd performed at his birthday. He'd just gotten back from Iraq.

"A lot of the fun in this work is ego -- it's definitely a little narcissistic, having people tell you you're the funniest thing they've ever seen. But there is also this sense that you've touched people."

Occasionally a kid will tell him he's fat, or point out -- often with malicious delight -- the gray in his close-cropped beard. He's gone slightly deaf from all those years of children screaming. He limps noticeably when he's tired, the result of arthritis in both knees. A few Saturdays ago, he did five birthdays back to back, the only break the hour between shows to drive from one performance to the next. (In full costume and makeup, mind you. He gets some interesting looks at fast-food drive-throughs.)

"I couldn't even bring my stuff in from the car at the end of the day," he says. "I got home. I had a glass of wine. And then I slept really, really well."

Despite the wear and tear, he figures he can do this full time for another 10 years or so. As lowbrow or unsophisticated as it might seem to adults, those of us who prefer humor that's either more painful or subtler, his comedy is as much intellectual as physical. The ability to twist a balloon into a hundred shapes isn't quite as important as knowing which kid's mom will blush the deepest when he takes those balloon lips and transforms them into balloon hotdogs and then, finally, presents her with a balloon rose. The dexterity required to toss a rubber ring onto a bowling pin from across a playroom isn't as crucial as knowing the proper response if a boy and girl of a certain pre-adolescent age are standing next to each other, holding twin pins, and the ring happens to land around both:

"In the circus world, that means you're married!"

The boy usually leaps away in horror, which never fails to amuse either him or his crowd.

"I love the idea that there's this circus world, with its own rules," he says. "The kids believe it. They always want to know where I live, what kind of car I drive. I tell them I live at the zoo with the monkeys. You would be surprised how many children believe it."

Or maybe you wouldn't. Zoo or otherwise, he's rarely recognized out in the world. Devoid of makeup, his voice at its usual timbre, he looks and sounds like what he is: a middle-aged guy who enjoys what he does, and enjoys the spoils of his labor. No dark secrets. No hidden agendas. No real regrets.

"Part of me wishes I could have been a children's comedian -- no makeup, same act," he says. "But people need categories. On some level, the clown stuff is for the people paying, for the adults."

The children understand.

"The biggest compliment of my career came from this kid who probably thought he was insulting me," he says. "He said, 'You know what, man, I've been watching you, and you're not a clown. No, you're just a guy dressed up like a clown to make us kids happy.'

"Now that is what I want on my tombstone."

-- Anna Griffin

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Some kids' mechanical skills AWOL in age of technology - St. Petersburg Times

Posted: 02 Oct 2010 01:37 AM PDT

Associated Press
In Print: Sunday, October 3, 2010

NEW YORK

Second-graders who can't tie shoes or zip jackets. Four-year-olds in Pull-Ups diapers. Five-year-olds in strollers. Teens and preteens befuddled by can openers and ice-cube trays. College kids who have never done laundry, taken a bus alone or addressed an envelope.

Are we raising a generation of nincompoops? And do we have only ourselves to blame? Or are some of these things simply the result of kids growing up with push-button technology in an era when mechanical devices are gradually being replaced by electronics?

Susan Maushart, a mother of three, says her teenage daughter "literally does not know how to use a can opener. Most cans come with pull-tops these days. I see her reaching for a can that requires a can opener, and her shoulders slump and she goes for something else."

Teens are so accustomed to throwing their clothes on the floor or hanging them on hooks that Maushart says her "kids actually struggle with the mechanics of a clothes hanger."

Many kids never learn to do ordinary household tasks. They have no chores. Take-out and drive-through meals have replaced home cooking. And busy families who can afford it often outsource house-cleaning and lawn care.

"It's so all laid out for them," said Maushart, author of the forthcoming book The Winter of Our Disconnect, about her efforts to wean her family from its dependence on technology. "Having so much comfort and ease is what has led to this situation — the Velcro sneakers, the Pull-Ups generation. You can pee in your pants and we'll take care of it for you!"

The issue hit home for me when a visiting 12-year-old took an ice-cube tray out of my freezer, then stared at it helplessly. Raised in a world where refrigerators have push-button icemakers, he'd never had to get cubes out of a tray — in the same way that kids growing up with pull-tab cans don't understand can openers.

Mark Bauerlein, author of the bestselling book The Dumbest Generation, which contends that cyberculture is turning young people into know-nothings, says "the absence of technology" confuses kids faced with simple mechanical tasks.

But Bauerlein says there's a second factor: "a loss of independence and a loss of initiative." He says that growing up with cell phones and Google means kids don't have to figure things out or solve problems any more. They can look up what they need online or call mom or dad for step-by-step instructions. And today's helicopter parents are more than happy to oblige.

"It's the dependence factor, the unimaginability of life without the new technology, that is making kids less entrepreneurial, less initiative-oriented, less independent," Bauerlein said.

Teachers in kindergarten have always had to show patience with children learning to tie shoes and zip jackets, but thanks to Velcro closures, today's kids often don't develop those skills until they are older. Sure, harried parents are grateful for Velcro when they're trying to get a kid dressed and out the door, and children learn to tie shoes eventually unless they have a real disability. But if they're capable of learning to tie their shoes before they learn to read, shouldn't we encourage them?

Some skills, of course, are no longer useful. Kids don't need to know how to add Roman numerals, write cursive or look things up in a paper-bound thesaurus. But is snail-mail already so outmoded that teenagers don't need to know how to address an envelope or put the stamp in the right spot?

Lenore Skenazy, who writes a popular blog called Free-Range Kids, based on her book by the same name, has a different take. Skenazy, whose approach to parenting is decidedly antihelicopter, agrees that we are partly to blame for our children's apparent incompetence, starting when they are infants.

"There is an onslaught of stuff being sold to us from the second they come out of the womb trying to convince us that they are nincompoops," she said. "They need to go to Gymboree or they will never hum and clap! To teach them how to walk, you're supposed to turn your child into a marionette by strapping this thing on them that holds them up because it helps them balance more naturally than 30,000 years of evolution!"

Despite all this, Skenazy thinks today's kids are way smarter than we give them credit for: "They know how to change a photo caption on a digital photo and send it to a friend. They can add the smiley face without the colon and parentheses! They never took typing but they can type faster than I can!"

Had I not been there to help that 12-year-old with the ice-cube tray, she added, the kid surely would have "whipped out his iPhone and clicked on his ice-cube app to get a little video animated by a 6-year-old that explained how you get ice cubes out of a tray."

Friends playing devil's advocate say I'm wrong to indict a whole generation for the decline of skills they don't need. After all, we no longer have to grow crops, shoot deer, prime a pump or milk a cow to make dinner, but it was just a couple of generations ago that you couldn't survive in many places without that knowledge.

Others say this is simply the last gasp of the analog era as we move to the digital age. In 10 years, there won't be any ice-cube trays; every fridge will have push-button ice.

But Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University who has studied culture and American life, defends my right to rail against the ignorance of youth.

"That's our job as we get old," he said. "A healthy society is healthy only if it has some degree of tension between older and younger generations. It's up to us old folks to remind teenagers: 'The world didn't begin on your 13th birthday!' And it's good for kids to resent that and to argue back. We want to criticize and provoke them. It's not healthy for the older generation to say, 'Kids are kids, they'll grow up.'

"They won't grow up, unless you do your job by knocking down their hubris."

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Stores get cheap, chic for kids - Raleigh News & Observer

Posted: 01 Oct 2010 10:59 PM PDT

Jessica Reavis babysits at least once a week. She also goes shopping at least once a week.

At 13, she loves clothes. But with her $6 an hour wage and a commitment to give some of her earnings to her church, she is always looking at the bottom line.

"One of my favorite stores is Forever 21," said Jessica, who attends Exploris Middle School. "I love all the clothes and the shoes and accessories. ... I love Abercrombie, but I can't afford like a $100 shirt. Maybe I might put it on my birthday list, but I'm not going to buy that $100 shirt.

"A lot of stores carry the same kind of things, so I'll go to the store that has it the cheapest."

As department stores and many major retailers have struggled throughout the downturn, retailers that focus on tween shoppers have continued to thrive, but only by managing to be fashionable and cheap.

Stores like Justice for Girls, Five Below and the longtime mall staple Claire's continue to expand and post good financial results for investors.

It's not that tweens - typically kids around 11 to 14 years old - have been unaffected by the economic struggles of their parents. Spending for kids 12 to 19 in 2010 is projected to be down slightly this year, from $85 billion last year to $79 billion, said Rob Callender of research group Teen Research Unlimited.

But overall, tweens and teens were less affected by the recession than older shoppers, Callender said.

And they're at the age where fashion matters and many parents are willing to indulge, especially if the price is right.

The most successful tween retailers combine the bargain appeal of a dollar store with merchandise that style-conscious kids favor.

"What these different companies have found out is that there's a tween market available if it's priced right," said Britt Beemer, retail analyst and founder of America's Research Group in Charleston, S.C. "You want to have the fashions that the kids want, but you have to have the price the parents want to pay."

Price is right for mom and dad

Five Below, which is expanding into the Triangle, tries to strike that balance - and appeal to boys as well as girls - by stocking items like basketballs, board games, athletic equipment and iPod accessories, right alongside storage containers and other items moms will buy.

An average store touts 2,000 to 3,000 items, all priced between $1 and $5.

The first Five Below store opened in October 2002. The company will finish this year with 142, including its first four in North Carolina, all in the Triangle. There will be a market-wide grand opening celebration this weekend for the stores in Crossroads Plaza in Cary, Beaver Creek Crossing in Apex, Poyner Place in North Raleigh and New Hope Commons in Durham.

Tom Vellios, CEO of the Philadelphia chain, said that the company could add 50 stores next year and that the Triangle could eventually have up to 10.

Targeting tweens does present challenges, said Vellios, who is the former CEO of Zany Brainy. The key, he says, is to make kids feel at home while making parents feel positive about their kids shopping at your stores.

Tweens like Nathan McClard seem to appreciate being the focus of retailers' attention.

Nathan, 12, was in the Cary Five Below on a recent Wednesday hunting for an iPod case - his second visit in two weeks. He found one for $5 and also talked his mom into letting him buy some off-brand Silly Bandz.

"They have some really good stuff here," he said. "They sell good iPod cases."

Jennifer McClard said that she sometimes spends more than she expects there because she starts shopping for herself while her son is browsing.

"It's not like a dollar store," she said. "It's quality stuff. I picked up a few Christmas gifts last week."

Tweens are big spenders

The importance of tweens is hard for retailers to ignore.

In its most recent quarter, teen accessories emporium Claire's reported an 8.9 percent increase in sales at stores open more than a year - an important measure of health for retailers.

Last month, Dress Barn reported that its sales spiked 78 percent for the fourth quarter, largely because of its acquisition of the Justice for Girls chain last year. Sales at Justice stores open more than a year rose 10 percent.

Representatives from both Justice and Claire's declined requests for interviews.

The tween specialty store market still has room for growth, said Dan Butler, vice president of retail operations for the National Retail Federation.

There are roughly 33.6 million kids between the ages of 12 and 19 in the U.S., according to Teen Research Unlimited.

On average, they spend $38 per month on electronics and technology, $35 a month on clothes and $25 a month eating out.

"For decades, this particular segment was covered by the department store," Butler said. "But many of those department stores went away. So now you have the handful of department stores that are left that carry juniors. But a lot of these specialty stores appeal to a very specific demographic of the market."

Now many department stores are ramping up efforts to reclaim the teen and tween shoppers they have lost.

This year during back-to-school season, Macy's struck a deal to launch a line of apparel associated with the hit TV series "Glee" and its legions of tween fans. And earlier this year, JC Penney launched a line of tween-targeted apparel called Uproar.

For tweens like Morgan Raynor, having more options is a good thing - though her mom might sometimes say there are too many.

Two weeks ago, 12-year-old Morgan stopped into the Cary Five Below with her mom and two younger brothers. As a treat for going to the dentist, each child got to spend $1.

Morgan found an iPod Touch case, but its price tag was $5.

"Mom, can I?" she asked. "It's for my iPod Touch."

"I said $1," her mom, Paula Gardner, replied.

The two looked at each other for a minute, exchanging one of those looks that only moms and daughters know, and Raynor trudged back to the rack to put the item back.

Kids Shoes

Saturday, October 2, 2010

“Portland's B.J. the Clown is serious about making kids laugh - Oregonian” plus 2 more

“Portland's B.J. the Clown is serious about making kids laugh - Oregonian” plus 2 more

Published: Saturday, October 02, 2010, 10:00 AM

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