Wanted: If you have photos, a favorite story or anything to add to enrich this page, please contact me: RIBubbleGuy@yahoo.com & Thanks!
Click here to see Tom on Video ~ Tracey Ulman's show...
Los Angeles Times, Feb. 11 1995. Specifically, it's a caterpillar bubble, a bubble inside a bubble, a jewel bubble, a bubble big enough to surround a 6-foot-tall person and a multitude of other soapy wonders. All of those can be seen today and Sunday at the Launch Pad in Costa Mesa. Noddy's "Bubble Magic" show launches the pad's second annual Bubble Festival.
If for no other reason than lack of competition, he's considered the world's foremost bubble-ologist.
Though Noddy has been playing with bubbles for a quarter-century now, his career really began to bubble in 1982, when he first appeared on "The Tonight Show." He appeared twice more on that show, and on countless other shows and newscasts here and around the world since. He's blown bubbles in Chile, Australia, Yugoslavia and Japan; he produced his first Bubble Festival at San Francisco's Exploratorium in 1983.
Like his bubbles, Noddy is somewhat transient himself. He tours most of the year; in fact, he began his career as a street performer.
"I took a job in a New Jersey factory, but as soon as I took it, I set a date for quitting," he recalled. "I was 20 years old and saving money for (a trip to) Europe."
Looking for cheap ways to entertain himself after work, he first tried his hand at the yo-yo, then a plywood paddle, to which a rubber ball is attached with a rubber cord.
"I tried to do a puppet show on the streets, and I wasn't a very good street performer. But I found that I could stand in one place in Central Park and bounce a soap bubble on my arm, and I didn't have to gather a crowd for the puppet show. I had a crowd."
Noddy now makes a living blowing bubbles at science museums and colleges around the United States. He also performs at corporate parties and at trade fairs-promoting such products as bubble-jet printers and bubbling hot tubs-and often appears on TV shows abroad. He boasts that he uses no gimmicks in his show. In his 1988 book, "Tom Noddy's Bubble Magic" (Running Press, 1988), he shares the secrets to most of his bubble tricks.
"There are dodecahedrons and tetrahedrons and all sorts of shapes in there," Noddy said. "If you look closely at suds, you'll go crazy. But you'll also find cubes. Bubble cubes are central to what I do." A bubble cube is created when a cluster of six
A bubble cube, however, is "a spherical cube, not a square cube," a cube with "traumatically" bulging sides. Researching the physics of soap film, Noddy found that bubble walls never join other bubble walls at 90-degree angles but, rather, at 120 degree angles, and that "bubble edges always meet bubble edges at 109 degrees, 28 minutes and 16 seconds. That's California time. And that's a joke. 120 degrees between the walls, 109 between the edges.
"That apparent chaos in your suds has an exact and repeating order to it," he said. "All the bubbles that have ever been, join at 120 degrees. When dinosaurs were frothing at the mouth, that little spit at the corner . . . ."
In "Mathematics and Optimal Form" (Scientific American Books, 1985), authors Stefan Hildebrandt and Anthony Tromba note that there is an Etruscan vase in the Louvre portraying children blowing bubbles. The book also includes photographs of Noddy with such creations as a "near dodecahedron within a bubble cluster" and a "worm" of 17 bubbles.
"For those giant bubbles, I use a weaker mix of soap, dishwashing liquid mixed with water mixed with some of the Woolworth's soap bubble stuff," he said. "Woolworth's, by the way, also sells soap bubbles by the half-gallon. That way your kids can spill all of them at once."
But most appropriate, with Valentine's Day upcoming, Noddy presents the love bubble.
"Two bubbles become one," Noddy said. "One will be a smoke bubble, one clear. Bubbles normally bounce off each other-it's very difficult to get true love, you know. But I will swing the bubbles together with enough brute force so that the two will literally join, the wall between them dissolve, the air from the two will mix, encased in a single bubble."
It's just like love, he pointed out.
"You have to overcome surface tension," Noddy said. "A scientist told me that. He didn't know it was funny when he said it."
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
IF YOU KNEW BUBBLES LIKE HE KNOWS BUBBLES...
November 25, 1988 Detroit Free Press
Like many a teacher or engineer, Tom Noddy has built a career on what he learned in college.
"When I was in college," Noddy said, "a friend of mine used to put smoke into bubbles -- she blew smoke bubbles."
Although Noddy's talent has earned him TV exposure (Johnny Carson, "That's Incredible," the Smothers Brothers), magazine features and scads of appearances at science museums, he didn't start out to be a professional bubble blower. Who ever does?
Noddy, 39, isn't really sure what he started out to be. He attended Memphis State University ("I majored in anti-war demonstrations"), left in 1969 and decided he wanted to see Europe. He moved back in with his parents in Paterson, N.J., and gave himself 10 months to work in a factory at the end of which "I'd take off with whatever money I got." Frugality required that he didn't go out much. "I needed to entertain myself at home nights. . . . I got a jar of bubbles." He remembered his friend who blew smoke bubbles; he learned to emulate the trick and spent time just watching what bubbles do and pondering why.
"My father thought 'Oh, great! First long hair, now the bubbles.' "
True to his vow, he quit the factory job after 10 months and went to Europe. "I ended up living on Crete for eight months. I picked olives and did house painting and got broke." He also performed with puppets and bubbles on the streets of various countries.
He returned to the United States, moved to Santa Cruz, Calif., where he still lives, and worked as a street performer, hooking up with such future notables as Avner the Eccentric and the Flying Karamazov Brothers. Bubbles became a significant part of his shows and, says Noddy, "Everybody always liked the bubbles."
Around the time he thought about getting himself on TV -- the winter of 1981-82 -- TV came looking for him in the form of "That's Incredible" and "The Tonight Show." A star, or at least a steadily working bubble guy, was born.
He calls one of his trademark tricks "Love," because in it one bubble surrounds another like a hug. "In order to get love," he says, "you have to overcome surface tension."
Incidentally, Noddy uses common, everyday bubble mixture, the kind you'll find at any toy store. "A lot of people I know have done something to make it stronger. I know what breaks bubbles; I avoid doing that. If I was able to make it stronger, most of these things wouldn't work."
Bubbling over with fun
April 3, 2005
AURORA -- Tom Noddy sees them in the soap suds when he's washing dishes. And in the Swiss cheese. And when baseball players spit.
Bubbles, bubbles, boils and globules.
The 56-year-old New Jersey native has spent the last 30 years playing with the same soapy liquid that little kids buy in colorful plastic bottles. His bubble performances have taken him everywhere from street puppet shows to science and math conventions. He's performed in European Vaudeville theaters, California's Bubble Festival, nightclub venues and even on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show.
Last week, Noddy was in Aurora as he performs Bubble Magic at the SciTech Hands On Museum.
"My biggest fans are little kids and mathematicians of the highest level," he said after a recent performance. "I've never met anyone who wasn't interested in bubbles. They're so primal and basic, and yet, they're just beautiful."
During Noddy's hour-long bubble show, he created a Mount St. Helens bubble that jiggled until the top popped to release a stream of smoke, a caterpillar bubble made up of about a dozen increasingly larger bubbles, a Galactica bubble with a bunch of little bubbles zooming around inside a large bubble, and a carousel bubble where a ring of bubbles spun around two larger bubbles.
Sitting on the edge of his plastic chair as he strained for a better view, Tristan watched entranced with about 30 other wide-eyed children and their families.
As they shouted out "Wow" and "Cool" and "How does he do that," Noddy bounced bubbles off his shirt, blew them inside one another, poked them, ate them and spit them back out. He even created a cube bubble -- something that a physicist friend once told him was impossible.
One of the most difficult tricks, he said as he brought the plastic wand to his mustache-covered lips and blew a bubble, is Love, "especially if you're looking for real love."
He blew a second bubble and filled it with smoke.
"Real love is when two become one," he said and took each bubble, dangling from two wands, and bounced them together. The two bubbles sprung off one another, still dangling from their separate wands.
Pop goes the bubble.
"Sometimes, that happens in love," he said, undiscouraged.
Then, as he carefully brought the wands together, the two bubbles merged to form one perfect, smoke- filled sphere.
Noddy said he started his bubble- making career while working at a dead-end factory job when he was 21. To save money, he would think of cheap ways to entertain himself at home. First he tried Yo-yos but soon grew bored of the game. Next, he tried Paddle Ball and soon grew bored of that.
Then, he remembered playing with bubbles as a kid, blowing long streams of the "sparkly" little spheres into the wind. And he never grew bored again.
Everyday for the last three decades, whether as a street performer or for a museum show, Noddy has played with bubbles.
"As a kid, you're stunned by the beauty until someone convinces us that it's not amazing; it's just normal," he said after the show as he twirled the straw in a soapy mixture. "But it is amazing. It is gorgeous. And it is impossible to blow an ugly bubble."
Don't forget to visit Tom's website: www.TomNoddy.com.
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Here are three articles from the press that feature Tom prominently in his fight to help the street performers:
Nüz
Street Heat
From the July 4-11, 2001 issue of Metro Santa Cruz.
Musicians, downtown residents and councilmembers are stewing in
the aftermath of last week's marimba incident, in which local band
Sadza was asked by the SCPD to stop playing on Pacific Avenue
(Nüz, June 27). Musician Rick Walker is organizing a coalition to
address what he feels is "a stepping-up [of efforts] by police to stop
live music in this town." Though the marimba contingent could
barely get a word in edgewise during the June 26 Santa Cruz City
Council meeting's public-comment period, they did manage to get
their point across: that live music is a boon to Santa Cruz and ought
to be encouraged, not routed.
And then there is Michele Makel, who lives and works at El Centro
on Pacific Avenue. She's also starting a new coalition, called
(probably) the Pacific Avenue Residents Association, to represent
downtown residents concerned with noisy disturbances in all forms,
not just musical ones.
"Why not have Pacific Avenue closed to automobiles? Not all the
time, just Friday and Saturday evening," says Makel, adding that
musical disturbances are also a big problem for Pacific Avenue
residents, most of whom are retired. "It seems like most of the
residents' complaints [about music] go unaddressed," she says.
"When you register a complaint with the police, you can request a
call back, but a lot of people don't do that and go back to sleep, so
the complaint goes unanswered."
Councilmember Emily Reilly says, "It's important to spend time
going over what is currently on the books regarding music
ordinances downtown. There seems to be a little confusion on this
point, but we're optimistic we can put something together that will
work for most people and be very supportive of musicians
downtown."
Councilmember Ed Porter thinks "we need to take a look at how
we're doing it [dealing with downtown music]. Having police shut
down the marimba band was not a good move. We need to look at
how the policy is being developed and implemented. A few things
may have happened that are not appropriate."
Porter believes that "the street performers' self-adopted
agreements are the best way to go." He's referring to agreements
compiled in 1980 with the consensus of 35 street performers, who
were trying to avoid inflexible laws when a conservative City Council
threatened a ban on their craft.
As Tom Noddy, bubble man and organizer of the Santa Cruz Street
Performer's Guild, explains, "The agreement consists of the
unwritten rules of street performing, which is older than stores if
you think about it. Street performing goes all the way back to the
markets of Babylonia."
Noddy says that over the years, the approach has garnered inquiries
from towns with similar problems as far away as Tyler, Texas. The
rules, copies of which are given to performers, residents, police and
downtown hosts, call for an hourly rotation, no blocking of
pedestrian traffic, and self-regulated spacing to prevent too many
performers from accumulating in one area. Performers are also
asked to respect downtown residents by observing the city's noise
ordinance, which calls for a 10pm curfew on noisy behavior.
As Noddy points out, one of the first street performers in Santa
Cruz, Tom Scribner--the saw player immortalized in bronze on
Pacific Avenue--lived at the St. George Hotel and used to yell at
musicians if they woke him up.
Nüz
Clown, Interrupted
From the June 18-25, 2003 issue of Metro Santa Cruz
"I've got the illegal items."
"And I've got the legal ones."
So said Bubble Man Tom Noddy and Flying Karamazov Brother Tim
Furst as they headed for the Cooper House last week, carrying not
joints and open bottles o' beer, but three silver juggling batons and
a tightly twisted neon-pink bottle of bubble mixture.
The question, of course, is which were the supposed "illegal items"?
The answer: the batons. At least if they're airborne. And possibly
only if they also involve a unicycle. Or something like that.
Yeah, it's kinda bizarre, given that three decades ago, a young
Noddy and Furst kickstarted successful performing careers by
blowing bubbles and juggling batons outside the old Cooper House.
But the fact is that bubble blowing is now the only activity explicitly
exempted from the infamous hackeysack ban, in which a freaked-
out post-9/11 City Council also prohibited the throwing,
discharging and launching of footballs, baseballs, beach balls and
Frisbees downtown.
Last week, mayor Emily Reilly assured Nüz that it was clear to her
that when the council passed said ordinance, "we did not intend
tooutlaw juggling. We need and love street performers. Maybe we
need to state that again at the City Council."
Maybe so, given what happened to Coire Langham, a young clown
who recently set up juggling clubs, balls and unicycle outside
O'Neill's, as he prepared to balance a music stand on his chin (Ooh!
Aah!), while simulating tightrope walking using a bright purple rope
laid on the sidewalk (Ooh! Aah! Gasp!).
Not surprisingly, a crowd gathered--as did a police officer, who
reportedly told Langham that it's against the law to juggle or
balance music stands--not to mention ride unicycles on sidewalks,
or use them to do tricks on downtown streets--but that he could
walk the tightrope along a silk rope, provided that it was laid on the
ground.
Reilly says that because Langham's act involved a unicycle and
projectiles, it was a "little more complicated" than your average
juggling performance, but that Assistant City Manager Martin Bernal
"is more than willing to help the clown get a permit for his act," a
process which Bernal insists is "not really that complicated."
But Noddy is upset that a downtown host called the cops on a red-
nosed clown whose act was delighting kids and parents alike.
"If the hosts work for the Downtown Association, then they should
be promoting the downtown experience for everyone," says Noddy,
who wants the city to dump said ordinance and return to the street
performers' voluntary guidelines, which he claims worked fine until
spring 2002, at which point Reilly and Councilmember Ed Porter
said efforts to address serious and dangerous downtown problems
(like drug and gang violence and sexual harassment) would not
endanger the 23-year-old agreement between performers and
merchants.
"Complaints about street performing accounted for less than 1
percent of downtown police calls at the time, but now performers
are being chased from alcoves of closed shops without the nicety of
the required trespassing complaint [nor letter on file nor posted
notice]," fumes Noddy. "They are being danced around by various
hosts and police officers' ideas of what the new laws now permit,
plus a general sense that the intent is to keep performers on a tight
leash."
Meanwhile, Porter, who Nüz shall henceforth nickname "Hall Pass,"
has been busy emailing explanations that the "expelling of
projectiles" ordinance section is the reason juggling would be held
to be prohibited.
"Whether or not one should balance a music stand on one's chin is
not clear to me. But, if you cannot currently ride a bicycle on the
downtown sidewalks, that may very well apply to a unicycle. Both of
those tricks can easily be allowed by obtaining a performance
permit," Hall Pass observes, even as the Downtown Association's
Keith Holtaway says he's trying to "fix things" so performers can use
plazas without permits.
Plazas? What Plazas?
"There are three or four great public plazas that no one uses,
including Abbot Square, and the area in front of Art Forms as well
as Plaza Lane. We're trying to set things up so it's easier for
performers to use them," Holtaway says.
Oh, we thought you meant a plaza on Pacific Avenue--but that
would put performers in danger of attracting a crowd, now wouldn't
it?
"These moves squash the city's weird eccentric side and make it
sterile like Capitola," says Noddy, as he demonstrates the beauty of
soap bubbles by blowing streams of them into Furst's face.
"Keep Santa Cruz Imitating Austin," jokes Furst, alluding to the Keep
Santa Cruz Weird fund, which copied Austin's efforts and has
reportedly accumulated $3K--and triggered rumors that performers
plan to use the money to sue the city for making it so darn hard for
them to perform on the streets here. Until then, better stick to
bubbles.
Nüz
When Lemons Fly
From the July 2-9, 2003 issue of Metro Santa Cruz
It's not every day you share strawberry shortcake with Hamlet (Ryan
Artzberger)and Ophelia's brother, Laertes (Carl Cofield), while
learning how East Coast actors acquire the ultimate Cruzer accent
(hang out with mountain bike mechanics who say, "Hey dude, pass
us the doobie and the Allen wrench," apparently,) but that's what
happened to Nüz at Shakespeare Santa Cruz's media lunch.
SSC artistic director Risa Brainin, who's directing Hamlet this year,
argued that post-9/11 is the most opportune moment to stage
Willy's greatest tragedy.
"Hamlet engenders us to question our motives for and obsession
with revenge," she said as we chowed our salad, and by the time we
were imbibing the whipped cream on the berries, Comedy of Errors
director William Partlan, who grew up on the East Coast, was
venturing that it seemed only fitting to set Shakespeare's finest
farce in Santa Cruz and explore it "as a true outsider."
All of which seemed sugarily pleasant, but a mere four hours later,
when Bubble Man Tom Noddy was cited and arrested for juggling
three lemons outside Borders, Nüz bitterly concluded that if Partlan
is serious about exploring the Cruz, he may want to invest in
lemons for all and any of the Errors' inevitable juggling scenes.
Reached after he was released from jail 13 hours later, where he, er,
not exactly partied until 6 in the morning with a cell full of drunks
and piss artists, Noddy said he provoked the citation by juggling
under the nose of a police officer "not because I want to be cited,
but because I want to be able to juggle without being cited."
And though he had not slept all night, the newly released Noddy
was already distributing fliers advising people that juggling is now
officially outlawed downtown, even as he played a tape of City
Attorney John Barisone advising then-Mayor Chris Krohn last
summer that the new ordinances would not outlaw juggling.
Reached shortly after Noddy's muck-stirring release, Barisone told
Nüz that he did not recall saying that juggling would not be
outlawed, "but if Tom has a tape, I must have, though I'm not sure
which version of the ordinances I was referring to at the time."
Noting that he will therefore dismiss Noddy's current citation,
Barisone added that he is however putting the Bubble Man on notice
that juggling is within the range of conduct prohibited by the
hackeysack ordinance--meaning, Nüz supposes, that further efforts
to make lemons fly will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
"This is all part of the same old cat-and-mouse game. When you're
writing an ordinance, you can't say, 'This is to prohibit punks from
throwing things on Pacific Avenue,' that's the dilemma," said
Barisone, noting that the city's Deptartment of Parks and Recreation
is "trying to put together a streamlined permitting process, knowing
that the bad actors are not going to apply."
Indeed, Parks and Rec's Carol Scurich told Nüz that said permits
only cost $10 and should be signed and approved within 24 hours
of applying and that so far she's issued one--for music--with one
more for music and another for juggling possibly in the works.
But Santa Cruz Art Commission chair Chip (no, he does not have a
last name) says the idea of dedicating any city staff to create such a
process is "blatantly offensive" given the ongoing cuts in staff and
hours for existing programs over at City Hall.
"Street performers are the canaries in the coal mine," said Chip.
And now it seems the canaries are going to sing their sweet heads
off, with the Flying Karamazov Brothers, who got their start on our
local streets, threatening some serious pin action this fall no matter
what.
"Lets bring thousands of jugglers to Santa Cruz! Like Gandhi to the
sea to make salt! We'll overwhelm the system," promised Ivan
Karamazov, while Dmitri Karamazov told the bubble jailbird, "You
are my hero. As soon as I can I'm coming to Santa Cruz and do a
street show."
Reached by cell phone en route to the Ukraine, Mayor Emily Reilly
vowed to amend the law upon her return to Lemon Land.
"I'm very surprised to hear that anyone was arrested for juggling. I
do not believe that was our intent; I have listened to the tapes of
Barisone saying this would not outlaw juggling, and if it has been,
that's something we need to fix."
Other articles about Tom!
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA)
May 24, 1985
FOREVER BLOWING BUBBLES
Check him out, man. He's got his hair knotted at the back of his neck, but it still cascades halfway down his spine. He's so all-natural that he shows up at the Franklin Institute with a half-loaf of zucchini bread filled with pineapple chunks. He's got a pack of butts in his pocket, but they're low-tar numbers with a generic label. And when he talks, he sounds like a cross between Buckminster Fuller and the Grateful Dead.
If you want, Tom Noddy can also expound at great length about soap-bubble molecules, and about how, when three surfaces meet along a curve, they do so at angles of 120 degrees with respect to one another, but the point to be made here is this: Tom Noddy blows bubbles for a living.
And we're not talking penury here, either. Tom Noddy has blown bubbles on TV. With Ed McMahon over there roaring on Johnny's couch - on two occasions, no less. With Charles Kuralt, with Merv Griffin, and with broadcast crews in England, Ireland, Holland, France, Canada and Australia. He's even blown bubbles for kids in Yugoslavia.
Tom Noddy, New Jersey native and California migrant, is headlining at the Franklin Institute's Bubbles and Balloons Festival this weekend; in fact, he's going through a period of mini-fame these days.
"I'm getting my 15," he says, citing the Andy Warhol dictum that each American will be allotted 15 minutes of limelight, and that's fine with him. Not that he minded the days when he had to sleep under the stars, but this is easier. This is a time when NBC News comes around, eager to tape a "bright" feature for the tail end of a downbeat newscast - all because he can coax a giant caterpillar from the same soap-water-glycerine solution that any kid can buy at the five-and-dime.
And we're not talking about Lawrence Welk bubbles here. We're talking about the Land of Oz bubble: Noddy blows up a basic sphere, then fires up a cigarette and blows smoke inside with the aid of a plastic straw. He somehow rotates the whole bubble so the smoke starts swirling inside, assuming the shape of a tornado. "Toto!" he cries out, "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore!"
There's the Mount St. Helen's model, where the inserted smoke explodes through the top of the bubble, and there's the Love Bubble, which involves blowing two separate spheres, then merging them into one ("Real love is oneness," he intones), then popping the ball - yet leaving behind a tiny baby bubble ("Birth!" he shouts in triumph. "All right!").
The "real love" rap is for real. He says he believes in "nonsexist, nonracist humor," which he traces back to the street performers he met in California 10 years ago. Real throwbacks from the '60s, he calls them; he even knows a sword-swallower with hair longer than his. The street artists never went for the my-wife-has-a-headache jokes, he says, because that stuff didn't go down well on the street.
Now all this is not your average American career path. He grew up in Paterson, N.J., the son of a machine maintenance man, and he was the first in his family to go to college. He wanted to be a lawyer, "like Perry Mason," but these were the late '60s, and he got caught up in the tempestuous times at Memphis State University. He dropped out in 1969, hitchhiked to rock festivals, and wound up back home, dead broke, in 1971. He was 22 years old.
He figured he'd save money for a trip to Europe, so he got a job in a contact-paper factory, feeding rolls of it to women workers who cut them into four-foot strips. And while he fed the rolls, he dreamed about blowing bubbles. That was his primary leisure-time pursuit; a Memphis friend had turned him on to bubbles, and now he was sitting around at night in his parents' house, blowing his time away. He was just being practical. It kept him out of the bars.
His father wasn't pleased. "First the long hair, now the bubbles!" he exclaimed. But Noddy went to Europe, then back to Jersey for another factory job, then off to California and his rendezvous with destiny.
He started doing an act and passing the hat at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, but the wind broke the bubbles, so he shifted to Berkeley. He also worked up a puppet show - starring a backpacking hippie puppet whose companion yearned to return to the womb - but the bubble act drew the crowd every time.
Word of his work spread far and wide, and finally The Tonight Show tracked him down. By then, it was 1982. "For a long time," he recalls, "I didn't want to do TV. I was doing 'entertainment for a post-TV generation.' But I got afraid that somebody would go on TV and do my act, and that I'd be out on the street where people would think I was doing his act."
So he did the show, and it was a snap. On the street, he says, you can be in the midst of a quip, and lose it in the exhaust of a passing bus. But on TV, he could blow bubbles shaped like tetrahedrons, and there was no wind to mess with the geometry.
But Noddy has few illusions about what he calls "the herd effect." He'll be happy, in the main, to make the rounds of science museums, rapping about soap molecules with rapt physics professors, and turning on the kids to what he calls "the ephemeral, precious nature" of his complex creations.
"I'd be happy just to keep my van running," he says. "This (fame) is all a bonus. I could end up as The Old Bubble Man, someone who's brought in to show off for the kids. It still might come to that. I know one thing: Every bubble I have ever made has burst."
IF YOU GO
Tom Noddy will perform at the Franklin Institute's Bubbles and Balloons Festival, tomorrow through Monday. He will appear three times daily, at 12:30, 2 and 3:30 p.m., in the Science Auditorium.
Other bubble activities include demonstrations by glassblowers from the Wheaton Village Museum from 1 to 5 p.m. daily, bubble-rock demonstrations at 2:30 p.m. daily and bubble workshops at 11:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. daily (participants get free bubble wands).
A variety of balloon activities are scheduled. At noon and 3 p.m. daily, visitors can put balloons together in creative shapes. At 1 p.m. daily, balloons will be frozen with liquid nitrogen. At 12:45 p.m. and 2:45 p.m. daily, weather balloons will be discussed. At 2:15 p.m. daily, there will be balloon workshops.
The film The Red Balloon will be shown at 1:15 p.m. daily and the Buster Keaton film The Balloonatic will be shown at 2:30 p.m.
The Franklin Institute is at 20th Street and the Parkway. All activities are free with museum admission of $4 for adults, $3 for children 4-12 and $2.50 for senior citizens. Children under 4 are admitted free. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. tomorrow and Monday; noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Information: 564-3375.
The Dallas Morning News
December 21, 1987
SEND IN THE CLOWNS
Nimble-bodied and quick-witted, `new vaudevillians' are stealing the show
During his show at the West End Cabaret, Avner the Eccentric will stumble and fall a great deal, but eventually the enchanting clown will balance a 10-foot aluminum ladder on his chin, juggle popcorn, wrestle a hilarious handkerchief, make toilet paper disappear and eat about 20 paper napkins that then come out of his mouth in different colors.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday nights over at Club Dada, the Beledi Ensemble finishes a set of its haunting Middle Eastern jazz and a 39-year-old busker -- a performer who passes the hat -- named Artis takes the stage. Artis will sing some of his painfully sincere and comic songs without music. His brief show is nowhere near as polished or theatrical as Avner's, but Artis does one thing better than any other human being alive: He plays the spoons.
Artis plays the spoons like Keith Moon played the drums. In a blinding, whirlwind frenzy of rhythm, he will clatter spoons against his head, chin, elbows, legs, heels and teeth -- and leave his audience astonished.
The Flying Karamazov Brothers, who were at the Plaza Theatre in September, juggle spaghetti and bad puns; Bill Irwin, whose brilliant The Regard of Flight has been broadcast on PBS, folds himself up in a trunk, while Penn and Teller, currently on Broadway, sardonically destroy their own magic tricks.
So what is all of this foolishness?
For the last several years, a lot of it has been called the "new vaudeville.' It's come out of the theatrical fringe world of Renaissance fairs, circuses and comedy houses to play on television, Broadway (where Avner sold out for eight months) and films (the Karamazovs and Avner appeared in The Jewel of the Nile and Avner's new film, Brenda Starr will be out soon). It's even appeared in cultural citadels such as Lincoln Center (where the Karamazovs and Avner starred in The Comedy of Errors).
Ever since a cover story appeared in American Theatre magazine two years ago, a lot of ink has been spilled on the "new vaudevillians.' The term has become an easy tag for the media to market. "It's a hook on a wide-ranging phenomenon that doesn't really explain the phenomenon,' says Fred Curchack, the internationally known performance artist whose Stuff as Dreams Are Made On, presented at the Dallas Theater Center in October, bears certain similarities to "new vaudeville.'
"The press made it up,' says Avner Eisenberg with an easy smile and a shrug. As a definition, "it may have all edges and no center,' he says. Some of the groups, such as Penn and Teller, even try to dissociate themselves from the term.
Nevertheless, many of these increasingly popular performers do have stylistic and thematic ties. One can consider them a very loose-knit impulse in contemporary entertainment: "It's a search for a form (of theater) that is extremely accessible across a wide range of people,' Avner says. "All of us represent the reinvention of the wheel.'
For better or worse, the name "new vaudeville' has stuck. The term vaudeville may be medieval, but it has come to refer to the American variety show, popular before World War I, that featured particularly and sometimes peculiarly talented performers. In Showbiz from Vaude to Video, authors Abel Green and Joe Laurie Jr. describe a typical bill as containing anything from "divinities like Sarah Bernhardt and Lily Langtry' to "wirewalkers, contortionists, dog acts and midgets.'
Vaudeville gave birth to silent comedians such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton; it was the mass appeal of their films, among others, that helped kill the circuit of more than 2,000 vaudeville houses throughout the country.
The "new vaudevillians' have revived some of the physical virtuosity of such acts. Like Keaton, Avner and Irwin are acrobatic clowns of breathtaking grace -- Avner will leap over a seated audience member to grab a newspaper in mid-flight. Like Houdini, Teller, of Penn and Teller, will wriggle out of a straitjacket and escape from handcuffs before the unbelieving eyes of his audience.
These performers also have dusted off folk arts normally disdained by classical theater. "Eccentric' is a vaudevillian term meaning a master manipulator of objects, and Avner balances just about anything during his show -- stacks of paper cups, brooms, ladders and a peacock feather. The Karamazovs will juggle household appliances.
Tom Noddy the Bubble Guy has expanded bubble-blowing into a mind-blowing comic technique. Although Curchack's Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is more of a traditional theater piece, its eclectic array of stage techniques includes puppetry, mime and ventriloquism.
The impulse to explore such crafts, Avner explains, was a reaction to the "formalism and inaccessibility of traditional theater, films and television' -- what Avner calls "the dulling edge of entertainment.'
Says Curchack: "It has to do with most of these people moving through the "dropping-out' phase of hippiedom. The ambition to be in the established theater was undermined by the sense of emptiness of those values, of the world of show biz having reached a dead end.'
Indeed, many of the "new vaudevillians' are from the West Coast (San Francisco has even held a New Vaudeville Festival), and many, such as the Karamazovs and Noddy, have ponytails and pleasantly countercultural attitudes. Many were part of or worked with the same California troupes, such as the Pickle Family Circus or the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
Because of this background and the experience of struggling for years as oddball street performers and festival attractions, many "new vaudeville' acts "deconstruct' or playfully satirize established, middle-class theatrical forms. The simplest example is audience participation: Avner, the Karamazovs, Penn and Teller, and Curchack simply ignore the division of audience and performer to include hapless theatergoers in their antics.
More tellingly, however, "new vaudeville' pieces tend to undermine expectations to become a kind of "anti-theater.' Irwin's The Regard of Flight is about his attempt to create "a New Theater' even as he continually fails to do so: He just can't give up his beloved hat tricks, slap shoes and funny nose.
Similarly, Avner's show is a dazzling display of physical agility, yet it's actually about a sad-sackish clown who is elegantly inept. As the show's subtitle says, "If You Can't Succeed Every Time, Learn to Fail Magnificently.'
As Curchack explains, "An analysis of (a "new vaudeville') performance goes on simultaneously with the performance.' Penn and Teller, for instance, frequently debunk their own magic tricks, and then top the audience's amazement with another, even more astonishing trick.
In their suspicion of glitzy American show biz and dinosaur stage classics, the "new vaudevillians' have resurrected performance traditions from the commedia dell'arte, court buffoons and European clowning. They seek the ingenuity and popular appeal of magic acts, the circus and, well, vaudeville. But when combined with their Zen-like sense of humor, their knowledge of Samuel Beckett's comics and even their left-wing politics, they achieve what has been called "metaphysical slapstick.'
Artis the Spoonman is more a highly unusual musician than a full-fledged "new vaudevillian.' He does not create a broad clown character; he is merely himself on stage, awkward but friendly. Yet he represents the alternative, "common-man' origins of many "new vaudevillians': Although he has played his spoons for Frank Zappa, Pete Seeger and Garrison Keillor, Artis continues to live in a schoolbus, driving around the country, making his money for the past 14 years solely through donations collecte d at his performances. He follows a life as old and simple as that of a wandering medieval juggler.
At the other end of development is a "postmodern clown' like Irwin. A highly literate and trained stage performer, Irwin is scheduled to co-star with comedians Steve Martin and Robin Williams in a revival of Beckett's Waiting for Godot to be directed by Mike Nichols next summer in New York.
Around the same time, Curchack will be working with Avner at Philadelphia's annual Movement Theatre International Festival. Having received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Curchack is planning "a clown summit' with Avner, the Norwegian Elsa Kvamme, Czech clown Bolislav Polivka and his French wife, Chantal Poullin. "The real idea,' Curchack says, "is for four different solo performers in very different clown genres and different languages to get together in a tower of Babel. I t's about the nature and confusion of language and the attempt to find a single performance language.'
It also sounds like a metaphor for the attractions and confusions of "new vaudeville' itself. It may whimsically defy definition, but it's also a growing success.
Journal Star (Peoria, IL)
March 14, 1999
NOBODY KNOWS THE BUBBLES HE'S SEEN>BUT EXPERT IS HAPPY TO SHARE A FEW TRADE SECRETS WITH CHILDREN
PEORIA -- Physics buffs may argue it's impossible to create a cube with bubbles, but all it takes for Tom Noddy is a few puffs with his bubble tools -- a typical wand and pencil-thin straw.
In a matter of seconds, he'll display a smoke-filled block firmly suspended between four other bubbles, just to prove them wrong.
Then, as the pieces begin to disband, he'll draw a bubble into his mouth and shoot 12 tiny ones out at the crowd.
"This is what you get after 25 years of playing with bubbles almost every day," Noddy joked to a group of children and parents at Lakeview Museum on Saturday morning.
"I don't recommend (eating them), though. . . . It's an acquired taste."
The internationally known bubble man, whose stunts have graced most of television's after-school science programs and variety shows, attributes an attraction for soapy suds to their basic nature.
His own fascination started at 21, while he was working in a New Jersey factory to save money to hitchhike across Europe. At the time, he was trying to recapture some youthful spirit.
When he got bored with yo-yos, puppets and paddle ball, Noddy turned to bubbles and grew obsessed.
"I started seeing things in the air that nature was doing," he said. "You can't blow an ugly bubble," even if it's the plain, everyday round sort.
But you can blow a sophisticated bubble if it comes in the form of a caterpillar, carousel, tornado, volcano, galaxy or yin-yang symbol -- all shapes Noddy illustrated Saturday.
"When I was in Australia, the kids wanted me to do a koala bubble. I tried to put a tail on it, and the kids said, `Koalas don't have tails,' so I had to suck it back in," he said.
Though Noddy's skills are refined to an art form, many of the bubble creations he makes are reproducible and don't even require special bubble solutions.
"I'm showing you what you can do with the cheap stuff," he said.
Creating a caterpillar bubble, for instance, requires a repetitive blowing and catching of bubbles to form a long chain. To seal the bubbles quickly, Noddy turns the bubble wand over after every blow.
"It's kind of like knitting, but you use bubble wands instead of knitting needles."
And if a few bubbles are burst along the way, no harm is done.
"Bubbles are the only thing in the world (kids) are allowed to break," Noddy said.
With sticky fingers from the bubble tables made available for audience participation, Benjamin Beiser, 9, of Peoria said he enjoyed Noddy's yin-yang bubble the most.
"I think this is pretty cool. I think it has to do a lot with science . . . with positive and negative structures," he said, referring to the educational aspects of the show.
Bubbles are frugal and take on the most economical shape in nature -- a sphere, Noddy explained.
Their charge forces them to repel, but if forced together, two bubbles will naturally share a common wall to minimize their space.
"Soap bubbles are schizophrenic. They have a split personality," Noddy said.
One end attaches to water molecules, while the other "hydrophobic" end either points up out of the water or -- for cleaning purposes -- sticks to grease.
Bubbles aren't all that fragile, either, he said.
"Bubbles don't care about sharp or pointy -- that's balloons."
So, a wet finger can pierce a bubble without bursting it, although a dry finger would pop it. Salt and dust also are known to break bubbles prematurely.