A Three Ring Circus

Sorry, but this isn't an analogy headline: Frau Lobster came into free tickets to the Ararat Shrine Circus Thursday night. Which means it was inexpensive to attend, all I had to do was feed my new (to me) '88 Buick enough gas to get to Municipal Auditorium, $5 for parking, $20 or so for concessions and souvenirs.

It's eerie how it's exactly like I remembered. It's been, easily, 25 years since I went to a circus. I was an overly cynical kid, and really didn't enjoy the circus that much as a child.

First off: after we park and are walking to the auditorium, I have to wonder if the children of all ages cliché is bizarrely true: there were tons of people mixed in with the families of obvious circus-goers who were twenty-somethings dressed to the nines in black designer dresses and semi-formal suits. Freaky enough, the idea of childless Beautiful People attending he circus: to get dressed up for cotton candy and clowns?

But Municipal has more than one room. The main arena was the circus, but the theater part was playing Les Miserables. Oddly (to the Lobster's POV), the two started at the same time and had the same intermission. We left at intermission because it was a school night, Mo was on overload from the spectacle, and, really, how do you top a human cannon? We emerged from the auditorium and had to pass through the well dressed young couples' second hand intermission smoke.

Cigarettes are a queer addiction. I've been off of them for a decade and still want one sometimes, but do I miss struggling to make it through a movie without sneaking out for a smoke? As long as Wagner's operas are, the junk-sickness for a cigarette must have made Sigfried seem much, much longer.

But back to the circus. Cirque du Soleil can be all Migh and Highty about how they don't use 'the animal,' but the real reason is that while watching a bear ride a scooter is fun, it pales compared to aerialist performing without a net.

The big cats are beautiful. The poodle routine was cute. But the trapeze, rope and high wire acts were literally breathtaking.

The flying angels were scary enough: they do the passing of one acrobat to another, stuff with a high enough goof-percentage you couldn't do it without a net. But I saw an act like that as a kid and maybe this is where my cynicism was checked:

When they set up the safety net for the act I remember from (I think it was the Ringling Bros., but it might have been the Shrine circus, I saw both, the latter more than once), I saw that one of the corner poles wasn't as upright as the others. I was just a kid in the stands, so if I could see it anyone could. Especially experienced circus people, right?

During this acrobatic act, a guy falls on the net and it gives, drops him to the arena floor. Brutal fucking fall, right? But in my child's mind, I thought it was like in the movies where people aren't really shot, it's blanks in the gun and fire-cracker size charges placed in walls to simulate a guy being shot at. If the net was set up to drop the guy and he hit the floor, it was staged, right?

The ringmaster gave a speech that struck my cynical-kid ears as corny, about what a sad thing it was, as the guy was hauled off by paramedics. Of course, the ringmaster lived on the road with this guy, he was probably genuinely upset by it, but I assumed it was all for show and I wasn't buying it. When he said that 'the show must go on,' I about gagged on cliché.

Then I find out, via news and my parents, that this acrobat really did take a nasty fall and was hospitalized.

Flash forward to Thursday evening and I like animals, but concerns that the animals might be cruelly trained are offset by a notion I have that to get a full grown bear or lion to behave in silly, anthropomorphic ways, you have to understand the animal better than you understand people. Breaking a horse is not inherently cruel: it's a process of making a physically superior animal 'want' to be ridden. When I see poodles doing a conga, I see Pavlovian templates taken to amazing conclusions. Ditto for kissing tigers (not without risk, remember Sigfriend and Roy?) or fiddling with bears on leashes, I can only see mean tactics getting one so far.

Also, the risks the animal trainers take are dwarfed by the acrobats. One act was three rings with a rope act, a ring act and a trapeze act, all without a net. These girls were doing things like hanging by a hand-hold and rotating their body in unlikely positions a good 30 feet above a floor with little more than a wrestling mat's worth of protection. The trapeze girl (who had earlier foot-juggled flaming batons), at one point was swinging by her ankles while a fat old man stood below her center like he'd catch her if she fell. Maybe if she fell at zero degrees of arc, but if she fell in any of the other stations her trapeze was describing, the guy couldn't even get badly hurt failing to catch her.

The tightrope act was another netless job: and one of the dudes, he didn't look old enough to vote, much less take a drink, and he is somehow allowed to sign the waivers to trust his balance alone? He was trying to skip rope on the line and fell, first taking what looked to be a bad groin shot and then catching himself with one hand before he went all the way down. He hoisted himself back up and the ringmaster asked him if he was okay.

The guy wants to try it again. And he did it. Skips rope on a high wire with no net, the wire slightly higher than the balcony level of the auditorium begins.

There's a purity to this thing. No, they don't have a sideshow in any circus I've attended, though Chris Offut's relatively contemporary memoir 'The Same River Twice' details his travels with one that did. He's a few years my senior, but he would have been travelling with that show after I was too old to be dragged to a circus unwillingly. Perhaps cosmopolitan KC got a cutting edge breed of circus in the 1970s.

Perhaps the animal acts will, as those French-Canadian fanatics suggest, look as ridiculous to me in the future as a sideshow. What I remember from Offut's memoir was the 'parrot lady' who was shunned by all the castes of the circus. She was a sideshow act, so acrobats, animal trainers, even roadies basically wouldn’t talk to her. The freaks didn’t like her because all her deformity was chosen (if memory serves, a bizarre series of tattoos coupled with a fetishistic exhibitionism.

Anyway, whether I should feel guilty for enjoying it or not, I will not willingly miss another circus that passes through town. I don’t care if I ever see ‘Les Mis,’ but I will not miss another circus if I can help it.