One-Ring Circus Encircles Family of Nomads

Nobody roams with Culpepper and Merriweather for the money.

Certainly not David Volponi. On stilts, he is nine feet tall. On the ground, he is 5 feet, 8 inches of peace--soft-spoken, always smiling, a gentle soul. The circus is his sanctuary against an outside world, its hard knocks and false friendships.

Five years ago, Culpepper and Merriweather visited Volponi’s home town of Groveland, near Yosemite National Park. He walked on stilts to promote the circus for the local Lion’s Club. “Mr. Johnson asked me if I wanted to join them,” says Volponi, 30. “I packed up and left that night.

“You see, it’s just something to be up there, looking down at smiling faces and knowing that I’m making someone happy. I get up in the morning knowing I am going to make people happy. You can’t ask for much more out of life.”

Bill Burger also ran away to the circus.

He was 62 at the time, a teacher at San Diego’s Pershing Junior High School and divorcing after 37 years of marriage.

Now 75, Burger wears a white beard and mustache for that Buffalo Bill Cody look, sells show tickets, handles the books and wouldn’t trade this working retirement for two condos in Leisure World.

“I pay no mortgage, no utilities, no telephone bills and I enjoy that freedom,” he says. “It (satisfaction) is also being a part of the mystique of the culture . . . and there’s the traveling.

“You hear on the radio about a forest fire in Mariposa and understand it better because you’ve been there. You hear about Cutbank, Alaska, being the coldest place in the nation and you can picture it because you’ve played Cutbank, Alaska.”

Cheeko is a circus purist. He has read the histories of 17th-Century European circuses and made pilgrimages to London as a street busker with a Punch & Judy show on the pavements of Covent Garden. Cheeko knows that working the world with the circus means new languages, fascinating cultures, and the social rituals of wine with meals and good talk with loyal companions.

So with Culpepper and Merriweather he is polishing his clowning for Europe, Australia and Japan. One day. Maybe.

“I don’t have to be the best clown in the world,” he says. It is 4 p.m. in Cheeko’s trailer and he is drinking loose leaf English tea with milk and sugar. “I do want to be well regarded to the point where someone in the circus says: ‘Yeah, Cheeko. I saw him work once. He does a good job.’ ”

Ken Taylor is also paying dues. He is Culpepper and Merriweather’s trampoline and trapeze act. At 19, his skills aren’t too far from the youthful tumbling hobbies Taylor learned at Redlands YMCA. He began on a back-yard trapeze made from pipe and chain.

Taylor has been schooled by the best who ever touched a trapeze bar. Mark David. Struppie Hanneford. He enters the arena in a cape, all jewels and swirling purple, made for him by veteran aerialist Tavana Lubas.

Yet he is painfully shy, to the point of barely smiling during his routine. So he has chosen a mud show to perfect his presentation, to “have something to sell and be able to sell it well.”

With Culpepper and Merriweather there is no escape from concentrating on packaging his act.

“When you are performing, they (audiences) can look into your eyes, can see the tattered wardrobe if you happen to have one,” says Taylor. “Working this close helps me develop a presence, get consistency, polish the tricks and develop my own style.”

He says it is working: “Two years ago I might have fallen and burst into tears. Now I’d laugh and get right back up there.”

Pigtailed and brush-cut Heidi Wendany is a mud show mainstay. She is 34, a third-generation circus brat who was performing one-arm handstands on her father’s head at age 3. She’s also a four-act threat with Culpepper and Merriweather, performing with her quintet of mutts, riding dressage, juggling flaming torches and tennis racquets, and curtsying in feigned amazement as the magician’s assistant.

In civilian life she’s just as flexible.

Wendany is licensed to drive semis, and her first-degree black belt in karate has been used when she was a bouncer at a San Fernando Valley bar. She also shoots pool, owns a 1942 Harley and has been dating the magician for four years.

Wendany pursues no suburban norms. She’s unconcerned about marriage and says she’s less interested in children of her own: “I’ve seen too many unwanted kids when playing orphanages and hospitals. Bringing more children into the world isn’t my dream.”

Her endless vision surrounds the circus and her dogs and two horses, Ajax and Billy, which she has been trailering around America for the past 14 years. Twice she has lost brakes on a long jump and barely escaped unhurt. Three years ago an oncoming motorist committed suicide by driving head-on into her truck and that put Wendany in a hospital for a while.

But the traveling and the companionship of the circus remain her life.

“I like the togetherness and being able to depend on others as one whole unit,” Wendany says. “I’m also a performer who loves horses and that’s what I do best.

“You know, if there weren’t a circus I’d still be doing something with horses . . . training, breeding, tending.”