Author relates circus to business arena

Public Record, The, Nov 09, 2004 by Kleinschmidt, Janice

Ask Judith Weigle about riding an elephant while wearing a tutu. No, really.

Or ask her about being a dancing bear gettin' jiggy to the tune of "Hava Nagila." Maybe you'd like to hear about the time she ordered Bubbles the clown out of her car over a tiff with Bonkers.

Weigle obviously has some stories to tell. And that's exactly what she's done. The public relations and marketing consultant has just published It's a Circus Out There. Oh, did we mention? Weigle used to work for the circus.

"It's still the most fun, the hardest job I have ever had," she says. As marketing director, booking agent. elephant rider and ticket seller, and dancing bear for the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus from 1980 to 1987, Weigle gained valuable business insight she wants to share through her book and as a speaker. In her book, she tells circus anecdotes, then relates each to a business "performance" tool or tip.

Weigle's story isn't one of being a kid always wanting to run away with the circus. In fact, she had never been to a circus when she applied for the Clyde BeattyCole Bros. job at the age of 22. Instead, her parents introduced her to art and classical music.

At the age of 8, Weigle was producing shows starring neighborhood kids in her garage. She served as emcee, choreographer and concessionaire. "We had the parents make cookies and then sold them back to the parents to make money [for costumes and other production costs]," Weigle recalls.

At 10, Weigle took up the flute, which she played throughout high school, in chamber orchestras, marching band and civic symphonies. When she started college at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, she majored in music, but realized in that competitive environment that her musical talent wasn't great enough upon which to base a career. And there was another problem.

"My favorite instrument became the telephone instead of the flute," Weigle says. "I love talking, so playing the flute became less interesting - being in seclusion in the practice room."

She changed majors and "played around with journalism and communications for a year," she says. Ultimately, she earned a bachelor of arts degree in English literature with minors in music, journalism, communications, education and philosophy. Her ultimate goal, she says, was "to work with as many different types of people as possible and travel to as many places as possible in order to do the work."

Those goals eluded her only temporarity. After graduating in 1975, Weigle got a management job with Krogers. She also ran a newsstand in a downtown Pittsburgh office building and then held two jobs: as a music, English and math teacher at a Catholic school by day and manager of the Pink Poodle Jazz Club by night.

The teaching job lasted six months. "The day they fired me I was ready to quit," Weigle says. "Indeed, even her 4th, 5th and 6th grade students recognized the ill fit. When she announced she would be leaving, she recalls, "They all said, 'This wasn't your right job.' "

It isn't that Weigle isn't good with children. In fact, with the circus, she produced a children's Halloween show and later was promotion manager for the Sarasota Children's Opera Company. "I play well with kids," she says. "It was unstructured and we got to be creative. But when I was teaching school, I had to be a disciplinarian. I was laughing with them at things other teachers did not accept."

The Pink Poodle job more precisely fit her skill set, even though she has "never been a bar person." She only took the job because she knew the owner and "saw obvious mistakes people were making running that business," she says. She arranged for university music students to play in what had been an unused room of the club at no cost and changed the name (from Pink Poodle to Pink Poodle Jazz Club) and logo.

But Weigle "needed to get out of Pittsburgh" and moved to Clearwater, Fla., where she had relatives. She went through the Wendy's management program, but ended up returning to Pittsburgh.

That's when she saw a want ad for the circus. It satisfied the two goals she had established for herself in college: (1) exposure to different cultures and (2) travel. Her first lesson in working with other cultures, she relates in her book, came when she first arrived at the circus, smiled at the chimpanzees in costume and they attacked her. As for travel, three marketers were hitting three cities a week 10 months of the year (they had December and January off). Though not a college goal, Weigle gained a lot of experience in responsibility - to the tune of being expected to generate $20,000 in ticket sales for twice daily shows.

Weigle gained a deep respect for the circus and its performers, who never have a day off: When they aren't performing, they are training. Weigle even made a point to join the roustabouts in their work setting up and tearing down the circus - an experience she says was worth breaking all her nails.

In 1985, Weigle married the circus bandleader, whom she now refers to as her "temporary husband." When she informed circus management that she wanted to stay with the circus performers (and her husband) instead of traveling in advance of the show, she was assigned to become an elephant rider. That didn't go especially well, and she was reassigned to be a dancing bear. She decided to become the best dancing bear the circus ever had.