I was born on a Circus Train somewhere in the Midwest. Most probably between Baraboo and La Crosse, but it also could have been in Detroit or Kalkaska or Kalamazoo. No one knows for sure, so draw a line around the Great Lakes and that's close enough.

My father was a Chimney Sweep and Circus Roustabout. My Mother trained the Big Cats.

My first job in show business began at age six, when I mistakenly wandered into the tiger cage while my Mother was being interviewed for local television. While the tigers were used to me and left me alone, the people at home watching didn't know that, and we sold the circus out that night.

We were all quick learners in the circus, so at the next town, and each town thereafter we would pull the same TV gag. The people at home always had to come to the circus to see how the little kid made out. Especially when we started cutting the TV camera shot at the moment the tigers started surrounding me, so the locals were left wondering whether I got eaten or not.

We eventually evolved that act into our world famous Black Tiger Act (see below). But that is a whole other story.

Over the years we toured the world, and eventually I got too big to a convincing little kid to the audience, so we got my nephew Drew to be in the act, and I turned into a sign and banner painter. I did this for years and years, until finally the circus in America pretty much died except for Ringling Brothers, and I couldn't work with them on account of a bad marriage I'd had years before with Peggy Ringling. So I was out of show biz.

But I kept thinking of circus acts and carnival schemes and signs and banners of every type.......ones that I just made up in my mind that didn't even exist. I couldn't stop it. It started to drive me crazy. One day in NYC I asked this girl what I could do about it, and she told me that a few blocks down the street was an improv theatre........and she told me that whatever was wrong with me could be cured there.

So I walked over there, and you know she was right. I started to learn that what I had been doing in with my mind was a game, and that game was called improvisation. And it turned out that I had practiced it alone for so long that I was already real good at it. But I didn't know how to do it with anyone else, I only knew how to do it alone. So these people there at the National Improv. Theatre taught me how to do that, and I became their friend. And I started performing in a little show with these new friends of mine. Did that for years and years.

Then the wanderlust set in. You usually have it if you were born on a train, or toured the world as a child, and I had done both. So I up and moved out of there with my wife, and we ended up in the Midwest for a decade. We saw a lot of our family, but we had no act.....and so the act became getting us, and everyone was getting good at it. So we up and out of there again, hitting the road.


We ended up in Hollywood, Ca. And wouldn't you know it, all these years later and our friends from the Improv Theatre were out here with a fancy new name, "The Really Spontaneous Theatre Company," and up to their same old tricks. So we banded up with them again and got ourselves doing another little show to entertain the masses.

In the middle of all of this I had started painting banners and signs of these crazy circus acts that I made up in my mind. To amuse myself I responded to a questionaire from Amusement Business Magazine by telling them I was painting hilarious paintings of Hollywood Weirdness that looked like a cross between an old sideshow banner and an ad for the next big movie. I didn't know they were gonna do it, but they published my response as a "where are they now" story. And people from all over the country started calling me and writing me to see these paintings...! Old friends and fellow performers.
So I had to front up to this new development I had created for myself, and I went and finished up nine of these paintings and took them out to this famous Hollywood Outdoor Flea Market to see if I could sell them. And that first day at the market this guy came up and asked how much they cost. I didn't know what to say........so I said they were 200 bucks each. He asked me how much if he bought six of them ? And I tried to act like I didn't care while I figured out what I thought he might be willing to spend. I told him "150 each." And he didn't bat an eye and said OK. Wrote me a check for 900 dollars.

And at that moment I became a fine artist. I started going to this market all the time with my wife, and she heard about how you could apply to get in a show in the Los Angeles County Museum. And so we did, and about six months later they put me in a group show there.

That was a big deal that people noticed, and from there I ended up with a painting at a big show in NYC. It was called the Bill Clinton Show, at the Locus Media Gallery in Soho, NY.

Recently two of my paintings were selected for the permanent collection at the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University in Orange, Ca.

In the last four years or so I have sold about 250 paintings, and they are all the way out in Georgia and Michigan and NYC and up in Seattle and over in London and in Paris and even in Russia, where the world's first and best Russian Woman Rock Star Zhanna Aguzaova has one of my paintings I made for her. She sounds like Chrissy Hynde, only in Russian.

And somehow I lucked out and a lot of well known people have bought my paintings, including Frankie Muniz (Malcolm of Malcolm in the Middle), and Elayne Boosler the Comedianne.

Other collectors of my art include the artist Mark Lipscomb, Maripat Donovan - the creator and star of Late Nite Catechism, Cedars Sinai Hospital, and executives from Disney.

Alright, that's the end and there ain't no more.....unless you want the whole Black Tiger Story. That's below.

R. HutchesonThe Black Tiger Act

"But it was an accident that my Father made at the winter quarters of the Circus that made us world famous. While cleaning out the chimney of the estate of the owner of the circus on the winter lot, he somehow caused an explosion, and a huge cloud of soot moved over the tiger cage and hovered there for an hour and a half. When it finally dispersed, all of the tigers were jet black. And they weren't happy about it. In fact, they were downright mad. And when a group of tigers is mad, everyone for about a mile around knows about it.

Somehow I got the job of going in with a bucket and a hose and cleaning them up. And while I knew I was in no danger, heck the tigers just lined up to get washed off, many of the circus people thought I was in grave danger and were giving my parents hell for letting me go into the cage with such a growling bunch of beasts. We all looked at each other then and there and started laughing.....we knew we had our next act.

And so the Black Tiger act was born. I was introduced to the crowd as the "Youngest Tiger Trainer in the world" at Twelve Years Old. As the audience caught sight of me in the spotlight and they started to put together in their mind what was going on, my Mother would send in the Tigers, Twelve coal black giants who rushed in and surrounded me while growling and snarling and swiping at me and each other. I would act scared and whimper. (At towns where we ran a strong show, I would release a hidden bladder of water in my pocket so I looked like I wet my pants.)

At this point the audience would be in a near riot. My Father would run out with a water hose and hand it to me through the bars, and the audience got the idea that maybe we were going to try to distract the tigers long enough with the water to get me out of there. So when my Father then smiled and waved to the crowd as he sauntered off, they wanted to murder him. The braver men would now be making their way to the cage doors to try to save me, and when the roustabouts then fought them off, we were always in real danger that the audience would start to tear the cage and the whole tent down.

It was at that moment each night that I would blow my special police whistle, it's piercing sound stopping everyone in their tracks. In the sudden silence that always followed I would give two more short blasts, and that was the Tiger's cue to come forward one at a time and I would soap them up and wash them off. As they were revealed to be regular colored tigers, giant waves of joy and laughter would reign down on us, as the audience realized that they had been had.

As each tiger who was cleaned up left the ring, he would do a trick, and the last tiger always stopped near the edge of the cage and gave a mighty shake, soaking everyone in the box seats down front. This always brought down the house, and I would take my bow and run on out of the cage and into my Mother's arms, and we would walk out of the arena with the spotlight trailing us out, as the circus orchestra would play "That's Entertainment" double time."

Bob Hutcheson - from the book Memories of Circus Superstars