Watching a brand-new Cirque du Soleil group yesterday--I've seen all the previous ones several times over every time they pop up on TV--I reached into my mental scrapbook and pulled out the following pictures. The first circus I ever saw was a shoddy traveling affair down at the Fair Grounds in Bloomfield, a small tent with a kind of midway, wagon cages of my first lion, my first tiger, a single elephant, also my first, lumbering through its little routine to finally stand on its hind legs, a group of horses circling with a trick rider or two, trained dogs, some mean monkeys, some clowns, some jugglers and acrobats in elementary trapeze and tumbling routines, not far beyond what we were getting for the grandstand acts at the County Fair in those days before TV ruined the traveling entertainment business. I had my first Cracker Jacks there, I think. It was all dusty, hot, grimy (I did notice that), small (the same few people over and over), but I was still wide-eyed, for one of my favorite toys was a very large, complete three-ring circus with menagerie and sideshow and all kinds of performers in vivid paper reproduction that I played with on our front porch, very fragile and subject to wind. I'd gotten it the same way I did my atomic bomb ring, cereal boxtops and money order. (Advertised on "The Long Ranger," I think, the ring held a little silver metal bomb with a plastic red-finned end I took off to look into the tiny bomb capsule for the same ricocheting light show that a TV screen has when there's no reception. But I had to go into the closet or somewhere dark to see it.)
Anyway, I did get to see The Greatest Show on Earth (the movie name was the circus' motto), Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey, in Norfolk by the train tracks, once with Mom, Gramma and Grampa Koftan, once with Ethel and Charlie Clark as a companion for their son, Tom. We parked in made-for-the-occasion lots and walked over the tracks to the encampment of tents. I don't recall if the two visits were before or after the terrible Hartford circus fire that killed around a 100, the Big Top not flame retardant until after that July 1944 disaster. (I didn't know until I checked that date that the circus had wanted to flameproof its tent, but the Army wouldn't release the product because it was wartime, everything important reserved for the military, everything else rationed, like sugar, gas, nylons.) Subject to the weather, full of light and smells, it was a Big Top, a huge, long canvas oval with three rings all going with different troupes in the same categories, all trapeze artists, all wire or rope walkers, all wild animal tamers, so that it was hard to watch all three groups at once, with clowns circling the outer track for more diversion. What we could see depended on seat location: once we were in the middle; once we were toward one end. The best act was always in the center ring, where the MC ringmaster stood in his special costume, scarlet coat, black top hat, black riding boots, the band at one corner by one of the performers' entrances. The performers were largely foreign--at least their names were on the programs--definitely international, and included special families like the Flying Wallendas of two and three generations and famous clowns like the sad-faced Emmett Kelly. With Ringling Brothers' reputation, they were the best to be had, wintering in Sarasota, Florida, where circus performers are still trained. I noticed they all wore special clogs to and from the rings, slipping them off before they did their routines. (Years later I saw the Circus World Museum at Baraboo, Wisconsin, also a Ringling Brothers headquarters, when I went up to the Dells.)
Several features were age-old, like the opening parade emphasizing the variety ahead; the ring-sized cages quickly erected with lions or tigers herded in from wagon cages down chutes, roaring as their tamers snapped whips and made them sit on stools or jump over one another; the tiny comic car out of which came an impossible number of clowns or a "clown"--a stuffed dummy, substituted for the live clown--shot out of a cannon, or the splendid trapeze artists doing doubles and triples and passes between their muscular catchers, all set to the big circus band's waltzes, Sousa marches, dramatic drum rolls. Supposedly new at the time were special theme numbers, costumes all matched to tropical gaudiness or lunar fantasy (I remember the latter, with yards and yards of silver lame and glittering moons the girls sat on, fake rockets), the performers costumed accordingly, coming in on elephants and in horse-drawn fantasy wagons in a pageant, then girls all costumed alike, twisting and posing high up on long ropes twirled by men in the sawdust, completely encircling the arena, while the three rings were alive with prancing horses, tumblers using seesaws to stack themselves up, elephants balancing on stools or on their heads or lifting a mighty foot for a woman to lie under briefly, men climbing rickety ladders of carefully balanced chairs or walking high wires. Who remembers the afternoon heat, the canvas roof glowing with sun, the aromatic mixture of animals, dung, sawdust, sweat?
Outside, to snare the audience on its way to the Big Top, were the menagerie and the side show. I never got into the menagerie, the adults contending it was a needless expense, for we'd see all the animals in the show, true but . . . . The side show, very politically incorrect now, was a long row of big signs with its caricatured performers, the bearded lady, a hermaphrodite (for adults only), the giant man, the Siamese twins, the fat lady, the magician, the snake charmer, with a noisy barker presenting one act at a time as enticement. Inside, the various freaks, as they were considered, were on raised stands around the long tent's perimeter, each selling mementos after a brief performance. That's how, after much wistful cajoling, I ended up with the giant's ring, a cheap thick metal one into which I could fit my fingers, and a little book of magic tricks with a lemon yellow cover and Gay Nineties typography, explaining how to do mostly card and hand tricks, making things disappear up sleeves and into scarves, and requiring in several instances chemicals I'd never heard of and didn't know where to get. Always careful about my prized possessions, I kept both for years.
I have since seen the Ringling Brothers, its Nebraska visit now limited to Omaha and the Municipal Auditorium arena, air-conditioned, noises and smells kept off at a distance, still three rings, but considerably lessened by years, expenses, and TV competition, though I did see Gunther Gebel-Williams with his spectacular act of putting a tiger riding on a horse, two natural enemies. I think he also had white tigers, which our Doorly Zoo prides itself on (as does D.C.'s National Zoo, the main reason I went there when I was in Washington). And the fliers on the trapezes were still my favorites.
Of course, the highly theatrical Cirque du Soleil began with Canadian street performers in Quebec and had a phenomenally rapid success I've watched on TV since the 1980s to where there are several troupes now, some permanent as in Las Vegas and New York, several themes, including a Las Vegas eroticism with nudity called Zumanity, which would never play in Norfolk, Nebraska. Or Omaha. The Circus of the Sun is an entirely different production, elaborately expensive, spectacular fantasies constantly in highly choreographed motion built around special music (the songs deliberate nonsense, often meant to imitate several languages), highly dramatic lighting, gorgeously exotic, sometimes grotesquely surreal costumes, skintight or revealing lots of skin or painted/dyed to resemble skin in its obeisance to the Cult of the Body, no animals, featuring--European style--one group at a time on a central thrust stage, the audience in a lower horseshoe around it, and the acts clearly the best that money and fame can currently buy. It is a dream world fit for our times, not really for little boys.
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