The Fiddler in the Subway Read online

  Tall and handsome, Don is a federal government lawyer. Short and pretty, Allison is an IT recruiter. Like most successful two-career couples who started a family later in life, the Coxes have resources to lavish on their children. When they bought this spacious Colonial in Bethesda, Maryland, the large area next to the family room was going to be Don’s study. But it soon surrendered itself into a playroom—filled, floor to ceiling, with entertainment for the kids. A wall unit became a storage place for dolls, games, and action figures, all neatly partitioned and displayed like heirlooms. The floor is a warren of toys: There is a little girl’s vanity and a tea table primly set with cups and saucers. For Trey, there is a ride-on choo-choo train. A fully functional mini moon bounce occupies one capacious corner. In another is a wall-mounted TV.

  The Great Zucchini’s problem? This room has no door. Its enticing contents were visible from the room where he would be performing, and the Great Zucchini tolerates no distractions. So he asked Allison to hang a bedsheet across the open archway, which meant making pushpin holes in the sheet and in the walls. Good-naturedly, Allison obeyed. Parents almost always do.

  When the Great Zucchini arrived that Saturday morning, Don had no idea who he was. Frankly, he didn’t look like a great anything. He looked like a house painter, Don thought, with some justification. The Great Zucchini wears no costume. He was in painter’s pants, a coffee-stained shirt, and a two-day growth of beard. He toted his beat-up props in beat-up steamer trunks, with ripped faux leather and broken hinges hanging askew.

  By the time the show began, more than a dozen kids were assembled on the floor. The Great Zucchini’s first official act was to order the birthday boy out of the room, because—a little overwhelmed by the attention—Trey had begun to cry. “We’ll retransition him back in,” the Great Zucchini reassured Allison as she dutifully, if dubiously, whisked her son away.

  At the back of the room, Carter Hertzberg, the father of a party guest, was watching with frank interest. He’d heard about the Great Zucchini. “Supposedly,” he explained dryly, “all the moms stand in the back and watch, because they think he’s hot.”

  Many moms were, indeed, standing in the back. And—in a tousled, boyish, roguish, charmingly dissolute sort of way—the Great Zucchini is, indeed, hot. (Emboldened by a glass or three of party Beaujolais, moms have been known to playfully inquire of the Great Zucchini whether there is any particular reason he merits that nickname.)

  At the moment, the Great Zucchini was trying and failing to blow up a balloon, letting it whap him in the face, hard. Then he poured water on his head. Then he produced what appeared to be a soiled diaper, wiped his cheek with it, and wore it like a hat as the kids ewwww-ed. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Great Zucchini was behaving like a complete idiot.

  Trey’s aunt saw me taking notes. “You’re writing a story about him?” Vicki Cox asked, amused. I confirmed that I was.

  “But… why?” she asked.

  A few feet away, the Great Zucchini was pretending to be afraid of his own hand.

  “I mean,” Vicki said, “what’s the hook?”

  Now the Great Zucchini was eating toilet paper.

  “I mean, are you that desperate?” she asked.

  On the floor in front of us, the kids—two-, three-and four-year-olds—were convulsed in laughter. Literally. They were rolling on the carpeted floor, holding their tummies, mouths agape, little teeth jubilantly bared, squealing with abandon. In the vernacular of stand-up, the Great Zucchini was killing. Among his victims was Trey, who, as promised, had indeed been retransitioned into his own party.

  The show lasted thirty-five minutes, and when it was over, an initially skeptical Don Cox forked over a check without complaint. The fee was $300. It was the first of four shows the Great Zucchini would do that Saturday, each at the same price. The following day, there were four more. This was a typical weekend.

  Do the math, if you can handle the results. This unmarried, thirty-five-year-old community college dropout makes more than $100,000 a year, with a two-day workweek. Not bad for a complete idiot.

  If you want to understand why the Great Zucchini has this kind of success, you need look no further than the stresses of suburban Washington parenting. The attendant brew of love, guilt, and toddler-set social pressures puts an arguably unrealistic value on someone with the skills, and the willingness, to control and delight a roistering roomful of preschoolers for a blessed half-hour.

  That’s the easy part. Here’s the hard part: There are dozens of professional children’s entertainers in the Washington area, but only one is as successful and intriguing, and as completely over-the-top preposterous, as the Great Zucchini. And if you want to know why that is—the hook, Vicki, the hook—it’s going to take some time.

  EVEN BEFORE THEY respond to a tickle, most babies will laugh at peekaboo. It’s their first “joke.” They are reacting to a sequence of events that begins with the presence of a familiar, comforting face. Then, suddenly, the face disappears, and you can read in the baby’s expression momentary puzzlement and alarm. When the face suddenly reappears, everything is orderly in the baby’s world again. Anxiety is banished, and the baby reacts with her very first laugh.

  At its heart, laughter is a tool to triumph over fear. As we grow older, our senses of humor become more demanding and refined, but that basic, hard-wired reflex remains. We need it, because life is scary. Nature is heartless, people can be cruel, and death and suffering are inevitable and arbitrary. We learn to tame our terror by laughing at the absurdity of it all.

  This point has been made by experts ranging from Richard Pryor to doctoral candidates writing tedious theses on the ontological basis of humor. Any joke, any amusing observation, can be deconstructed to fit. The seemingly benign Henny Youngman one-liner, “Take my wife… please!” relies in its heart on an understanding that love can become a straitjacket. By laughing at that recognition, you are rising above it and blunting its power to disturb.

  After the peekaboo age, but before the age of such sophisticated understanding, dwells the preschooler. His sense of humor is more than infantile but less than truly perceptive. He comprehends irony but not sarcasm. He lacks knowledge but not feeling. The central fact of his world—and the central terror to be overcome—is his own powerlessness. This is where the Great Zucchini works his magic.

  The Great Zucchini actually does magic tricks, but they are mostly dime-store novelty gags—false thumbs to hide a handkerchief, magic dust that turns water to gel—accompanied by sleight of hand so primitive your average eight-year-old would suss it out in an instant. That’s one reason he has fashioned himself a specialist in ages two to six. He behaves like no adult in these preschoolers’ world, making himself the dim-witted victim of every gag. He thinks a banana is a telephone and answers it. He can’t find the birthday boy when the birthday boy is standing right behind him. Every kid in the room is smarter than the Great Zucchini; he gives them that power over their anxieties.

  The Great Zucchini’s real name is Eric Knaus, and the last few analytical paragraphs will come as a surprise to him. Eric is intelligent, but he is almost aggressively reluctant to engage in self-analysis, even about his craft. What he knows is that he intuitively understands preschool kids, because he’s had a lot of practice. He worked at Washington area preschools and day-care centers for more than a decade.

  During a brief stint as a party host at the Discovery Zone in Rockville, Maryland, Eric discovered his ability to entertain as well as babysit. He was making $2 an hour, so tips were vital. And he found that the most substantial tips came when he acted dumb, serving up laughter along with the pizza.

  Four years ago, he decided to go solo. It may have been the best decision he ever made. The Great Zucchini’s clientele is mostly from affluent neighborhoods—Northwest Washington; Chevy Chase, Bethesda, and Potomac, Maryland; and Great Falls, McLean, and Arlington, Virginia. He’s been to homes the size of small cathedrals and to parties where he w
as only one of several attractions, including cotton-candy and popcorn machines, lawn-size moon bounces, and petting-zoo sheep. Most famously, he did a party at the vice president’s residence for a granddaughter of Dick and Lynne Cheney.

  I first met the Great Zucchini at a location he chose, a coffee shop in White Flint Mall. “In the beginning, I had almost no clients,” he said, “and I would sit at a table like this in a place like this, and if a mom would be walking by with her three-year-old, I would pretend to be talking on my cell phone. I’d say, ‘Yeah, I do children’s parties geared for three-year-olds!’ And a lot of times, the mom would stop, and say… ‘You do children’s parties?’”

  When he first started, he found out what other birthday party entertainers were charging—roughly $150 per show—and upped it by $25. That worked; it seemed to give him agency. After a while, his weekends were so crammed with parties—seven or eight, every weekend—he felt overwhelmed. So, applying fundamental principles of economics, he decided to thin his business but not his profits by raising his prices precipitously—from $175 to $300. It turns out that the fundamental principles of economics are no match for the fundamental desperation of suburban parents. He still was doing seven or eight shows a weekend.

  Weekdays, he mostly haunts places like this, drinking coffee and tending to his cell phone. It rings a lot. It’s ringing right now.

  “Hello. Yes. Okay, sure, what date are you looking at?”

  He flips open the tattered appointment book that is always with him. He’s got dates penciled in as far into the future as October.

  “I have nothing on the twelfth, but I can do the thirteenth at eleven o’clock. Okay, good. You’ve seen my show? Excellent. Sure, I remember Dylan’s party. Dylan’s got short hair, right? Oh. Well, I remember Dylan anyway. He’s got two ears, right? This party is for… ? He is turning, what? Six, okay. Your name is… ? Okay. And the dad’s name?”

  He listens, wincing slightly at his own misstep.

  “Okay, Dad’s not invited. We don’t feature Dad. Not a problem!”

  RAISING CHILDREN HAS always been stressful, but these days it seems even more so, with single-parent families, two-career time pressures, and a bewildering explosion of diagnosed childhood developmental disabilities. Things are hard, even if you have a nice income and a nice house in a nice neighborhood. In some ways, that can make it even harder.

  I first found out about the Great Zucchini through a friend of mine who lives in Northwest Washington. She gave up a high-prestige job to raise her four young children. Because her husband has a successful career, they can swing it, if not entirely comfortably. She doesn’t want her name used because she has hired the Great Zucchini three times and, like many of the parents I interviewed for this story, is more than a little conflicted about it.

  “It’s an insane, indulgent thing to do,” she said. “You could just have a party where you all played Pin the Tail on the Donkey or musical chairs or something. But that is just not done in this part of D.C. If you did that, you would be talked about.

  “The whole thing has snowballed into levels of craziness, and it’s just embarrassing to be a part of it. I would never tell my father about this. He grew up in Arkansas during the Depression. It would physically cause him pain to know what I spent on a child’s party, for some guy to put a diaper on his head.”

  What’s indisputable is that the kids love the guy with the diaper on his head. They talk about him all the time. They repeat his dumb jokes. They recognize him on the street.

  They see him at their playmates’ parties and ask for him at theirs. “The Great Zucchini,” said my friend’s husband, who deals professionally with Washington’s power elite, “is the most famous person my children know.”

  It is crazy, and a little unseemly, and the Great Zucchini knows that. When he was a kid in Bethesda, he says, his own birthday parties consisted of a cake and touch football with friends in the back yard, and that was just fine.

  Not that he’s complaining about his good fortune, or bashful about discussing it. The Great Zucchini can elevate self-confidence to amusingly Olympian levels. “Why shouldn’t I charge as much an hour as the best lawyer in town?” he asks. “I am the best children’s entertainer in town.” And: “David Copperfield couldn’t keep these kids from running around wild. I can do that.” And, when I noted that he relies on many of the same routines, time and again, he said: “When people come to see Springsteen, they don’t want new stuff. They want to hear ‘Glory Days.’”

  His business plan? To become the children’s entertainer to the stars, a star in his own right who is flown first-class to Beverly Hills to do parties at $5,000 a pop for Angelina Jolie’s kids, or Britney’s.

  For all his swagger, Eric Knaus is instantly likable and effortlessly charming. He’s got a hitch in his smile that says he’s not taking himself all that seriously. His hair is moussed into an appealing, spiky mess, like Hobbes’s pal, Calvin. He speaks with a gentle, liquid “l” that tends to put children at ease and seems to work with adults, too. And he is just stupendously great with kids, which is not an inconsiderable factor for a single mom looking for a mate, or a married mom with a single-mom friend whom she’d like to set up. It happens. Eric once had a romance with a single mother he met at a party, but he isn’t entirely sure he’d do it again. When they broke up, the child was inconsolable.

  Eric is aware that some of his party-time demands can seem obnoxious, but he insists they are reasonable. Very short people, he explains, have very short attention spans, which is why he is notorious for shushing parents who insist on talking during his show, even to the point of ordering them from the room. As he puts it, with characteristic grandiloquence: “I have the power. I’ve actually said, ‘Do you want me to refund your money and leave?’” No parent has ever chosen that option, not with a roomful of kids sprawled on the carpet, giggly and expectant.

  This has led to the occasional testy moment, particularly with one mother not long ago who not only balked at covering a picture window with a sheet but insisted on giving her child some macaroni during a show, in defiance of the Great Zucchini’s inviolable no-eating rule. (“A choking hazard,” he said. “He was hungry,” she said.) She not only got a dressing down from the Great Zucchini at the party but a scolding letter afterward. “My husband threw it away,” she said. “He didn’t show it to me, because he knew it would really upset me.”

  This mom happens to be a high-profile attorney with a big-name law firm. Though the Web contains quotes from her on important public policy matters, you won’t find her name in this story about a children’s entertainer. She, too, insisted on anonymity. Some subjects are just too personally perilous. This lawyer-mother thoroughly dislikes the Great Zucchini and used a potentially litigable word to describe him.

  So, is she sorry she hired him?

  Pause.

  “I have to say, he did a great job with the kids.”

  Both anonymous moms I talked to mentioned something curious. They were surprised that the Great Zucchini required payment in full, up front, the day the party was booked. He actually drove over, that day, to pick up their checks.

  It was odd, they said—almost as if, for all his financial success, the Great Zucchini has cash-flow problems.

  From the moment I met him, there were things that puzzled me about the Great Zucchini. Unless I drove him, for example, he relied on cabs to get to all of his gigs. He’d recently totaled his car, he explained, and hadn’t gotten around to buying a new one. Besides, he said, he found cabs less restrictive.

  Also, the Great Zucchini didn’t seem to live anywhere. He had an address in Bethesda, but he would always want to meet at one Starbucks or another. Every time I proposed coming to his house some morning, he was staying elsewhere overnight. He seemed to crash everywhere but home.

  His act was never fancy, but in recent months it had lost whatever frills it once had. On his Web site, the Great Zucchini is pictured at the White House Easter Egg R
oll, where he once performed in a fancy black vest with cartoon smiley faces on it. He used to wear that vest to all his performances but lost it some time ago and has no plans to replace it.

  He is more than a little disorganized. He lost a glowing-thumb trick, then found it, but it was broken, and he never got a new one. At one point, he lost his cell phone. When we were together, he often commandeered mine. Many of his magic props seem to be weathered to the point of decrepitude. His dirty diaper is years old. His magic bag with a false panel—a “change bag,” in magicians’ terms—is soiled and ripped. The once-orange sponge balls he palms for an illusion are brown with use. And there’s that persistent, just-rolled-out-of-bed stubble. He didn’t always have that.

  Some parents I talked to were worried that the Great Zucchini might be rotting on the vine. Their guess was substance abuse, or something even darker.

  This was understandable, but wrong. His demons turned out to be of a different species, more benign, perhaps, but also more interesting.

  HAVE YOU EVER tried to peel a zucchini? It’s not like a potato. The skin is pretty thick. You don’t get it all with the first swipe.

  Eric and I were in Arlington, at a fifth birthday party for a boy named Charlie. It was the first time the mother, Sarah Moore, had hired the Great Zucchini, and she had no complaints. He was everything she’d been told he’d be, she said, as she surveyed her postparty, preprandial dining room, aswarm with giddy kids.

  “He’s a big draw. You know, we wouldn’t have gotten half this turnout with a moon bounce,” Sarah said, completely seriously.

  On our way to the party, Eric and I had been talking football, and I had said I thought the New York Giants would win their next game. He agreed but said they wouldn’t beat the spread. I’d found that a little odd, and on our way back from the party I took a stab.