I’m Going to the Circus, Out West, With Grandma ... Wondering Why Cole closed early? ... Steaming Inside, Still, over Big Apple’s Big Screen Fiasco (Assumed) ... Laughing About New World Clowning Creep Outs ...

Okay, you there, all seven of you?  Ready .... Set .... GO!

Where was I?  Forgot already.  Oh yeah, while wondering when Ringling did the annual TV highlights thing, after first doing it in 1955 (anybody alive back then?), I surfed into Tim Tegge's Circus Video store, to find that he is offering the 1961 and 1965 editions of the same format, which I ordered.  This, in preparation for something on and around Big Apple Circus’s recent rather stillborn visit to movie houses nation-wide, apparently streaming dead.  Did anybody out there see it?  Based on my knowledge of the action in three theatres, a total of eleven people came to watch Metamorphosis.  And five of them returned after intermission. Do any of you respect hard facts? There they are.

So, that’s the making of a roast post, upcoming sometime.  You see, it’s not about my having fun hyping so ineptly handled a great opportunity for national exposure (BAC hardly half filled the tent in which it streamed — or strangled itself); it’s because I am a fan of Big Apple Circus, pardon me, and I want to see them succeed.  They seem to have a way of self-destructing when cameras roll; their visit to PBS has not, to my knowledge, ever been rerun .  Had the Movie house streaming been better attended, had the show itself had a stronger pulse, that would have been all to the better for Paul Binder’s residual crowd, said to have been struggling for some time to make ends meet, and maybe even close to an economic abyss.  Okay, enough.

Whilst surfing the titles that tanbark Tim offers (I am paying for mine, just for the record, in case you think I'm spinning), there was Grandma going west, full BAC show. I’m getting that one too!  I need reason to re-convert to Gotham's own circus.

What else lies here before me, next to my PC?  A big laugh from Circus Report’s Chuck Burnes, he saving  an otherwise rather fallow issue (a cloudy parade of tributes to the recently departed that gives it a funeral feel), Chuck, in a tone of levity, talks up the eerie emergence of a new generation of funny felons, AKA: scare clowns.  A fourteen year old kid in Bakersfield (Ca) donned mayhem makeup and scarred a little child beyond amusement.  Seems to be the craze, these dayz, to go dark on big top buffoonery, thus further setting back the plight of traditional rib ticklers.   Gosh, it’s not enough for the star animals getting run off the lot by the do gooders, but now, are the jesters next? ...

Burnes, you’re on fire:  “If the movies It and Killer Clowns from Outer Space [I know some from inner space] gave you the heebie jeebies ... there’s now another reason to be scared of clowns.” That would be the younger set running amok in gory greasepaint.  Freaky trend spreading, just another gift of Social Media., thank you Disgrace Book.   Chuck, himself once a clown, seems to be having a little too much fun reporting on these funny felons.  The only good that may come out of it, I’m thinking darkly, is somehow, somewhere, someway, the END to Shrine clowns.  I’d almost welcome being creeped out, safely, over being bored by the former.  Burnes writes of these insidious new funny faces, “wielding machete, and baseball bats” And I won’t take that into a far more disturbing realm, if you know what I’m thinking.  Ah, yes, the latest proof negative of American exceptionalism, right?  Okay, I can feel your mounting unease.

Onward to where? ... To be continued on Monday. I just saw a creepy face outside my window. Gotta call the Funny Felon Hotline.  Somebody, save me!