I have to admit, it lives up to the slogan.
I hadn't been to the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus since I was a little kid. With the way TicketBastard adds service charges on, three $12 are like fifty bucks. They have all kinds of pricing tiers, like the $75 front-row-center-ring seats, but I saw they had lower level seats at $19, and I did some math in my head...
Basically, this was going to be a more-or-less $100 excursion by the time I paid for parking, got each honyock a snack, a soda and a souvenir. That's a lot of dough, and on one side I wanted to keep the cost down any way I could, but my inner child won out and I popped the extra $18 to sit down close.
Which turns out to be a great idea.
We went early hoping to get in on the preshow party. They have Asia (the oldest of their elephants) and some clowns and acrobats out for a meet-and-greet. The will-call line I was in was the slowest, everyone ahead of us seemed to have a special problem, but we still got to get down close. And Mo got to try on a clown coat, which was awesome. It felt like a weighted therapy vest, very heavy.
I loved the Shriner's circus last fall, but everything Ringling Bros. does is over the top. Instead of one elephant, try ten that do coordinated acts. Instead of three or four lions, a dude with eight tigers. Plus trained zebras, camels, etc.
For that matter, the human cannonball, a staple of any circus: the Arrarat had a guy near the finale; this circus starts the show with not one, but two. A double-barrel job, a husband-wife team.
The clowns were basically acrobats as well. One even flirted with me briefly.
'Oh you're a hippie, I just love you! My parents were huge hippies, it's why I turned out so weird!'
I don't, for the record, think of myself as a hippie. But if Norine the Clown and a lot of other people are to be believed, I cut a very hippie picture these days. Or, as one coworker puts it, I'm flying the freak flag high.
Like I said, I knew the concessions would be outrageous, that's a given. And it would take a true skinflint to not buy even cotton candy at the circus, right? Kind of like with casinos and fairs, don't take what you can't come home without, they will suck you dry.
It's $7 to park at Kemper, but there was a $5 lot across the way, and I figured I might as well save a couple bucks. Glad I did, we got to park right by the circus train.
When we got in, I needed to pee. This is a tricky thing, because I can't go in the Women's if I dont' want to spend the night in jail. Mo and Em can't go in the Men's unless I want to talk to child welfare officials. Normally, I can send them into the Women's, take care of my business, and be out there before Mo and an exasperated Em emerge from theirs.
But the restrooms at Kemper are spread out, way out. So I'm like, meet me here, by the $30 stuffed elephants.
I run, pee as fast as I can, then come out to see Em struggling to hold Mo in place. Mo spotted (I think) a cotton candy barker and was trying to bolt for the stairs up.
She almost overpowered me, but I convinced her she had to calm down and come to where our seats were and then she'd get cotton candy; the alternative was we'd leave and no cotton candy and no circus.
So when the cotton candy barker passed me, I'm like, "TWO!"
He handed over the goodies to my kiddos and then said, 'Twenty Dollars.'
Twenty dollars?
The cotton candy comes with hats, cool top hats that they wouldn't sell nearly as many of if the kids weren't already ripping into them before Dad finds out how bad he's being gouged.
When Em asked about getting one of the light toys, I said, 'Don't you think the hats are cooler?' I'm thinking, that's the souvenier, no two ways. After parking and cotton candy/hats, I barely had enough money left for two $5 sodas.
I love the circus, and I love it even for being what it is, an apex predator of wallets. They had barkers outside after, in case anyone had an idea they'd leave with money in their pocket.
I told Em the yarn about P.T. Barnum and the 'Egress' sign in his sideshow. The show is nothing if not true to the spirit, one's born everyday, etc.
There was also this guy with the incredibly tall hair, he turned out to be, more or less, the star of the show. If Charlie Chaplain could be reincarnated, this eraserhead is he.
Mo did crack me up after inhaling her cotton candy. I mean really, I looked for where she'd dropped it, because Em was on her, maybe, third bite and Mo's was totally gone. She leaned against me and said, 'Soda, soda, soda!' I'm thinking, I'll bet, that's thirsty work you just did.
Mo also said, 'Camera!' many times, and I obliged, clicking away. A lot of the shots I wanted, I'd need a more serious camera and some good lenses. We were up close, but it was very relative in terms of photographing it.
I can't believe I let such a huge window in my life pass with no cirucses. I want to go again.
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