Last year's trip to Ringling Bros was a bit impromptu. Will-call tickets, I remember, because I ordered them so late I was afraid the mail wouldn't be fast enough. And forget having TicketBastard ship them to you overnight, it's just one ticket and it'll cost you like you FedExed a brick.
For that matter, I still can't figure what 'service' TicketBastard provides that shouldn't be included in the face price. Printing a ticket? I work in printing, and even with the anti-counterfeiting elements (a concert ticket is a pretty sophisticated piece of print), there's less than a dollar of printing involved. Yet their inscrutable math works out three $19 tickets comes to $75. That's more than sales tax. Even with Kansas City's exorbitant rates, sales tax is all of a buck and a half, meaning TicketBastard is claiming around $4.50 to do fifty cents worth of printing.
But I recall Pearl Jam tried to cut out this odious middleman, I don't think entirely successfully. Probably about like trying to cut the Mafia out of vending machines. You'd have better luck finding a politician who shouldn't be cut up for bait.
But anyway, the circus is fun, and the circus is about getting skinned. It's a nearly perfect system for evacuating your wallet of anything resembling legal tender.
I found a bargain on parking: the Sinclair station across from Kemper had $3 spots. Everyplace else was $5 to $7 as far as I could tell. We were early, got there at 2:00 for the 3:00 show because you can go down on the floor. We didn't know that last year, and got about two minutes of pre-show in. I'm guessing the $3 parking spots sell out by about 2:05 because there were only a half dozen spots left behind the Sinclair when we parked there.
It was louder this year. The pre-show in particular, I don't remember them playing music last year. Maybe they did, but this year it was on the obnoxious side.
Still, cool stuff! We got free clown noses, the only thing I think I've ever seen in the Ringling Bros universe that didn't have a hefty price tag on it. The girls got to try on costumes, Mo got on a saw horse deal the Cossacks had out.
There was a couple standing by a motorcycle for the meet-n-greet, but I didn't know what their act entailed, and I'm not convinced they spoke English. They were jabbering at each other in Spanish periodically, smiling mutely at passers by otherwise. You know, that competition from Argentina for suicidally dangerous stunt riding, it's gonna shut down the whole U.S. economy.
Going to find our seats, I was planning to buy the girls a soda. A soda and cotton candy was what I'd budgeted in my mind. Last year, the cotton candy came with a top hat (it still does), and while $10 is a futhermucking outrageous price for cotton candy, the girls loved the hats and still have them. They look flimsy, but they've lasted a year. In stark contrast to the light toys they got at the Arrarat circus the year before. I think those were also $10, but I think they were broken almost before we got tot he car.
But the girls didn't want soda. Not once they got an eyeful of the shaved ice. In very cool flip-top mugs.
Em wanted the clown; Mo was all about the elephant. $9 and $12 respectively.
I know, a $12 snow cone ought to have Remy Martin in it, but it covered the souvenir front thoroughly, and I have to say they're pretty cool steins. Relatively sturdy for plastic. Made in China, I notice, so no doubt full of lead and rat poison, but hey. I bet they'd have to charge $12.50, maybe even $12.75 to use food grade plastics. Political prisoner slave labor only saves you so much, ya know?
This year's tour had a storyline where they had the Ringmaster, an aerialist, an acrobat and a dancer all pretend to be a family from the audience who got picked out at random to be in the show. Magic dust was supposed to account for how 'Mom' could just have the knack for trapeze work. I'm not sure if there were any kids that bought this particular line of bull, but I know Em saw right through it.
Don't get me wrong, the show is great. I liked Bello better, but Ringling Bros. doesn't send the same tour through every year, they mix it up. Bello's Red tour, and we got Blue this year. I guess next year will be the Gold tour if I've sussed out the system. And Em did tell me she liked this year's circus even better than last year's.
We did see a strong man who get a Jeep run over him and who caught a canon ball. Granted, Herkules looks a little pudgy, and the canon ball goes slow enough you can see it arc to him, but I wouldn't be too keen to try and catch a bowling ball that was 'only going' 75mph.
Part of the problem I had with the 'Circus of Dreams' story line is I couldn't quite suspend my disbelief that Dan didn't know what he wanted to do. I mean the Ring Mistress, Jennifer Fuentes, tells him to beat this drum and he can do anything he wants. Well, either the magic drum isn't quite for real or Dan is gay, because if you give me the drum stick and all that magical wishing power with Fuentes and all those white-hot dancers lined up in fishnets and it's not going to be a family show.
This is one of the essential charms of the circus: it'll suck the dollars right out of your wallet like a strip club, but the dancers are much hotter and it's actually fun to go. Plus nobody thinks you're a creep for being there and you can even take your children.
My camera is better this year. 1600 ISO ceiling instead of 400 ISO, and half again the megapixels, but still it's not the man for the job. I got some passable pics of a few things, but the challenging lighting, distance and speed you're up against at the circus would be daunting even with a professional dSLR. A pocket camera just doesn't stand a chance of catching a back lit acrobat in midair somersault from 100 feet away.
The motorcycle I didn't know what to make of before the show? That was the closer, a cage ball with motorcycles riding in it. I mean, they start out with a couple, and it looks crowded in there as they go buzzing around it. Then they add a couple more, then a couple more. Seven motorcycles blurring around in a sphere maybe twenty feet in diameter. With criss-crossing courses like electrons around a nucleus. When it was over, I realized I was actually physically tensed up, I was so sure they were about to have some disastrous collision in there.
Leaving, I was surprised to see it was 5:45 when we got to the car. It might be fun to bitch about the prices and all that, but a two and a half hour show with an hour of pre-show comes about as close to making it a value as you're going to get. They're proud of the show but they give you a lot of it. It's the family entertainment version of that ridiculously expensive steak dinner that was so good you couldn't stand it and so filling you didn't want to eat again until the following Thursday, and the doggie bag weighed more than a pound.
I'm still struck that they have hucksters waiting outside with souvenirs and programs in case you're trying to leave with any money.
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