Yesterday 2 friends of mine invited myself and a friend of theirs who has a seven year old daughter to go to the Ringling Brothers circus at Madison Square Garden. Four adult gay men and one 7 year old girl. It was like the time I directed a play at the California Theatre Center in Sunnyvale and four of my friends drove down together but I didn’t know whose name to give for the tickets waiting for them and so I said to the woman who was in charge of the ticket table, ‘you’ll know them, four grown gay men, no children’.Anyway, yesterday’s trip to the circus gave me the following reflective thoughts:
1, The spectacle of hundreds of whirling thingabob lights throughout the crowd is one of the most beautiful man made sights. A child’s smile reacting to said sights is one of creations more beautiful sights (no matter how much said smile is stuffed with the man made delights of hot dogs, cotton candy, popcorn or snow cones).
2. I love elephants and feel that no matter what I know about how they might be treated and trained, I still want to see them and the entire day was made for me at the sight of a dozen pachyderms parading through the coliseum, some with beautiful ladies in colorful costumes riding them. It’s a simple pleasure and I can’t underline enough how happy this made me and I’m willing to look the other way on animal rights abuse issues (ok no I’m not but I was for the few minutes they were out there).
BTW I could swear I saw one elephant snark to another. Three of them were lined up to come out onto the main floor; one of them ducked their head to the other in a way that said to me “hey, pal, get a load of THIS crowd, wanna go crazy with me and watch everyone run in terror? We’ll totally be put down but what a way to go, and hey, we’ll be on the news!” to which the other one just did their best ‘harumph’ at and ignored them. I still maintain that one of the elephants when walking past me winked at me. Just me. No one else. Really. Why don’t you believe me? :)
3. There is not much at the circus to hold my interest: the clowns are too broad and are shouting, straining their voices too much to be funny/heard; the ‘magic tricks’ creep me out (anything having to do with knives, flaming pokers, steel plates, etc slicing people up upsets me); the high wire and aerial tumbling acts frighten me and while I love the animals, my bleeding heart liberal mind can’t get around the fact that these creatures are being subjugated into doing the bidding of others, something they didn’t choose to do. Add to that the very plastic feel and the over consumption of it all, I don’t know that I’d go back.
4. The Roadies were almost more interesting to me to watch than the main acts.. although in concert with the performers, the Roadies completed a sort of ballet --- actions (walking to a spot to put a chair or bench down while something is happening elsewhere in the better lit area) and reactions (taking said chair away, or helping a performer down a rope ladder from a tiny staging area on the ceiling) were somehow compelling to me. Although that the Roadies seemed completely indifferent to acts around them left me feeling both confident that they had seen it all before and there was no real danger and worried that they were getting to complacent and Something Bad would happen because they weren’t paying attention.
5. There are people who are still willing to get up on all sorts of manners of ropes, wires, cages and moving contraptions and walk, run, ride bikes, do flips and generally endanger their lives for the entertainment of others. There are still lots of people who find this entertaining. What’s wrong with me that I don’t?
Half the fun of a circus (from what I can remember in my one or two childhood experiences going to them) seems to me to be not only the sideshow attractions and the games but also the smell of a circus, the gritty odor of live animals mixed with cotton candy and popcorn.
I think it’s part of the same fun that’s lost on me with big theme parks. To me, ‘riding the rides’ (as my Texas friend Karen said in the 80s when we were working for the Bible camp) means walking through the dirt fairground and the fairway and seeing the town you live in from the top of the ferris wheel.
In any event, it was nice to spend some time with friends and over and above everything else, that alone made the circus worthwhile. J
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