A reluctant performer with a penchant for creating fond memories, Frank Biafore is the Minster of Fun in El Cerrito. | By Mike Rosen-Molina.
Everyone knows that a colorful bouquet of balloons outside a house often indicates one thing: There’s a birthday party going on.
At Playland-Not-At-The-Beach, there are birthday parties going on almost every week. And it’s up to Frank Biafore, 52, to put out those balloons so parents can find the right place.
“How lucky am I to get to buy balloons for work?” Biafore said. “Where else could I do that?”
As the name implies, this area attraction is not by the beach; rather it’s in an unassuming storefront in El Cerrito. But on weekends, it transforms into a lively carnival for old and young alike with diversions that recall the circuses and amusement parks of yesteryear. Billed as a “Museum of Fun,” Playland is both a historical archive of past amusements and a working fun park, where visitors can wander through a haunted gallery, test their skills on boardwalk games like skeeball or bowler roller, or watch clowns, magicians, or even a flea circus. The park regularly hosts birthday parties and family reunions—any event where kids, parents, grandparents, and sometimes even great grandparents want to come together for a good time.
“Playland is part museum and part family-fun experience,” said Biafore, who has held the reins at Playland since the untimely death of park founder Richard Tuck by gallbladder cancer in 2011.
Biafore, better known by his stage name Fabulous Frank, is a magician at Playland-Not-At-The-Beach, but he’s also the park’s chief operating officer and “Fabulous Fun Facilitator.” But performing for kids is the highlight of the job. In fact, after a successful performance, having to get back to the nitty-gritty of running the Bay Area’s biggest collection of carnival memorabilia and sideshow games can be a bit of a grind. Filling out paperwork or overseeing the placement of a new shipment of pinball machines can seem like chores.
Biafore didn’t always enjoy the attention. His persona is a lively entertainer with a childlike excitement for the kitschy and the absurd, and Fabulous Frank peppers his stage act with purposely groan-inducing humor and goofy wordplay. Biafore remembers being a shy, withdrawn child with a distaste for magic who eventually grew up to join a profession hardly known for its flair or showmanship—banking. Not an auspicious start for a magician.
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Biafore attributes his transformation to Playland-Not-At-The-Beach and, more importantly, to Playland’s founder, his friend Richard Tuck.
“I look around and see so much of him,” Biafore said. “Richard was very much like Robin Williams in Hook. He rarely saw bad or problems. I can’t imagine what life would be like if without him.”
In many ways, the park still bears the distinctive imprint of its creator—the miniature Victorian city-scenes in Playland’s “World of Charles Dickens” stand in testament to Tuck, an English major who wrote his master’s thesis on Dickens.
But in his tenure as Fabulous Fun Facilitator, Biafore has made his own mark on Playland, channeling his own passions into creating “The Happiest Place on Eartha,” Playland’s tribute to actress Eartha Kitt. A rabid fan of Kitt since her early career in burlesque theater, Biafore is president of the Eartha Kitt fan club, and his collection of memorabilia (with more than 5,000 autographed items) is now on display at Playland.
Biafore grew up recognizing her as Catwoman on the old Batman series. He admired her larger-than-life persona and the way that her character played both friend and foe to Batman. Off the air, he was fascinated by how Kitt constantly reinvented herself to stay relevant from a cabaret singer and performer to actress.
“Kids know her as the voice of Yzma from The Emperor’s New Groove; people my age know her from the old Batman series; older people remember her stage shows,” Biafore said. “How many other actresses have fan bases that cut across generations like that?”
In some ways, Biafore’s admiration for Kitt’s enduring legacy mirrors his philosophy for Playland: Playland isn’t just a place for older visitors to jog down memory lane or for kids to burn off some energy. It’s a place where young and old can come together and each find something to enjoy.
“People say, ‘This is better than Disneyland,’ but that’s mainly because there are no lines,” Biafore said. “This is one of the few places where you can have a 65-year-old grandma playing the same pinball machine as a kid, and I think that’s amazing. More and more, I hear the younger kids talking to each other, saying, ‘This is so cool.’ They seem to really enjoy being able to touch and play and put their hands on all the old games. It makes me feel that what we do is really important. It’s what makes Playland a special place: Kids see old merry-go-rounds, the simple rides that will eventually evolve into the tallest, most extreme coasters. It tells them a little about what came before. To see parents and kids together and having a good time—it’s really wonderful to be part of that.”
The park began as an homage to Playland-At-The-Beach, an amusement park near San Francisco’s Ocean Beach that operated from the late 19th century to the early ’70s.
Biafore himself never saw the original Playland. It closed while he was still living back east, in his home state of Connecticut. He didn’t arrive in California until the 1980s, when he drove out in a 30-foot U-haul with his partner and a cat. But even back then, Biafore still had an affinity for the strange and bizarre. Between hitting blizzards in Chicago and ice storms in Salt Lake City, he hoped that they would be able to stop at all the strange roadside attractions and mom-and-pop stores along the route.
Even though he missed out on San Francisco’s Playland, his family did go
on trips to similar parks back east—Riverside Park in Agawam, Mass., or Santa’s Village in Putney, Vt.
“Some of those parks kind of sucked,” Biafore admitted. “But the voyage is what made it. You’re all together in a car, grandparents are there, you stop along the way in Vermont for cheese and bread. It’s all part of the experience. It’s a very different, very cool time.”
Biafore first arrived in California on a Friday, applied for a job on Monday, and, by Tuesday, was working at a bank in Berkeley. He continued to work at a variety of banks until he met Richard Tuck, a local entrepreneur who hired him to work at his job search firm. Tuck and Biafore became friends, discovering a mutual love for collecting Christmas village sets. Biafore had studied architecture and used to build dollhouses for his mother’s decorating hobby. Tuck had 10 buildings, but eventually they had 500 between the two of them.
But collecting was only one of Tuck’s passions; he was also an enthusiastic stage magician, and he soon introduced Biafore to the craft.
“When I met Richard, he was a magician,” Biafore said. “He loved performing in house, but he swore he would never perform in public. He was the magician, and I was the lovely assistant.”
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As a child growing up in Connecticut, Biafore didn’t much care for magic or magicians. Every Christmas, his family went to the local Elks Lodge to see Santa. The opening act was a magician who liked to cut up a sports jacket with a pair of scissors only to reveal the jacket was “magically” intact at the end.
“I was the only kid in the audience with a sports coat, so I always got picked,” Biafore said. “I built up a resistance to magic.”
Tuck also loved circuses and owned the traveling big top show Circus Chimera for about 10 years.
“That’s how I accidentally started performing,” Biafore said. “Frequently what looks like an accident during a circus performance isn’t. If they pick some random person out of the audience to help in a routine, often that person isn’t actually random—it’s someone who’s been planted. This circus had a jump-rope routine, where they would pick a guy out of the crowd to make him look foolish, but the audience doesn’t know he’s a stooge. They had chosen Richard a few times. There was very little Richard didn’t enjoy, but he didn’t enjoy that. So he became the master of disappearing from the crowd just as they pulled out the jump rope. I got snagged instead. At first, I wasn’t happy, but I knew that if they were choosing me, they weren’t choosing Richard, so I got more comfortable.”
But today, Biafore is on the other side of the stage.
“As a magician, I get to see the most amazing part of the show,” Biafore said. “Most people don’t get to see the audience’s reactions. I’m able to perform what adults think of as throw-away magic. I can do a 20-minute illusion and kids say, ‘Eh, that’s OK.’ But I do a 15-second trick, like pulling a bouquet of flowers out of nowhere, and kids’ eyes light up: ‘That’s real magic!’ “
Playland itself started by accident when Tuck decided to use some extra office space to store relics from his collecting craze—a half dozen pinball machines and an old jukebox. A visitor dubbed it “Richard’s Playland,” but Tuck preferred to think of it as his “Playland not by the beach.” As word spread, people who remembered the original Playland, the seaside amusement park at Ocean Beach, began to show up, sometimes bringing their own Playland memorabilia to donate. Tuck and Biafore realized the nostalgic factor and set about opening a park dedicated to the memory of Playland. Since then, Playland-Not-At-The-Beach has expanded to become a celebration of all things fun, so even people like Biafore who never saw the original Playland can enjoy it.
Today, Playland boasts 30 free-play pinball machines and an arcade packed with vintage games like Centipede and Galaga. It has exhibits celebrating Eartha Kitt, Charles Dickens, Walt Disney, and the original Playland’s Big Dipper coaster. It has a sideshow gallery with replicas of the Fiji mermaid, the cobra woman, and the atomic fish. In April, it celebrated its seventh anniversary as a family-entertainment venue.
There are kids who have their birthday at Playland every year, so Biafore recognizes familiar faces. Often, aunts, uncles, and grandparents—those people who get invited to birthdays out of familial respect but whom no one expects to show up—change their mind and attend when they hear the party is at Playland-Not-At-The-Beach.
“Years down the road, a kid might not remember that they had their birthday here at Playland,” Biafore said. “What they’ll remember is: ‘I had a birthday, and my grandparents came to spend it with me.’ Some places are about hours and minutes. But this is about moments being created.”
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Mike Rosen-Molina is an East Bay freelancer and longtime contributor to The Monthly.
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Margaretta K. Mitchell is a nationally known artist and professional photographer, author, and educator based in the East Bay. www.MargarettaMitchell.com.