SUNDAY LOOKING BACK: A City P. T. Barnum Could Not Have Topped ... The Side Show is Now Us -- No, Them

 Update, 10.13.23:  Out the car window, the sidewalks are strewn with the lost and the damned: They are now called "the unhoused."  Some live by night in four star hotel rooms, by day in their own squalor, in a city woke-choking itself  to death, here in the State of Insanity.  In the civic center area, block after block are so littered of human debris  as to look like the stage set of a nightmare film in the making. If you promise sanctuary, food and drugs, drivers licenses and medical care to everyone -- citizen or not, they will come.

Update, 6.17.23:  You may have heard of major commercial renters in downtown San Francisco leaving for other horizons less freaky than here.  Every time the place loses another high-end retailer, or the Giants baseball team fails to sign a star payer, the locals mull over all  the reasons, but rarely if ever do they face the real culprit: Themselves.  Their smug addiction to woke idiocy and destruction, epitomized by their current groveling to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, is repelling the public at large.

     SAN FRANCISCO, ONCE the enchanted city of my boyhood, is sinking deeper into greed, decadence and the insane building mania over land fill that may one day turn tragically soft under the wrong earthquake.  A PBS Nova report some time ago raised the sobering possibility.

     ON A RECENT VISIT to Baghdad across the bay, I grew instantly dizzy and vaguely disoriented, assaulted  by jackhammers pounding, angry cars flying through intersections,  building cranes  shifting ominously overhead. Will the madness ever end?  At Market, I ran for a bus which took me through what felt like the aftermath of a local war — more demolition and/or construction under way, more filth and litter along streets ruled by human slugs.  If you plan on visiting the central library, you might consider bringing your own porta-potty. Ikea?

 

    THE FREAK SHOW that has been San Francisco ever since the sixties is only getting freakier.  Halloween every day?   Barnum could not have competed with the emerging class here of self-defining characters, each his/her/its own universe.  But the clever Barnum  might have rented space nearby and offered them free living quarters with wide window views -- of  ticketed museum-goers passing by.

     HOW TO KNOW who they are? I wonder what the average old-world Joe from out of town is to do when facing a woman on a pre-arranged date, or by accident, but now feeling uneasy about said mortal’s true nature?  Does he outright ask?  Good grief, he’d risk getting arrested for sexual harassment.  In this mind-boggling new world disorder where new gender options are being added to the pool daily,  perhaps Apple will come up with a new app,  GAB--Gender at Birth, a device to detect the native truth of the person before you.  Of course, said person might  have an app designed to thwart the signals from yours.  But then again, here you just might meet the freak of your dreams.

     LET ME GET to the point: San Francesco is a moral toilet.  Sample exhibit:  I remember when Willie Brown was elected ‘Da Mayor and, soon after, as reported, he attended a late night private party at which one man stripped to the waist and bore the sliding  knife of another against his willing back, while a third  urinated into the fresh blood stream.   On a local radio talk show soon after, the righteous indignation of Bernie Ward, who also hosted God Talk on Sundays, was answered by the ‘Da Mayor telling Ward to mind his own damn business.  Ward, minding his own damn business, was later convicted of circulating child pornography on the internet,  and sent to prison.  
               

     BUT THE EGALITARIAN toilet on ground level is safely avoided by the billionaire renters above living in higher realms behind glass and steel and praying for structural stability. You’ve heard of the sinking tower of condo?  Another new monster showoff, the Trans Bay Terminal,  has  likewise shown evidence of shoddy construction with the shocking discovery of cracks in two critical brand new beams.  This multi billion dollar extravaganza was designed to host the L.A.to SF bullet trains championed by CA Gov, Jerry  “moonbeam” Brown, trains stalled in state-wide litigation that may never arrive. The terminal's proximity to the sinking condo — which now also shreds cracked  glass -- has caused people to fear that other new high rise darlings may likewise be perilously compromised below street level.  Oh, the irony of it all. Imagine New York's Grand Central Terminal exclusively hosting but one occupant: Greyhound Bus Lines.

     SO, FOR NOW, while the Transbay beauty is shut down for repairs, the old “temporary” outdoor East Bay bus station is back in use.   How relieved and happy I felt to be leaving San Francisco on a bus bound for Oakland’s idyllic Piedmont Avenue neighborhood.  Sanity and peace.  Oh, what a joy is simplicity!  The sunshine never felt better.

10.20.18

Shocking, Simply Shocking! British Museum Rebuts Feminist Myth About Women in Circus

It may come as a blow to traditional circus-hating feminists, New York to San Francisco, that women actually did perform in our earliest American circuses.  And we are not talking ornamental sex props placed in the shadows while male stars hoarded the rings.  As you may have observed, that’s the knee-jerk line they’ve been dishing out for years.  Fake news has been around long before the current occupant of the White house moved in and took it on.

This belated bow to historical truth comes from across the Big Pond. Circus! Show of Shows, a new exhibit at the Western Park Museum in Sheffield, England, sets the record right.  As covered in the Smithsonian Magazine, the display focuses on women and black performers said to have found “an unusual degree of independence and professional success in circus.”

Oh, really? 

I am shocked! And lying through my teeth.  Actually, relieved to know that all the wonderful female performers who thrilled me in my boyhood were not figments of my imagination.  Ask me to name the greatest names of circus long before I was born:  I will probably recite more women than men.  You want a list?  Go look for yourself, or Ask Fred.   

Of course, anybody with half a brain who has read a circus history book or two (not written by an academic peddling the party line) would already have known this.  The rant is re-issued periodically, and those who print it don’t take the time to fact check.

 Edgar Degas, Miss La La, at Cirque Fernando, 1879

Patty Astley, wife of Philip, founder of the modern circus, performed in the show, and not as a king pole dancer.  She rode a galloping horse while swarming bees buzzed lyrically around her hands.  How charming.

As quoted in the Smithsonian, says  the exhibition's curator, Vanessa Toulmin, “Women were granted freedoms that would have been unthinkable in broader Victorian society.”

And over here, one particular woman who  rode horses, charmed snakes, sewed costumes and dragged canvas across muddy lots, among a host of daily thrills -- was helping five young brothers  become circus kings of America: Louise Ringling. Truly troubling is how little recognition the brothers gave her.  Those were times when women in spangles were equated with women in garters.

What’s more, because those doing dames were seen as “athletes” —  they got away with performing in brief costumes, thus exposing arms and legs.  

“In a culture that emphasized women’s domesticity, female circus performers were hard at work.”

Are you reading this, San Francisco Circus Center?  Are you reading this, Sarah East Johnson,  New York’s go-to  expert on such issues who, writing in the The Wall Street Jouirnal in 2011, declared how “nice it was to see women “ in the ring,  and made clear that “rigid gender roles under the big top [were] really traditional.”: And that’s the best  the Journal can give us on the subject?  Ms. Johnson may have been ill-informed while under the spell of the San Francisco Circus Center, where she spent (or served) time years earlier.  Oh, those PC-addled feminists across the bay just can’t let go. A sad and regrettable legacy of the old Pickle Family Circus.

And more from Toulmin:  “Women could be circus proprietors, they could have their own business.“     

Among museum artifacts on display, there’s a 1940 photo of Lulu Adams, below, one of the first female clowns in Britain.  Lulu incorporated bagpipe playing in her act.

Nice job — British Museum of Sheffield!

The Circus on PBS: Big Tents - Big Dreams - Big Betrayal

I found the anthology gifted with much to enjoy and admire, but shockingly irresponsible in its narrow coverage, its eviscerations and aborted ending.

More about this in the future

The Morning Midway: PBS Big Tent - Big Dreams Delivers Big in You Tube Ballyhoo. Show Hits Town Monday

I was so taken by the two 9-minute You Tube previews I saw, that I have very high hopes for this documentary from American Experience,  a long-time leader in such fare for PBS.

The overwhelming imagery throughout  is of IMMENSITY.  Immensity of tents, of parades, of surging crowds, here and in Europe when James A. Bailey took Barnum & Bailey abroad.  That he stayed there five years suggests a towering reception at the ticket wagons he could not resist.  Of course, when he returned to America, he had five brothers named Ringling, now a formidable force, facing him.

Debbie Walk eloquently gives Al Ringling due credit for the primary role he played, with his brothers, in making their mark as circus kings.  P.T. Barnum seems properly placed  here as sideshow king and ballyhoo genius. 

You see the trains clanging in.  You see the mass of humanity spreading the canvas, raising it high, and the locals on the sidelines, captured and enthralled by it all, believers without issues or hesitations in this once great and magical and very American spectacle.  I almost cried, so moved by vivid scenes of what the American circus was in its heyday.  No wonder, the program is said to end with the fall of the last Ringling big top in Pittsburgh, 1956. 

How will the rest hold up?  I am guessing very well, as long as they don't get side tracked filtering an emphatically populist form of entertainment through PC-obsessive analysis.  This is not a story best told by self-serving academics.

The Big Show comes your way Monday night!

But Only a Few Remained: Circus in a World Without Ringling

Pardon me, but I've got the shrinking big top blues.  For walking wounded fans, you enter here at your own risk.                                    

At Rngling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, circa 1920s
When Americans embraced circus without question, without issues, without iPhones.

How do you frame it now?  Dead?   On life support?  In-between engagements?  Gender equity reassignments pending?

Spin it any way you wish.  Facts are — if facts count, undeniable truth.  Remember when fans counted tent poles, wagon wheels, elephants?  What are they counting now? Hula hoops?  Peanut pitches and pony rides? ... Empty seats?

                             Drum Rolls for Less is More!

Fewer Tents: Remember Ringling? Remember Clyde Beatty Cole Bros?  The last two American railroad shows both fell in 1956 -- the circus, they said, was dead!, but regrouped and kept on going.  Quite well, or well enough for a long time. “Well enough” was wonderful enough in a business perpetually on the brink. Both Ringling and Cole are now over the brink.  On the watch list: Kelly-Miller, maybe Carson and Barnes.  Big Apple?  I’d say promising so far, but far from certain. 

Fewer rings: A no brainer.  Who can count three?  Okay deduct two, and you have one. Deduct another (think stage, cruise ship, concert hall, Vegas, hat on cement), and you have none.

Do I sound like Mr. Rodgers in the hood? .

Fewer acts:  The “new” Big Apple Circus is touting six acts, not counting horses and dogs and clowns.  Not so radical given a trend in the Cirque era for less is (maybe)  more.  But what less can also mean is less variety – the biggest draw under booming  big tops in better times.  SO much to see.  SO much to be surprised and amazed by!  SO much to remember!  

Fewer smiles:  The lean BAC lineup, when I study it, tells me why I  miss a Chinese troupe on the menu, which was nearly a staple during the last Paul Binder and  Kenneth Feld  years.  Those exhilarating acrobats from a land not high on psycho-babble brought lots of bodies into a single ring and therefore a degree of spectacle — plates spinning, hats flying, rushing runners through hoops diving, bikes in motion, energy and gusto -- and without a shred of big top broccoli.  They give us unadulterated joy. 

Oh, Joy, where did you go?  Now we have the show being directed by Bergman or Freud, the modern act choreographed so internally, that we are pushed even further way from the artist, as if allowed, oh how lucky to be allowed, to admire  his or her self-possession. To behold the artist working out his/her/its issues on the tissues (fabrics, kids).   Pardon me for failing the post-performance exam. I did not go expecting to observe the damaged soul in therapy on a static trapeze.

                            Now: At Melha Shrine Circus, 2018

Fewer seats: Can you kindergarten count along with me?  The Felds deducted thousands of arena chairs, blocking out maybe a third of them, not to achieve greater intimacy but to shut down damning evidence of paltry patronage — until, they would claim, PETA ran every last customer, in public shame, off the lot. Sure.  And who managed  The Greatest Show on Earth  into oblivion? Not a Ringling.  A billionaire named Kenneth Feld, whose late father Irvin, god bless his look-at-me-ballyhoo, must be screaming for a way back.
  
Kelly Miller fired the animals to beat down PETA,  shrunk the  tent size, threw out VIP chairs and settled for planking it.  Circus Vargas, striving to be Cirque for families on a budget, is also going smaller.  And hopefully not under.   Carson & Barnes, another down sizer, now skips summer stops — a season once, I thought, lush with crowds.

How much more of this shrinkage before the patient shrinks away like a deflating  balloon before a couple dozen souls out there on the planks, half of them in free and already bored,  the other half on their cell phones? 

So here we are, on the edge of another deserted lot where once, great tented cities that traveled by  by night — thank you, Bev Kelly —  pitched their glories for a day, and great crowds of curiosity came to be astonished and thrilled — and not to be  lectured to, or badgered by angry leaflets from PC purists, or dragged through another dreary allusion to some obtuse self-help drama -- troubled soul seeking The Way and The Light under what’s left of The Big Top.

Ooops. Hope I didn’t depress you too much.   Are you amply amused, Anon?  Truth is, I giggled part way through this; my tears, you see, are all used up. There’s nothing left but. what? ...  Laugh, clown, laugh, I guess.

****************************

P.S.  What a lovely postscript  came my way after drafting the above.  A link from Don Covington to a captivating promo tease of Big Tent, Big Dreams, the PBS American Experience documentary coming to the  screen on October 8 and 9.  The  one-minute promo conveys what it was like when circus-loving Americans flocked to the big tops  A phenomenal clip of Pinito Del Oro in motion is just fabulous -- it stops my heart every time I watch  it -- unlike anything of her work I have ever seen on video, which only reminds me of why I was so mesmerized by her act when I first saw this aerial goddess perform under the Ringling-Barnum big top in 1955.

Bring it on, PBS. I can't wait!