Goodnight, Sweet Clown
Jul. 23rd, 2012 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peristaltorIn 1992, author Douglass Coupland said this about Bill Gates:
As of July 22, 2012, J.P. is with us no longer.
For those of you not from Seattle, I cannot emphasize enough what an impact this humble clown had on our fair region. J.P.'s show, titled simply The J.P. Patches Show, "was one of the longer-running locally-produced children's television programs in the United States", running continuously from 1958 to 1981. Every morning, we would sit in front of the telly and watch J.P. broadcast from his home in the City Dump, watch his many guests leave (including my cousins, on a few occasions) and then listen to them soon after fall through the hole he never fixed. When his monstrous grandfather clock hit 8, it was time to walk the mile to the bus (7/10th of a mile of driveway; no fooling).
Dad ran the high school drama program and had a bunch of sound effects records. One was dear simply because J.P. got half of his show's sound effects from it, including Esmerelda's laugh and sigh ("Baby laughing" and "Baby sighing", the Tobackaty Bird's call (onomatopoeic name, that, on the album "Tropical bird"), the guy falling down the hole and many others.
Okay, enough about me. This guy was huge around here. Soundgarden's Kim Thayil and Hiro Yamamoto grew up in Illinois, so when the new band mate Chris Cornell, a local, suggested opening one of their shows at the Moore Theater with a clown, they were skeptical. According to an interview with Thayil, J.P. walked out to a restless crowd . . . which immediately got quiet. Thayil was expecting a riot. Didn't happen.
Instead, he heard from the clown, "Hi, Patches Pals!"
And incredibly, he got the uniform response, "Hi, J.P.!"
J.P. went one to introduce other Soundgarden shows, never once inducing a riot. He was beloved as only a television clown could be.
How many telly clowns get
bronze statues of them made?
Expect a bit of respectful quiet from the NW for a while. *sigh*
His Seattle brain is becoming the brain of the planet and because of that Seattle is one of the most important places in the world. The brain of the planet is being developed here. . . . And that brain watched J.P. Patches.
As of July 22, 2012, J.P. is with us no longer.
For those of you not from Seattle, I cannot emphasize enough what an impact this humble clown had on our fair region. J.P.'s show, titled simply The J.P. Patches Show, "was one of the longer-running locally-produced children's television programs in the United States", running continuously from 1958 to 1981. Every morning, we would sit in front of the telly and watch J.P. broadcast from his home in the City Dump, watch his many guests leave (including my cousins, on a few occasions) and then listen to them soon after fall through the hole he never fixed. When his monstrous grandfather clock hit 8, it was time to walk the mile to the bus (7/10th of a mile of driveway; no fooling).
Dad ran the high school drama program and had a bunch of sound effects records. One was dear simply because J.P. got half of his show's sound effects from it, including Esmerelda's laugh and sigh ("Baby laughing" and "Baby sighing", the Tobackaty Bird's call (onomatopoeic name, that, on the album "Tropical bird"), the guy falling down the hole and many others.
Okay, enough about me. This guy was huge around here. Soundgarden's Kim Thayil and Hiro Yamamoto grew up in Illinois, so when the new band mate Chris Cornell, a local, suggested opening one of their shows at the Moore Theater with a clown, they were skeptical. According to an interview with Thayil, J.P. walked out to a restless crowd . . . which immediately got quiet. Thayil was expecting a riot. Didn't happen.
Instead, he heard from the clown, "Hi, Patches Pals!"
And incredibly, he got the uniform response, "Hi, J.P.!"
J.P. went one to introduce other Soundgarden shows, never once inducing a riot. He was beloved as only a television clown could be.
How many telly clowns get
bronze statues of them made?
Expect a bit of respectful quiet from the NW for a while. *sigh*