Few eras of modern history have been romanticized by later generations the way that the late 1960s through the early 1980s have. Between the literature, music, art, countercultural movements and the antagonist idea of working a corporate job, “the mid 20th century was a really interesting moment,” says Howard Jay Patterson, author of the new memoir Jester Prince: How the Flying Karamazov Brothers Reinvented Theater and Saved The World, Almost.
Patterson is a co-founder of the internationally renowned vaudeville performance troupe and Oregon Country Fair frequent flyers The Flying Karamazov Brothers. The group began in 1973 Santa Cruz, where Patterson and his college friend group all found that they each had a particular knack for juggling. They named themselves after the philosophical novel The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and each adopted a stage name for their characters. Patterson performed as Ivan, Paul David Magid became Dmitri, while Randy Nelson joined as Aloyosha and sometime later Tim Furst joined as Fyodor.
For 34 years, the Brothers — though none were actually related — toured the world with their elaborate stage juggling show and made numerous film and television appearances, including the Seinfeld episode “The Friars Club” and the 1985 rom-com adventure film Jewel of the Nile.
They are known for tricks such as the “Terror Trick,” where the foursome juggled nine objects — including a fish, an egg, a cleaver and a flaming torch — and “The Gamble,” where they juggle objects brought in by audience members.
The Flying Karamazov Brothers still perform to this day, but the show and cast has changed, with Magid the only original member left.
Patterson’s new self-published memoir details most every significant moment from the time he was born to when he left the show in 2008, seemingly, without missing a beat — in fact, the book is 784 pages (a mere third of the size of its first drafts, he says). Jester Prince will be officially published July 19, and he will do a book signing Sunday, July 12, at the Oregon Country Fair at Vaudeville Central next to Stage Left, where the books will be for sale all three days.
Creating a book of this stature was a marathon, as Patterson says it took him 12 years to write it, and he had difficulties getting it published when it was completed. He says he heard from several publishers that “I can’t sell it, it’s too long, and no one’s buying memoirs, and you’re not famous enough anymore.”
As he saw it, it was still important to write the book and get it out there despite the difficulties, and that boiled down to two reasons. The first was to capture the romance of being a bohemian vaudeville performer during the “mid-20th century moment,” Patterson explains. “The world always changes,” he says. “This is a really different world now than it was then, and I wanted to create both a memory of what it was, what it was like to do the thing we did, which was a weird thing,” he continues, “and I hope that there is some inspiration in it for people following their dreams.”
The main reason he wrote a memoir, though, is that “I wanted to get mine done before somebody else wrote theirs.” Patterson wrote the book entirely from his own memory and perspective, without telling any of the original Brothers that it was even happening.
“If they knew about it, I was afraid they were going to rush and not do as good a job,” Patterson says. When writing the book, “I didn’t really want to interact with anyone. I didn’t want to get someone else’s opinion. I didn’t want to have people shaming me or guilting me or guiding me.”
His singular voice and independence leads to meandering brutal honesty throughout the book. An excerpt reads that one later Flying Karamazov Brother, “Mark Ettinger, injured my family and myself with acts so egregious that they ended up destroying my relationship with the Fair and the vaudeville community. He is in this account only because of the fact of his historical presence; if I could excise him completely from reality, I would.”
Since the book has been available through his publishing platform, Patterson says he has not heard from his Brothers.
While Patterson tells all in his memoir regarding their adventures, he also gives beginner instructions on how to juggle, as well as quite a few Flying Karamazov Brothers behind the scenes tidbits.
One such fun fact about the stage show is that when they juggled dangerous items such as cleavers, torches and other flaming or sharp objects, there are no safety precautions in place. “We have a fire extinguisher backstage,” he says, but the Brothers simply had their own ways to keep track of the high-flying items to make sure they caught the objects at the right angle — which often didn’t work out. “We were in our 20s, so we’d get cut and we’d heal,” Patterson says.
As far as choosing Oregon Country Fair for his book signing, Patterson says that the festival is everything that he and the Brothers stood for. As opposed to other Renaissance fairs the Brothers frequented, “Oregon Country Fair is actually about rebirth,” Patterson says, and the feeling it evokes brought them inspiration to carry it on throughout their shows to eventually “Save the World, Almost” as the memoir’s title promises. “How do we carry this spirit of these people coming together from all over the world with joy and with honesty and working in the spirit of community. How do we take that elsewhere?” he says.
Patterson says that no matter where the Brothers were in the world or in life, they would fly back for whirlwind three-day romps at Oregon Country Fair as often as they possibly could.
Howard Jay Patterson’s book signing of Jester Prince: How the Flying Karamazov Brothers Reinvented Theater and Saved the World, Almost, is 12:30 pm to 3:30 pm Sunday, July 12, at Oregon Country Fair in Vaudeville Central next to Stage Left. Books will be sold onsite all three days or on Amazon or Store.BookBaby.com for $36.