Of Circuses & Life
Written on August 16, 2009 at 12:52 am, by Hartford
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A traveling circus provides a raw glimpse of life. It arrives in bright daylight preceded by much anticipation, but leaves hastily, in the early hours of the morning. The only evidence of its corporeality is its detritus—paper tubes from cotton candy, ticket halves and cold popcorn, a few tire marks, scattered piles of straw mixed with exotic dung and the posters plastered on the boarded-up windows of derelict buildings. However, the ticket holders and those who sneaked into the show need no tangible evidence of the event. They remember seeing the trapeze artists fly through the air and their mouths are still dry from slack jawed awe when the net was taken way. Their sides still hurt from the laughter that brought tears to their eyes. The voice of the gallant ringmaster still echoes in their ears. Although most of their memories will become brittle with age like the plastic of cheap souvenirs, they cling to a few so viciously that their night at the circus with its mystery, valor, shock and joy lives on with them forever. People do not forget the moments that make them wish they could eat fire, ride an elephant, hurl a pie, or stand face to face with a lion.
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A traveling circus is an imperfect caravan of contradictions. The canvas tents are stained and thin albeit heavy from coats of weatherproofing applied in careless strokes. The stripes are faded and dingy, but bright and exciting. In rusted cages and tethered to iron stakes, the beleaguered animals dream of younger days and greater freedom and are also content with the routine and regularity of two performances a day. The pancake makeup over pockmarked skin and uneven eyeliner is garish up close, but the illusion successful, even beautiful from afar. Performers wear old costumes with dignity even though years in the spotlight have necessitated a few patches and stretched the velvet thin. All along the midway, bright lights and bells promise prizes for lucky shots and with each ring tossed at an impossible bottleneck, the contestant imagines himself a winner and the hawker holds his breath. Conspicuously hidden to the right of the popcorn vendors and bell ringers, the sideshow promises a glimpse into the sacred and profane, the delicate and disfigured—unnatural beings in their natural environments. A sinful ticket with warnings to the fainthearted and feminine grants passage into a darkened tent guarded by a sinister parody of a ringmaster with chipped teeth and a stained collar. The crowd gasps as a curtain pulls back to reveal the world’s smallest/largest/most horrific/hairiest/conjoined monstrosity who for five minutes will flaunt his/her/its disfigurements, deformities and curses. At the end of the show the wide-eyed voyeurs shuffle to the exits harboring a mixture of shame and regret over the price of admission. Curiosity compels some to linger for a closer look and their courage uncovers the humanity in the inhuman as they stumble into conversations about baseball with the dog-faced boy or suggest a good coffee shop to the skeleton man. At the insistence of clowns and pretty girls in sequined leotards, the audience enters the big top and settles down shoulder-to-shoulder hip-to-hip along on wooden planks. The show unfolds into a bright cacophony of expectations, disappointments and fantasies. And for a brief moment a troupe of debtors, tuberculars, immigrants, freaks, drunks, whores, opium addicts, megalomaniacs and loners become heroes in the greatest show on Earth.
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Such is life.
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But, what would happen if twenty minutes into the show the brass band suddenly broke into “Stars and Stripes Forever” as violent orange flames rose along the south wall of the tent? What of the metaphor? What of the reality?
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On 6 July 1944 a fire started by an arsonist at a Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus afternoon performance in Hartford, Connecticut killed 168 people. It remains one of the worst fire disasters in American history.
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Two years earlier on the same date, Anne Frank and her family went into hiding to escape the fires of the Holocaust.
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Of Circuses & Life by Hartford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Category circus fires | Tags: circus stories,meaning of life