CAMANO ISLAND — The Chumleighland gate swings wide and up strides the wild-haired vaudevillian and his dancing 5-year-old son Aubrey. At their heels is Liberace, the youngest of a small herd of donkeys on the ranch.
The Rev. Chumleigh, known to his family as Michael Mielnik, is the son of a late Polish Catholic who was a Marine Corps vet. He heads down a path to a clearing in the woods. There his big-top circus tent, an outdoor movie screen, a bunch of old stuffed seats and lawn chairs offer a playground for man and boy.
Chumleigh apologizes for not being prepared to walk the tightrope and play the violin at the same time, neither of which he does well, he admits.
“There’s an old Chumleigh axiom that says two mediocrities make an act,” he says. His rapid-fire, improvised monologue never stops. “There’s the cannon out of which I shoot myself,” he says, pointing. “I still do the underwater straightjacket escapes, but I stopped eating fire and I never juggle.”
“What do you call a juggler without a girlfriend?” he asks in straight-man form.
“Homeless!” yells Aubrey, who is now swinging from chair to chair on the rope hanging from the top of the tent. “Watch me. Watch me.”
Obviously watching the chip off the old block, Chumleigh smiles. He and his wife, Carla, need to cut down on Aubrey’s sugar intake, he says. Their son was asking members of the audience at Chumleigh’s Camano Island Free Outdoor Cinema for treats and they had to put a stop to it.
The free outdoor cinema series is a pet project of Chumleigh’s because families should be able to enjoy some entertainment even when they can’t afford it.
“Besides I get to inflict my opinions on the unsuspecting audiences,” says Chumleigh, who also runs the outdoor summer movies for the cities of Arlington and Snohomish.
On Saturday, Chumleigh and some friends plan to stage a benefit vaudeville show to keep the Camano movie series running for an eighth season next year. “Escapism for these perilous times,” is the way he bills the show.
When not plotting world domination, as he likes to say, Chumleigh is preparing for whatever is next. Weddings. Funerals. Festivals. A chance to perform for people who appreciate his ever-changing 35-year-old act.
Chumleigh, now in his mid-50s, came to northwest Washington when he was about 20 years old. For awhile he ran a theater in La Conner called the Alligator Palace and he was a noon-time fixture on college campuses, such as Everett Community College, the University of Washington and Western Washington University in Bellingham.
The Rev. Chumleigh of the Miraculous Church of the Incandescent Resurrection and Spiritual Leader of the Morally Indigent had a loyal following.
Students would stand on garbage cans, hang out of windows or sit on each other’s shoulders in order to watch Chumleigh’s antics. As the Flaming Zucchini, he would eat fire, lie on a bed of nails or traipse in an animal-skin costume across broken glass or a wire, and all this while maintaining a running comedic diatribe and satiric commentary on politics, society and the people in the crowd.
Growing up in Southern California, Mielnik’s school was run by nuns, he says, who slapped him when he used his left hand instead of his right. He escaped by joining a junior magicians’ group. Escaping became a habit. He fooled somebody, took the SAT a year early and ended up leaving high school to study at the University of California at Riverside. He escaped college to join other street performers in San Francisco, and, as he tells it, escaped the draft only because on the day he was to report, federal offices were closed because President Truman had died.
It was the time of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Pickle Family Circus and the beginnings of the Oregon Country Fair outside of Eugene, Ore., where he gave the Flying Karamazov Brothers one of their first paid gigs. Chumleigh traveled the country, opening for the likes of Country Joe McDonald and Jerry Garcia. He coined the term “new vaudeville,” a special brand of street performance that leaves you laughing and thinking.
Fellow performer Avner the Eccentric, who is teaching clowning this week at Chumleighland on Camano Island, calls Chumleigh a world-class performer, much like W.C. Fields.
“He’s not just an artistic treasure for this region, Chumleigh’s also one of the best in the profession. I have seen him at his best in tough situations where other comics would whither,” Avner said. “He’s a philosopher who is funny rather than a comic who’s philosophical. He gives you the impression that you’re just hanging out with him, and that’s not easy to do.”
Also known as Avner Eisenberg, the performer is the headliner for the benefit show Saturday on Camano. He is perhaps best known for his role as the scene-stealing holy man in the movie “The Jewel of the Nile,” starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner.
Chumleigh’s life changed in the early 1980s when he bought his ranch on Camano Island. He had two sons, now adults, and he sought solace in doing freelance shows. Street performing had lost some of its dignity and running his theatrical business had made him lose some humor, he said.
“Then 9/11 happened and many of the shows were canceled. Not a fan of the ruling class, I had to be careful about what I said,” he said. “It was way worse than watching sausage being made. Street performers were considered only slightly more talented than the guy panhandling across the street. Nobody wanted to pay for art and our culture suffered.”
Now he hopes his equipment rental business, officiating at weddings and performing at moped rallies will bankroll his theatrical projects.
Raising a 5-year-old keeps him young, Chumleigh said, and he looks forward to many more years of performing. He also frequently sees his grown sons.
“We get along well. But, really, how do you rebel against a dad like me?”
At the end of the morning, Chumleigh goes out to the road to get his mail. The box is lying in the ditch.
“The mailbox has been hit more times than Obama’s broken his campaign promises,” he says. “I was a Kucinich man myself, but on election day last year, I finally took the Canadian flag off my backpack.”
Before he closes the gate, Chumleigh tells a story from the early 1970s when he ran his traveling circus, complete with vegetarian clowns. The group was given a dozen chickens, and most of the other circus performers were ready for some roasted chicken legs.
The clowns objected.
“We told them they had a few days to make the chickens part of the circus act or else,” Chumleigh recalls. “It wasn’t long before they came back and told us that they were convinced that the chickens were vegetables.”
Gale Fiege: 425-339-3427; gfiege@heraldnet.com.
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