TINY TIM Tiptoes thru our small town BIG TOP

If you think that Tiny Tim the musician,(??), with his ukulele and his falsetto voice singing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips“, is a bit bizarre then I’m here to tell you; “you ain’t heard nothin’ yet”.

In 1985 my little town of Vass, NC, with barely 700 residents, played host to a small time circus to raise money for a local charity. People from near & far came for the one-night performance and Tiny Tim was the main attraction. He sang and joked around and the people seemed to love it. I couldn’t stay, however, because I had to be up very early the next day to get to my job in the ER of our local hospital.

Imagine my surprise upon arriving there the next morning to see a familiar looking figure dressed in a long, dark overcoat, at the front desk .It was Tiny Tim. He had a small paper bag with him and was pleading to have the ER Dr. see him “in private”.

He refused to be registered so we called the Supervisor. She finally determined that he was carrying a urine sample that he swore he had obtained from a girl in Vass (!) She, according to Tiny Tim, was accusing him of getting her pregnant and he wanted the Dr. to prove her wrong. Remember, this was back in 1985, long before you could get a pregnancy test kit from a drugstore.

This whole scene was getting more and more bizarre. Both the Dr. and the nursing supervisor tried to tell him that it was way too early to determine anything but Tiny Tim just became more agitated and obnoxious. He started yelling about “my rights as a citizen” and “people taking advantage of me because I’m a star”, and it was at this point that the news photographers arrived.

In retrospect we could clearly see that we’d been conned. He managed to get a front page spread in the local newspaper, as well as mentions in the Raleigh and Fayetteville ones too. The un-named girl from Vass “conveniently” disappeared and Tiny Tim, with a big “gotcha” smile on his face, tiptoed quietly out of our lives.