| An Attempt at a Brief History of The Flying Karamazov Brothers, |
in which Howard Patterson aka Ivan Karamazov does his best to include only the most relevant and necessary digressions to a succinct recollection of only the most significant highlights of their lengthy and ongoing career.
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In 1972,Howard Patterson and Paul Magid lived across the hall from each other in the dorms at The University of California at Santa Cruz (a school with no grades). Howard was studying Biology and Music; Paul, English Literature and Moslem History, and the two apparently had little in common besides their Jewish backgrounds, an interest in Irish music, and rudimentary juggling skills.But when Howard got a five-minute juggling lesson (from Billy Barrett of Cock & Feathers) followed by a bout of
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mononucleosis at the end of his first quarter, he spent winter break at his parents' house in LA eating, sleeping, and jugglingÑhe couldn't read or think, after all, he had mono. He returned the
next quarter with a small vocabulary of tricks, which encouraged Paul (and everyone else on their hall) to start working up his juggling skills as well.
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| Soon they were utterly obsessed, spending every spare minute inventing new tricks and new ways to use them. For spring break they hitchhiked to Michigan and back, juggling on the roadside to attract potential rides (it worked). Then Paul got a part in a Commedia dell' Arte production of Boldoni's The Three Cuckolds, and when the director suggested they might want to find something with a "renaissance flavor" as an opening act, Paul piped up "oh, my friend and I are juggling." The director said, "Great, come back in an hour and show me what you're doing." Paul said "uh... sure!" setting the pattern for Karamazov productions for years to come. |
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Howard in College |
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He sprinted across campus, found Howard, and shouted "Quick! We've got 45 minutes to come up with an act!" Coincidentally, thanks to Howard's long-standing interest in ancient music (he would shortly join the wonderful Antiquarian Funk Ensemble, which continues to perform in Santa Cruz to this day), he happened to have just checked out from the library a copy of Thomas D'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy, a collection of bawdy ballads from the court of Queen Elizabeth I. He was particularly attracted to "Tom Tinker's my True Love,Ó a tune whose rhyme scheme implied various naughty words without quite stating them:
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Tom Tinker's my true love and I am his dear,
And I will go with him his budget to bear.
For of all the young men he has the best luck,
All the day he will fuddle, all night he will
(chorus)This way and that way, which way you will
I am sure I say nothing that you can take ill!
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Paul in '75 |
They choreographed verse after verse with three-ball juggling tricks performed in unison, then several verses with passing tricks, all in time to the music. Then they sprinted back across campus to pass the audition; when they finally performed the piece they turned out to be better received than the play was. A collective silent "Hmmm..." was uttered.
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| f Howard's interest in combining juggling with music dates back to the very beginning, so did Paul's interest in combining juggling with theater. Their next piece was an all-juggling version of "The Question Game" from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead , which is featured in their current show, "Catch!". That interest continued to grow and develop. That spring they went to the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in LA, where Howard's Madrigal quartet was singing, and once between songs they did Tom Tinker and passed the hat. They made $1.65. A fortune! An era is born! |
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In the summer of 1973 the duo went to Seattle to live in Paul's aunt's cabin and get high-paying baggage smasher jobs from his uncle at United Airlines. The cabin came through, anyway, but while Paul did end up as a dishwasher in the United Airlines kitchen, all Howard managed to find was what turned out to be his only real job ever: cutting out parts for stuffed animals at minimum wage. At the end of the summer they snuck into a Renaissance Fair in Fall City, Washington, and were the hit of the festival: and, when they'd perform, people would GIVE THEM MONEY! Like, more than enough for lunch! This was a remarkable discovery. They also began their first danger juggling, juggling hunting knives and cutting themselves repeatedly but definitely holding the crowd's attention. They also met Sam Williams, who at the time was working as a puppeteer who juggled on the side (harder than juggling in front, but he had two left hands at the time). He reemerges in the story soon.
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Paul went off to Alaska, intending to live in the wilds with his college roommate Clifford. When Cliff never showed up, Paul lived in Anchorage and worked as a short order cook the first quarter of the next school year. He came back to Santa Cruz, he and Howard took many college classes, and they kept juggling. They opened for a few more plays, including Stop the World I Want to Get Off. The weekend of the Santa Cruz Spring Fair, they performed by the banks of the mighty San Lorenzo, protected by gentle yet psychotic Vietnam veterans, and for the first time had the experience of making so much money they could barely carry it home.
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But Paul was still eager to accelerate their theatrical development. The reason he was studying literature instead of the sciences, as he too as a child had intended, was that in high school he had participated in a highly cathartic and life-changing production of As You Like It .
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The role of the melancholy Jacques was played by a slightly older, much blonder friend of his, Randy Nelson, calligrapher, and ballet dancer who was attending San Jose University and would occasionally drop by to visit.
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| In the summer of 1974, with tales of staggeringly large bags of easy cash, Paul managed to talk Randy into going to San Francisco with them. They would live at Paul's aunt's house (yet another aunt), and in that great Mecca of street performing they would all save up enough to support the next year of their college habit and still have plenty of time for fun and adventure. |
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Randy in '77 |
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Randy didn't actually know how to juggle, but that didn't in any of their minds preclude him from joining a juggling act none of them thought of it as a juggling act particularly, then or now. He purchased a small suite of magic tricks from a gent named William Wizard and performed them between juggling tricks. While Paul and Howard juggled, he mostly just pointed at them. They spent the last of their money on prop rapiers and convertible leather pants and headed off to the fabled City of Street Performers' Dreams.
When they got there, they discovered that the People of San Francisco were pretty used to street performers; in fact, they were utterly jaded and very difficult to impress or to shake down. Rather than the sacks of quarters too heavy to carry that Randy had been lead to expect, they generally pulled together enough for a pretty nice dinner at the end of a long, hard day. In addition to Randy's rope and ring tricks, they would attempt more speculative material too, such as "So That's the Way You Like It" from Beyond the Fringe. After two weeks, Paul's aunt got tired of their failure to accumulate anything more than a daily meal and sent them packing.
But that was okay, because they'd been in touch with Expo '74 in Spokane, Washington. As they understood it, the people at the World's Fair had told them, on the phone and in writing, that they would be paid to perform on the street there and could pass the hat as well. So they stuck out their thumbs and headed for the Eastern Northwest. They didn't bother to bring the letter...
Not far from San Francisco, they were picked up in a van by two women from Michigan, Mary Ann Sullivan (Ed Sullivan's niece! An omen!) and the lovely Latvian Mona Poga, who had come out west to buy Coor's Beer.
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arrived, sleeping in the dust of a plowed field west of Spokane (while the Michigeese [the presumed feminine form of 'Michigander'] slept in the van), the boys cogitated on what to call themselves. Paul and Howard had thought of numerous names, none of them really good enough to commit to, so when they stayed up all night in the UCSC print shop hand printing their very first business cards, they just included them all, and mostly used "Patterson and Magid" if anybody asked. But "Patterson, Nelson, and Magid" didn't have much of a ring to it. Randy suggested "Red Star Craft Works," the name of his brother's jewelry collective.
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Howard had read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov the previous summer, and now as he thought of ways to twist a family circus sort of name, he realized there were parallels between their respective stage personae and the black and passionate characters of that deep, psychological thriller: Randy was always sweet, friendly, positive, and vaguely spiritual on stage, like the youngest brother Alyosha, the student monk; Paul was brash, explosive, and unpredictable, sometimes even a little scary, like Dmitri the soldier; and Howard was talkative, polysyllabic, and philosophical, always trying to explain what was going on, like Ivan the intellectual. So they became, officially, The Flying Karamazov Brothers. Of course being college students they had no idea that most Americans had neither read the novel nor even heard of Dostoevsky; they never imagined that they were setting themselves up for a lifetime of being asked where their trapezes were and complemented on how well they spoke English. But as Randy said, "Hey, we can always change it."
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When they arrived at Expo, they marched up to the office and explained what they thought the arrangement was. They were told that no, they would not be paid, and no, they couldn't pass the hat in the fair or they'd be thrown out, and no, if they tried to pass the hat outside the fair they'd be thrown in jail. They could do all the free shows they wanted, though. They wanted to do exactly one. After a very successful free show (a large gentleman of impressively red neck told them gratifyingly that if the U.S. had spent the $11.5 million dollars they'd spent on its pavilion on acts like theirs, it would have been a much better fair), they got ready to hitchhike back to SeattleÑand couldn't get a ride. For fourteen hours. After spending the night at a park that had been set up as a sort of Hippie Hilton, they tried again to hitchÑwith no success. They speculated that Spokane's population was primarily comprised of people who had hitchhiked in and couldn't get out.
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And so they got to follow the ultimate Boho dream and hop a freight. Really, it was the only option. After a quick game of Guess Where our Ancestors Came From with the surprisingly friendly yard bull (a hard game for many people to resist, what with Randy's Swedish blondism, Howard's freckly combo of eastern European Jewish with a dash of Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, and Paul's dark and striking blend of Turkish and Polish Jew) who guessed totally wrong (but they didn't tell him that), they followed his helpful advice and slipped aboard a boxcar right behind the engine.
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Soon they were speeding through beautiful spreading farmland not served by roads and never seen by those who travel by car, greeting friendly farm children at the crossings, smiling at the folks whose backyards they were rumbling through. They discovered an entire civilization clustered around freight trains, which for all they know is still there, waving from the jungles, partying in the bouncing boxcars, cooking, raising kids, and generally having a lovely time on a beautiful summer day. Then, in Wenatchee, another 50 odd cars were put in front of them, leaving them in the dangerous and unstable middle of the train.
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As they sped through the Cascades, the car began to vibrate in three foot oscillations; the riders would fall asleep, then wake as they smashed into the wall of the car several feet off the floor. Randy said it was as though someone had invented the Hand of GodÑthey'd only got the hand part down so farÑand was testing it on the train. Finally they passed through the famous 17-mile tunnel and found themselves asphyxiating from the horrible belching diesel fumes of the massive engines far ahead. Lying on the floor, breathing through their berets, they eventually lost consciousness.
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When they finally began to bubble to a strange hallucinogenic surface, they were in Everett north of Seattle, the train still being smashed around the yard at 2 in the morning. The massive door, which they'd been unable to move, was slowly sliding closed, and in Paul's hazy confusion he suddenly cried "They're steam-cleaning the train!" Terrified of being parboiled alive by industrial cleaning equipment, they grabbed their few bags, squeezed through the nearly shut door, and staggered into the night.
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Wow, that was less brief a digression than I'd intended. So they began to perform on the waterfront in Seattle, but after Randy's pocket was picked he had enough of the Bohemian life and went back to San Jose to work in the Ford factory before returning to school. This was Randy's First Retirement Attempt. Paul and Howard went to Canada to perform in Victoria, but fearful of sparking an international incident, they first called some official (hard to imagine whom now) in the Canadian government, who told them "I don't think what you're doing is the sort of thing we want to have happening in our country." Impressed at being thrown out of an entire country, Paul briefly joined Randy at the Ford factory before breaking his leg rock-climbing and going to Spain for his junior year.
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| Howard hitchhiked down the coast, revisiting the Fallshire Renaissance Fair and having a grand old time with Sam Williams, who will reenter the story again soon. Howard headed back to Santa Cruz, very much enjoying the life of a single juggler, and settled back into |
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| collegiate and scientific life. He also met his future wife, Seiza de Tarr, sister of the tenor in his Madrigal quartet, and by the end of the school year they were living together (don't worry, it was okay back then). When trying to concentrate on Calculus lectures (and failing), he attempted to design a group logo, trying out endless variations on the Egyptian sun disc, which littered his calculus notes. |
Tim in '76 |
| He sent periodical logo project updates to Paul (who was having a wonderful time defying the Franco government and getting slapped by policemen); Paul was supportive but puzzled by the obsession. By the end of the school year they had decided on the Heart and Wings pattern they still use. |
| Howard also hung out with another juggler named Tim Furst. Tim and Howard had taught respective high school friends to juggle, and when two of those friends met at Berkeley through juggling they each said "well, you should see the guy who taught me!" Eventually they did. Tim had been drafted while at Stanford, studying philosophy and architecture, and when he attained Conscientious Objector status he somehow convinced his draft board not to send him to Tule Lake or some other remote wilderness for brush clearing and similar light entertainments, but instead to let him perform his alternate service by working in the Stanford Medical Library. As a sideline, he worked as an independent trucking contractor, carrying soup samples from Lipton's laboratories in Palo Alto to their factory in Santa Cruz in the sidecar of his mid-60's BMW motorcycle, which featured an engine transplanted from a Volkswagen (not a big engine in a car, but enormous on a motorcycle). While in Santa Cruz, he'd get together with Howard and they'd juggle... |
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Go to The College Years Part Two
Go to the main History page |
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