For three years this merry menage toured the parks, colleges, fairs and street comers of Eastern America. Street performing gave them their livelihood and taught them about the intimacy of crowds. They liked the feeling of having people so close you could count the freckles on their noses. By 1974 it was time to expand.

 

Pisoni borrowed $1,000 from four philanthropic friends, put an ad in the paper, and began assembling people and equipment. "Our first recruits weren't exactly jugglers," Snider said. "In fact, we didn't hire anyone who'd ever been in a circus before."

 

The people knocking at the door of their tiny office in her Potero Hill home were mainly dancers and actors. "Bill Erwin was our very first clown and he'd had a mere six weeks training at Ringling Brothers Clown School," she said. What a group! Short on circus experience but long on talent. But they were a hardworking bunch of individuals with the "can do" spirit.

 

Snider explained, "Our philosophy, from the beginning, was that as a community of friends, we would try to give back to the world more than what we took. After all, we grew up in the '60s. We would be non-profit, and act as a fund­raiser for other needy organizations. An alternative to the Big Business approach of "stab 'em in the back and stomp on 'em."

 

They created themselves in a somewhat chaotic fashion as they evolved. Larry developed his eloquent clown character, Lorenzo Pickle. Bill became Willy the Clown and Geoff Hoyle developed the mischievous Mr. Sniff. Kimi Okada helped to choreograph the dance numbers. Acrobats, ropewalkers and tumblers joined the little one-ring show.