Kick Ass: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen

Performance artist Kman (no hyphen), AKA Art Kendallman, AKA Monkey Joe, AKA the Missile—collared during the Orange Bowl parade.

Intercepted as an unauthorized clown.

"I was just parading like I do every year," Kman says. "They said the director didn't want me there."

Kman loves a parade. He waits all year for the Orange Bowl. Usually he tags along with the Ringling Brothers clowns, but this year the Ring-ling clowns didn't participate so Kman was pretty much running solo.

His costume was, well, distinctive. The green jump suit with the red dots wasn't too gaudy, especially for a clown. The sneakers with the flashing lights weren't so peculiar, either. It was the rest of the outfit: "I have a helmet with goggles and a mask. My mask is like a hawk pilot. I'm a hawk! Yeah, and I have a helicopter on my head."

That's what seems to have caught the attention of police.

"It's motorized and everything," Kman says of the helicopter. "It's a great chopper. It's a Huey. I found it at Toys-R-Us, amazingly enough. A scale-model Huey!" So he was whirlybirding down Biscayne Boulevard toward the grandstand and the network TV lights when a Miami policeman stopped him. Kman didn't have a permit to be there.

He told the cop he hadn't missed an Orange Bowl parade since 1984. He explained how the Ringling clowns always welcomed him into their formation. Kman says the cop told him OK, get with the Ringling guys. But there was no sign of them, so Kman loosely hooked up with some clowns from the phone company.

This is how he describes his act: "Basically I'm flying this helicopter on my head and basically running around. I do different stunts, turns and spins. I'm a dancer, so I dance while I do this."

He was just warming up, revving the chopper, when the same cop spotted him again. "I also was walking really slow, and that had something to do with it," Kman theorizes.

At any rate, he got arrested for trespassing. The police report straightforwardly describes the suspect as a man "adorned with a helicopter" who "did not belong in the show."

As he was hustled out of the parade, some of the spectators booed the cops. Kman spent five hours in custody. "They had great fun with me," he recalls. "They had me posing with officers and taking pictures." Kman relates the story with annoyance but no bitterness. He's been arrested before. Once he was riding the Metrorail as Monkey Joe—that is, dressed as a monkey and squatting on his haunches like a monkey and occasionally making noises like a monkey—when he was busted for wearing a mask in a public place.

On the day the pope visited Miami, Kman was arrested again for refusing to remove his goggle mask. At the time, he was riding a bicycle with the scale model of a Hercules military transport plane mounted on the front. He is uncommonly fond of miniature war toys; he once appeared in public as a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

Says his lawyer, Glenn Terry: "He's a harmless guy who's trying to say something, though I don't know what it is."

Police say Kman wasn't causing any problems at the Orange Bowl parade, except that he refused to go away.The parade folks say it's unfortunate that Kman was arrested, but say he should've got a permit like all the other clowns.

"We had Captain Crime Stopper, and the World's Fastest Clown," notes Gene Cokeroft, director of production for the parade. "My gosh, we'd never say no to a clown." He added that Kman's whirling helicop-ter-on-the-head routine sounded very entertaining.

Next year, Krnan promises, he will go through the proper clown channels. As for the theme of his performance, the message of his art: "Fly in peace," he says. "Whatever."

No peace for movie ushers who want quiet June 26, 1991

AMC Theaters has announced a crackdown on customers who yak during movies: Violators will be ejected after one warning.

This ought to be fun, especially in South Florida. We've got the loudest, surliest, burliest, most well-armed movie audiences in the hemisphere. A verbal warning might only provoke them.

What prompted AMC's new policy was a national survey in which 71 percent of those interviewed named "disruptive behavior" as the reason they don't go to the movies more often. Like AMC, Wometco and General Cinema are attempting to discourage talkers by showing on-screen warnings before every film. The test will be trying to back up those threats with serious muscle.

AMC says it will order its ushers to patrol the aisles vigilantly. I didn't even know they still employed ushers! They've got plenty of uniformed young men whose job is guarding the uniformed young women who make the buttered popcorn, but these fellows are under strict orders never to leave the refreshment stand. You seldom catch them inside the theaters.