Carny Sideshows:: Weird Wonders of The Midway

chapter.

INTRODUCTION

It seems to me that people have vast potential.Most people can do extraordinary things if theyhave the confidence or take the risks. Yet mostpeople don’t.

—Philip Adams

Today’s show promises to be a marvelous celebrationof the human spirit.

—Sideshow Bob, The Simpsons

Enjoy every sandwich.

—Warren Zevon

At one time, the boards of the stage at the Coney Island Circus Sideshow were painted a bright red. Now they were dull, dusty, and cracked, as was the slender banister that ran around the perimeter of the stage area. Or maybe it was just the dim lightingor a trick memory that nostalgia plays. I’m still not sure.

Six of us were gathered around that banister eyeing the three items the instructor had set before us: a nail, a Phillips head screwdriver, and an ice pick. The nail and screwdriver, I estimated,were approximately four inches long, the ice pick a bit longer. Of the three items, it was my summation that the ice pick could be problematic for a number of reasons:

First, the tip was incredibly sharp. So much so that if it was flung to the floor at just the right angle—as our instructor had done—it would penetrate the wood and stand upright. Of course, an amateur, such as myself, could feasibly miss the floor and hit his foot. Such catastrophes are best saved for private momentswhen no one else is around. Fortunately, my limp was undetectable for the remainder of the day. Note to self: purchasesteel-toed shoes.

Second, the length of the ice pick seemed to be more than four inches. It seemed closer to six—maybe six and a half inches—whereas the depth of my head can be measured at around six inches or so. Every instinct I had was telling me that the math on the ice pick wasn’t exactly in my favor.

The keen-eyed and quick-witted thinkers should be asking themselves at this point what the depth of my head had to do with anything at all. This being Sideshow School, the depth of my head was exceedingly important since we were attemptingsomething known as the Human Blockhead.¹ In brief, the Human Blockhead is a sideshow act that involves the hammeringof a nail or the insertion of some other item into the nose. Usually the item can be inserted fairly deep, but if somethingwere inserted too far, then you risk hitting the back of your head where a little something called the medulla oblongatarests. This is better known as the brain stem, and best respected at all costs.

The risks were clear, and there we stood. Our instructor had asked us to choose one of the items and insert it into our respective nasal passages. I wasn’t sure but could probably guess that this wasn’t the approved use for any of these items. I glanced at the choices one more time, hoping they’d changed into something a bit more nasal-friendly. It would’ve been nice to have at least one option that might not, should I make a monumental mistake—as I’d done earlier with the ice pick in estimating where my foot ended and the floor began—cause any internal bleeding or, god forbid, brain damage. My wife would have contested that I must have had some form of brain damage even to consider attending Sideshow School in the first place.

Choose one of the items and gently probe around a bit; then once you find the passage we’ve been exploring, insert the item into that passage.

I took in the items one last time. Nope, they still hadn’t changed. The old Sesame Street skit played through my head: one of these things is not like the others. If that axiom were true, then I’d be damned if I could figure out what the right choice was. But then again, I couldn’t imagine Big Bird, Ernie, Bert, or Kermit, hell, I couldn’t even imagine Oscar the Grouch, inserting any of those items into his head, and he lived in a garbage can—and was made of foam.

Your turn.

All eyes were on me. When you’re in Sideshow School, someone’salways the center of attention. Sometimes, even though you’ve chosen to be there, you don’t want it to be you. I’d had jobs in the past, office jobs, where I’d be at a meeting and it was my turn to speak, my turn to add to the group and throw my thoughts into the mix. Or it would be my turn to aid in a brainstorming session to inform my superiors and colleaguesexactly what I was bringing to the table to earn my weekly paycheck. And in retrospect, each of those moments paled in comparison to moments in the spotlight at Sideshow School.

With a tentative hand I reached out and took the nail. We were provided with alcohol swabs so that we could clean the item before inserting it. I understand that they also swab the arm of death row inmates before executing them. Just a thought.

I tilted my head back and hoped that what I’d heard was true: there was no real danger of brain damage since the copiousamounts of blood squirting out would be warning enough that I’d gone too far. Gently I inserted the nail into my nostril. It entered, then went deeper, and deeper, and deeper.

Sideshow School. What had I gotten myself into? And an even more curious question: Why? I could probably narrow down the answer or answers, as the case may be.

Growing up I had a strong proclivity for, and love of, magic. Magicians, misdirection, deception, all of it fascinated me to no end, as did the relationship between the magician and audience.Here you had a performer who sought to deceive and lie to the spectators, and the spectators were ready, willing, and able to be deceived. And, in addition, the magician, utilizing basic methods of misdirection also employed rudimentary psychology in order to achieve the miracles that the audience believed they were witnessing. It was, indeed, a strange relationship.

Most of my young adult life I pursued magic as a hobby, and as an adult, I pursued it even more vigorously as I attempted to gain meaningful employment performing and attempting to turn my hobby into an actual paying job. Life was good. I enjoyedwhat I was doing.

Except for one thing, one memory that seemed to linger at the very outer reaches of my subconscious. Even today, I have only a few pieces of the memory at best, but the pieces are clear ones, easily recognizable, and even easier to interpret.Most importantly, there are enough pieces of this memoryto assemble a recognizable picture.

I must have been anywhere between the ages of six and eight years old. My parents decided to take me to the circus. Now, this wasn’t one of the big names. It wasn’t Ringling or the Big Apple or even Cole Bros. To the best of my knowledge it wasn’t. This was sometime during the 1970s in suburban Pennsylvania. It was in either the spring or the fall, when carnivals,fairs, circuses, and the like, would spring up in empty parking lots and unused fields almost overnight, as if out of a Ray Bradbury novel.

This one, the name of which still eludes me to this day, was erected in the far corner of a mall parking lot. There were two tents, one larger and brightly colored, the other smaller with a white, garish canvas covered in tears, holes, and patches. Outside the smaller tent’s entrance stood a stage, and on that stage stood two men, one bellowing into a microphone, the other standing placidly nearby with a handful of razor blades and paper. My parents and I stood at the base of the stage as the crowd filled in around us. As the outside talker (a term I later learned referred to the man ranting on the stage, sometimes also called a barker) ran through his spiel, the other man began to shred a sheet of paper with one of the razor blades, then he stuck out his tongue, placed a blade on his tongue, and proceeded to eat the razor blades.

I stood by my father’s side, slack jawed and stunned. One after another the razor blades went into the man’s mouth. He chewed them, and we were close enough to the stage so that you could audibly hear the blades pop in his mouth as his teeth ground down on them. Finally, after popping some ten blades into his mouth, he spat the broken metal shards out into a bowl for all to see, then opened his mouth, peelinghis checks apart and sticking out his tongue as proof that he remained unharmed. My father led us away.

Though I wanted to see what was inside the smaller tent, my parents didn’t deem it appropriate fare for a child my age, so it was to the circus we went. As I was dragged from the smaller tent, I got a glimpse inside. The flap was pulled back, and there I could clearly make out a tiny crowd gathered on bleachers. They watched as a man, lying on a bed of nails, held a cinder block on his chest. Another man stood over him with a sledgehammer and brought the full weight of the tool down onto the stone block. The gasp of the crowd and the crack of the cinder block are the final memories I have of what was my first sideshow.

What is a sideshow? In its essence, in its heart, the sideshow is a collection of misfits celebrating their uniqueness. As Todd Robbins, author and sideshow performer, pointed out to me, "One of the appeals of the freak act is that everyone has a touch of the freak about them. Everyone has something about them that they’re a little bit ashamed of, that sets them apart in their eyes in a not good way. And the sideshow says, ‘Don’t hide it, celebrate it.’ "

The sideshow is the place where such things can be celebrated.And more and more, it’s not only their uniqueness these folks are celebrating but their unparalleled ability to push their bodies to the very reaches of what they can do. They stand determined to show their audiences and the world that there is more to life and that there is more that they can do with these shells they call bodies. There is untapped potentiallying in wait for each man and each woman, and they’re here to prove it. They’re living, breathing proof that there’s more to life than the daily grind of the office cubicle and the watercooler. They’re here to show us and, at times, shock us into the reality of the world.

Sideshow performers are people who are truly alive on the inside, and they want you to be too. After all, we’re all misfits to one degree or another, born of a country of misfits. Our forefathers came to this country seeking a home, turning their backs on lands, kingdoms, and sovereignties that deemed their religious, personal, or political beliefs contrary to the norm.

They were misfits. And the sideshow is the place where misfitscan celebrate being themselves and where one’s uniqueness and one’s rare and special individuality can thrive for all to see. What could be more American than that?

Now before anyone goes hammering nails into their noses while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with the Star-Spangled Banner echoing in the background, there are some facts that need to be set straight. America didn’t invent the sideshow.

Many people, wrongly, believe that it was P. T. Barnum who invented the sideshow, but this is not necessarily true. It’s a Barnum sort of exercise, now that I think about it, noted James Taylor, author and publisher of Shocked and Amazed: On & Off the Midway. "Because Barnum didn’t invent 99% of the things people think he invented. At all. He didn’t invent the circus, he didn’t invent the sideshow, he didn’t invent the dime museum. But he perfected them. He did invent modern advertising, and there are those that would argue, and I’d be one of them, that he invented modern New York."

Before acts such as sword-swallowing, fire-eating, and the Human Blockhead found their ways into the capable hands of P. T. Barnum and the sideshow, they existed throughout the world in various forms performed by a variety of peoples. Middle Eastern priests and Indian fakirs used such feats regularlyas ways to not only draw crowds but prove that the gods had blessed them. Oh, and they were also able to sell a few things after the sermon, as well, but that’s neither here nor there. Is it?

"American sideshows, the ‘10-in-1’ tradition, are not unknownelsewhere, Taylor said. Sideshows are not unknown elsewhere, but it’s the way America honed the tradition, and the way Americans just seem to become identified as the sideshow nation. It is really the metaphor for the twenty-first century.

"They’ve had sideshows in Japan, they’ve had sideshows in Central America, South America, Africa’s got sideshows, they come from different places and different traditions except that they’re all driven by human curiosity and the need to have things learned by having things presented to you. It’s the show business is what it is."

These oddly bizarre acts were utilized by performers throughoutthe world for a variety of reasons—and for centuries—beforefinding their ways to the shores of America, eventually being gathered together into a single show. You might say that the Industrial Revolution had a lot to do with it.

It was in the late eighteenth century and early part of the nineteenth century that the Industrial Revolution began seriouslyto influence America as a nation. The scales started to tip in America to that of an industrial nation from that of an agrarian.

Industrial? Agrarian? What does all this mean, and what in the world does it have to do with the sideshow? These words should be confined to the classroom and shouldn’t enter into even the most cursory discussion of glass-eaters, sword-swallowers,bug-munchers, and their ilk. Well, industrial and agrarian have a lot to do with it. A lot.

Before machines came along, turning us into the industrialbeast we are today, and made our nation smaller while at the same time bigger, America was mostly agrarian. That’s not to say that we were pagans on the hunt for strangers to torch and barbecue alive inside a Wicker Man once every vernalequinox to appease the gods for a fruitful harvest (thumbs up if you conjured images of Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward).Rather, it just refers to the fact that we were a nation whose driving force were the farms woven into the American landscape. Agriculture was king. The towns and cities scattered across America’s heartland were collections of people who, from day to day, worked the land. These were people who grew the food that fed us and cared for the animals that provided what was needed to clothe us. And, damn, what little free time these fine folks had must have been boring as shit because by the time the circus was born these folks were ripe for the picking—which bring us to P. T. Barnum.

Barnum struck a deal with two businessmen, William CameronCoup and Dan Costello, to create P. T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Circus. The show was full of over-the-top spectacle and was exactly what people had come to expect from Barnum. But it wasn’t long before good ole Phineas Taylor Barnum came up with a shrewd moneymakingidea, something that could be added onto the circus and bring in a few extra bucks.

Next to the circus tent, he arranged another tent to be erected. This secondary tent utilized many of the acts and displays from his famous museums, the human oddities he’d become acquainted with, and other performers such as sword-swallowersand fire-eaters. Thus the sideshow as we know it was born.

So you have America, a nation that was still fiddling with a new invention called the radio and no television in sight. Once word got around that a circus or sideshow was coming to town, everything nearly came to a standstill. Maybe it wasn’t that dramatic, but traveling circuses and sideshows of that latter part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century thrived on riding the rails and going from town to town providingentertainment for these folks who were the backbone of America.

Then, of course, radio, television, and movies came along and things began to change, particularly with regard to how people spent their entertainment dollars and where they found that entertainment.

Carnivals soon became a big deal, and sideshows found a life among them as well. But eventually carnivals changed as well. Everything changes, and everything evolves. The same is true of the sideshow.

The traveling sideshow lived and breathed going from one town to the next during the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies. In America it grew, lived, died, evolved, changed, and disintegrated, and if you look in the right places, it is rising again like a fiery Phoenix. But no matter what, through it all, the sideshow has held the public’s fascination, offering entertainment both unique and bizarre.

Traditionally structured to include ten acts in one, the 10-in-1,or sideshow, is composed of a multitude of performers, from human and animal oddities to magic and illusions, curios,and trained animal shows. Most acts that fall under these banners require particular and distinctive entertainers not easily found, such as Siamese twins, the grossly obese (though some might argue that these folks are more easily found in the wilds of America as opposed to other places around the world), little people, deformed animals, or the use of specially made large-scale illusions such as the classic sideshow exhibit Girl to Gorilla, where a young woman visually transforms into an ape. There is, however, one last category of sideshow entertainerthat almost anyone can aspire to, the working act.

Working acts are the meat of the 10-in-1 and are composed of entertainers who have made a conscious choice to be different.Unlike those performers who are born different, performersthat comprise a sideshow’s working acts have gone out of their way to stand out. Through vigorous learning, practice,a bit of blood, and more than a few burns, these people have acquired and mastered a particular skill or skills. The basic working acts found in most sideshows include lying on a bed of nails, fire-eating, performing the human blockhead (hammering a nail into your nasal passage), walking on brokenglass, snake charming, mastering the use of animal traps (jamming your hand or tongue into any form of animal trap without being harmed), and sword-swallowing.

Sideshows attract audiences with these acts in much the same way as car crashes: people can’t help but watch, covering their eyes but peeking through their fingers nonetheless. And while we want to watch, few people would ever consider attempting the feats presented on the dusty painted boards of a sideshow stage, which is exactly how I felt, until I attendedSideshow School.

On a Monday morning in April 2007, while my friends and family dropped off their children at day care centers and went off to their respective jobs and while millions of Americans went about their lives, arriving at schools or businesses that would see their days playing out in front of a desk or confined to a cubicle, I attended Sideshow School, learning the bare basics of the working acts and the ins and outs of the sideshow.

What was it that caused me to set out on this venture? Why would anyone, in their right mind, decide one day that they desperately needed to know how to eat fire and jam various and assorted body parts into the traps of animals? What was it that convinced me I had a need to walk on broken glass and learn how to insert varied and numerous items into my nasal passage? There can be a number of answers, some such as idiocy, stupidity, and sheer recklessness. These I try to ignore when they’re presented to me at the dinner table.

Most of my life I’ve not been idiotic, stupid, or reckless. Some might contend that I’ve played it entirely too safe on occasion, far from reckless. No, some of the other answers are closer to the truth.

Certainly it had something to do with my experiences as a boy, being exposed, albeit briefly, to a sideshow performer and the seemingly endless wonders that waited for me on the other side of the tent flap. It’s all alive on the inside! Wonderswrapped in the canvas of a tent were being denied me by an adult. If there is anything sure to make an impression on a child, it is censorship. Ask anyone whose EC Comics were taken away from them as a child, denying them their Vault of Horrors and Tales from the Crypt. Those children found a way to get their hands on them, one way or another.

It also had more than a little to do with my interest in magic, but therein lies a peculiar rub. You see, if ever there were polar opposites in the world, it is magic and the sideshow. While magic deals in lies (honest lies, true) and deception, there is, in the sideshow, veritably little deception involved in what these performers are actually doing onstage. The sideshow’s tagline could almost read, What you see is what you get.

In magic you have a cornucopia of secret moves, deceptive sleights, and hidden gaffs. In the sideshow, the only deceptionis the exploitation of the audience’s lack of knowledge. The audience doesn’t know, for example, that the human anatomymakes it not only probable but possible to hammer a nail into your nose. The sideshow exploits this knowledge and, in turn, presents something amazing. So after enmeshing myself in the conjuring arts, practicing hour after hour on card sleights and hidden moves, I found the very concept of what you see is what you get very refreshing.

The skills of a magician are the unsung heroes of the magic show. Never will an audience truly know the countless hours of practice that made a specific trick, illusion, or miracle possible.In the sideshow, however, the skill is there, it’s real, it’s tangible, it’s alive, and