"I was just parading like I do every year," Kman says. "They said the director didn't want me there."
Kman loves a parade. He waits all year for the Orange Bowl. Usually he tags along with the Ringling Brothers clowns, but this year the Ring-ling clowns didn't participate so Kman was pretty much running solo.
His costume was, well, distinctive. The green jump suit with the red dots wasn't too gaudy, especially for a clown. The sneakers with the flashing lights weren't so peculiar, either. It was the rest of the outfit: "I have a helmet with goggles and a mask. My mask is like a hawk pilot. I'm a hawk! Yeah, and I have a helicopter on my head."
That's what seems to have caught the attention of police.
"It's motorized and everything," Kman says of the helicopter. "It's a great chopper. It's a Huey. I found it at Toys-R-Us, amazingly enough. A scale-model Huey!" So he was whirlybirding down Biscayne Boulevard toward the grandstand and the network TV lights when a Miami policeman stopped him. Kman didn't have a permit to be there.
He told the cop he hadn't missed an Orange Bowl parade since 1984. He explained how the Ringling clowns always welcomed him into their formation. Kman says the cop told him OK, get with the Ringling guys. But there was no sign of them, so Kman loosely hooked up with some clowns from the phone company.
This is how he describes his act: "Basically I'm flying this helicopter on my head and basically running around. I do different stunts, turns and spins. I'm a dancer, so I dance while I do this."
He was just warming up, revving the chopper, when the same cop spotted him again. "I also was walking really slow, and that had something to do with it," Kman theorizes.
At any rate, he got arrested for trespassing. The police report straightforwardly describes the suspect as a man "adorned with a helicopter" who "did not belong in the show."
As he was hustled out of the parade, some of the spectators booed the cops. Kman spent five hours in custody. "They had great fun with me," he recalls. "They had me posing with officers and taking pictures." Kman relates the story with annoyance but no bitterness. He's been arrested before. Once he was riding the Metrorail as Monkey Joe—that is, dressed as a monkey and squatting on his haunches like a monkey and occasionally making noises like a monkey—when he was busted for wearing a mask in a public place.
On the day the pope visited Miami, Kman was arrested again for refusing to remove his goggle mask. At the time, he was riding a bicycle with the scale model of a Hercules military transport plane mounted on the front. He is uncommonly fond of miniature war toys; he once appeared in public as a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
Says his lawyer, Glenn Terry: "He's a harmless guy who's trying to say something, though I don't know what it is."
Police say Kman wasn't causing any problems at the Orange Bowl parade, except that he refused to go away.The parade folks say it's unfortunate that Kman was arrested, but say he should've got a permit like all the other clowns.
"We had Captain Crime Stopper, and the World's Fastest Clown," notes Gene Cokeroft, director of production for the parade. "My gosh, we'd never say no to a clown." He added that Kman's whirling helicop-ter-on-the-head routine sounded very entertaining.
Next year, Krnan promises, he will go through the proper clown channels. As for the theme of his performance, the message of his art: "Fly in peace," he says. "Whatever."
No peace for movie ushers who want quiet
June 26, 1991
AMC Theaters has announced a crackdown on customers who yak during movies: Violators will be ejected after one warning.
This ought to be fun, especially in South Florida. We've got the loudest, surliest, burliest, most well-armed movie audiences in the hemisphere. A verbal warning might only provoke them.
What prompted AMC's new policy was a national survey in which 71 percent of those interviewed named "disruptive behavior" as the reason they don't go to the movies more often. Like AMC, Wometco and General Cinema are attempting to discourage talkers by showing on-screen warnings before every film. The test will be trying to back up those threats with serious muscle.
AMC says it will order its ushers to patrol the aisles vigilantly. I didn't even know they still employed ushers! They've got plenty of uniformed young men whose job is guarding the uniformed young women who make the buttered popcorn, but these fellows are under strict orders never to leave the refreshment stand. You seldom catch them inside the theaters.
Say you scrounge up some ushers crazy enough to take on a South Florida movie audience. Training them will cost a fortune. Start with a basic martial-arts course, then six weeks on the firing range, nightscope training, wilderness survival school, hostage negotiations, and so on. Those who don't wash out of the program still won't be prepared for the teeming hellpit that is your average early-bird matinee in, say, West Broward. There's one sure way to see if an usher is combat-ready. Put him in the aisles during a Woody Allen movie.
Allen is a literate and witty screenwriter. His movies are full of clever lines, exquisitely timed. Enjoying the dialogue, unfortunately, requires that one be able to hear it. That's simply not possible in many local theaters.
The problem is chronic and insurmountable. Woody Allen sets most of his pictures in New York. Many South Florida moviegoers are from New York, or have relatives there, or once visited there on vacation. Thus they cannot restrain from exclaiming, at the most crucial moment of the movie:
"Look, there's the Chrysler Building! We were there with your cousin, remember? Back when she had that terrible gout!"
At which point, the wife is likely to say (in a voice like a diesel): "That wasn't the Chrysler Building, it was the World Trade Center! And it wasn't gout, it was gallstones!"
Other Manhattan landmarks that send moviegoers into clamorous eruptions are Radio City, the Empire State Building, Macy's, the Plaza Hotel, any Broadway marquee, and of course Central Park. Whenever there's a scene in Central Park, you might as well go buy some Raisinets and relax in the lobby, because you won't be able to hear a word of the movie. Audience members will be trading moldy Central Park anecdotes for 15, 20 minutes easy. Another perilous situation for ushers is Terminator-type films, which rely on spectacular methods of incineration, dismemberment and organ removal. In other parts of the country, such scenes evoke normal shrieking and groans of disgust. Here in South Florida, though, they inspire long esoteric debates about technique—for example, is a grain thresher more effective than a circular saw? How long do human body parts keep in the refrigerator?
Only the boldest of ushers would interrupt such a conversation with a "Sssshhhh."
Once a customer defies the warning, the challenge is subduing the noisy culprit and removing him or her from the movie. Many of these babblers are quite huge, much bigger than your average usher. Nothing short of a flash fire is going to budge them from their seats.
AMC's solution is to offer a refund if they'll get up and leave peacefully. That'll probably work fine in Tulsa, but extra coaxing may be required here in Miami.
We're talking stun guns and grappling hooks.
Miami politics a sticking point for voodooers
February 20, 1992
Miami City Hall, usually likened to a circus, is now a chamber of the occult. Goodbye, Ringling Brothers. Hello, Addams Family.