It was 12 years ago when I first saw a dark circus. My photography business was drying up with the ease of online Stock Photography searches and buying. Like all things what was different wasn’t the technology of making pictures, but they way they were bought and sold. Photography had become de-professionalized and was now a folk art.

To ease my pain of the loss of my business and art, I ran off to the dark circus– metaphorically at least. I became a Human Ostrich, then working with my knowledge of human anatomy, discovered my abilities as a sword swallower.

The 25 of May marks my 12th year of performing repulsive feats before the paying public. Almost the entire time of the Neo-sideshow era.

A lot has happened since those halcyon days. Sideshow seems to have become the province of bar entertainment. There it is and there it will die again. It is badly interpreted by the compromised audience, demystified by lazy performers, undervalued by cheapskate bar owners and sexualized by vapid beer and cigarette sponsors.

It has become an American entertainment, thoroughly.

The romance is completely evaporated. In its best form it was experienced by slack jawed yokels who seldom saw anything other than the back end of a horse or their one or two neighbors. The banality of of the yeoman farmer or industrial age worker is to a 21st century mind incomprehensible. A bright shiny circus with a sideshow or thought-provoking medicine show featuring skill acts has been deeply foiled by the age. No wonder it was romanced, loved, and completely captivated it’s audience. It was a very segregated experience from daily drudgery. Yet it is as hard to escape from today as refined sugar (which was once a scarce commodity as well in this country).

We have suckled at the teat of mass media so long now that our taste and teeth as consumers are long rotted away, and we idly gum our entertainment with few expectations, the latest of which is that it should be free and online and that the high speed connection should also be free. With no ads.

What babies we are.

Vintage entertainments, when visited by modern audiences, are as obtuse as Shakespeare, curiosities whose jokes are not understood and take too long to get to the point, meaning someone’s untimely demise. Indeed, the only way to enjoy Old-time radio is to excise television from your life and cease gaming. Then the pictures of radio come flying in. Your mind becomes yours again, and your headaches go away.

To enjoy and deeply feel the best of human civilization today requires conversion into something akin to a sociopath. You MUST disconnect. You MUST simplify. Stop watching the blinking lights on screens, billboards, iPods, telephones, etc. etc. They are NOT connecting you. They are IN THE WAY of connecting. Then you must rinse your mind with only the stimulus that comes from within and become an intellect instead of a statistic; A brain instead of a maw, awake instead of numb.

Only then will we realize we have traded amazing entertainment for hog slops, enlightenment for orgasms, the experience of human connection for a list of virtual friends we will never ever meet.

I have known the glory of leaning on a bannerline on a hot summer afternoon on the midway in a small agrarian fair, in costume whistling at the townie girls, offering free passes for a smile.

I have stood upon a bally stage watching these groups of giggle boxes show a grin full of braces, wondering which amongst them was brave enough to approach me for the passes– then giggling insipidly some more, running away as a group, the brave one with the passes looking back over her shoulder at me — with a look of trying to figure something out.

And watching them scurry away I knew that if they found the courage to come back to the midway that evening, they would be amazed so purely that they would remember that night long after the fair, long after I was gone, for the longest day they ever knew. For they knew the glory of Crossing Over behind the Bannerline, being visitors to another world and running safely home again with a head full of wonder.

We are under attack by summer tanagers.

They hate the Airstream. They peck at the roof, flutter against the windows, claw at our screens and sharpen their bills on our propane tanks. If we step outside it’s all Alfred Hitchcock for a moment before they retreat to the treeline.

We have absolutely no idea why they hate the Airstream. We also have no idea why the tanagers seem to be the only species of bird here that hate the Airstream. There are cardinals, towhees, various other members of the finch family, plenty of sparrows and even owls. The tanagers are the only ones with this incredibly specific and bizarre personality flaw and I must say it’s not very becoming for an otherwise elegantly plumed bird.

At first we were concerned for their health, as they were knocking themselves stupid against the trailer, but after three consecutive days of this behavior it’s become hard to be particularly sympathetic. They start promptly at 6am and continue until about 9pm when presumably they go roost someplace.

There are three males, two adult and one juvenile. The two adults station themselves at either end of the trailer. The juvenile pecks on the roof. There is an adult female also and she started getting into the act yesterday evening until Alex came up with what seems to be a foil for the adults, placing a goopy mix of bacon grease and peanut butter on slabs of wood and covering the perches they are using as staging areas. This has done nothing to deter the juvenile, who is still on the roof, doing his best impression of a hailstone. When we go outside to shoo him away he flies to the treeline and chatters at us, really giving us an avian what-for.

We’re waiting to see if the influx of people to the fairgrounds this weekend proves a deterrent, but we’re not holding our breath. At this point we half expect to see them seated in our front row for all of our shows, throwing popcorn and shouting “DO SOMETHING!” Considering the disdain they show for our humble aluminum home it honestly wouldn’t surprise us in the least.

We made it to St. Louis in one piece, more or less.

Our water pump is in need of some therapy. It rained nearly the entire way here and our front window leaks. The floor is sagging. These are just a few of the joys of being on the road in a trailer over 40 years old. All of it is repairable, of course. It will just take some time and attention.

Some familiar faces from the pirate festival last year will not be here for the Renaissance Faire, much to our disappointment. We’re confused about this since two of the acts in particular are huge draws and very popular with the hometown crowd. We can only hope it was a mutual parting and not a drawn out confrontational split. We hope for visits from them but realize we’re idealists in this way.

I suppose the best way to update this very neglected blog is to share a little of our trip and the roadside attractions and experiences contained therein. They are what makes life on the road worth every mile.

As we left our home state of Virginia I recalled a place we’d seen featured on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives located in West Virginia and did a search to find out how far off our route they were. Answer: 7 miles. The decision to stop was unanimous.

The original location of Hillbilly Hot Dogs is located 7 miles north of Interstate 64 from exit 18 in Lesage, West Virginia. You can’t miss it. It looks for all the world like some child experts in the blanket-fort construction business got hold of some school buses and built a grab joint. It is colorful, wildly cheerful and fantastically welcoming. There are affectionate cats roaming the grounds and the front door is actually a little challenging to locate amongst the collected antiques and objects-d’art. Inside the décor is supplemented with signatures of patrons absolutely cramming the walls, tables, chairs and any other readily available surface outside the kitchen. There is an 8-track player next to the VCR. The first thing you hear after the music is the staff bidding you a warm welcome from the kitchen, and owners Sonny (The Weenie Man) and Sharie (The Weenie Wife) are right there with them.

The menu contains hot dogs and hamburgers served with everything you can imagine. Some of them are actually larger than your head. All the traditional sides are offered and for dessert, along with traditional root beer floats and ice cream sundaes, there is homemade cake courtesy of Sharie’s sister.

I ordered the Taco Dog. Alex ordered the ½ pound Big Bubba Burger, to much fanfare in the kitchen. A side of fries and some drinks rounded out our meal nicely. While we feasted we talked with Sonny and Sharie, telling them a bit about what we did and where we were headed. In return they gave us a real education on hot dogs, their newer franchises and business practices, and the best example of customer service I’ve experienced in years. Sonny also introduced us to the foundation ingredient in one of their signature offerings, the Homewrecker. I had never seen a 15-inch long 1 pound all-beef hot dog up close …

I’ll pause while you compose yourselves …

… but it was impressive to say the very least. When fully dressed, the Homewrecker weighs in at approximately 3 ½ pounds and anyone finishing it in under 12 minutes wins a prize. I think they said they’d had one winner in recent memory.

We wanted to stay longer but needed to keep moving to reach St. Louis in time to find a good camping spot. Sonny and Sharie, if you’re reading this, we sincerely thank you for a fabulously great time. We’ll be back to see you on our trip home in June and I’ll be trying that Junkyard Dog on for size. Maybe we’ll have The Weenie Song ready to perform too. Who knows? You’re great folks and we’re really glad to know you! See you down the road!

February 28th has been named International Sword Swallower’s Awareness Day and Alex and I were fortunate to have been given a bit of soapbox time in the Washington City Paper.

Point Taken: Sword swallowers show their scars

Back to FL tomorrow, then home just after St. Pat’s. More to come. I owe you some serious text, dear readers!

In the absence of posting I have been nonetheless very busily involved with the website and those of a few others. Lots of work to be done in the weeks and months ahead, as I’ve taken on the redesign and organization of www.showhistory.com to make it a more easily navigable and usable interface for contributors and researchers alike. I hope to have the initial CSS work done by mid-month. The new look will be unveiled when the site owner approves. Here, I’ve added links under Kindred Spirits and Trailer Travel and we’re discussing updates to our Recommendations listing since nearly all the current ones are linked in the second sidebar.

There have been ups and downs aplenty on this tour, some quite elating and others quite upsetting, but we remain steadfast traveling carny folk in the midst of it all, doing the very best that we can wherever we are, whatever we happen to be doing.

I find that I miss school, more specifically the structuring of my time that school provided. I’m determined to find a way to get back for the MFA in Arts Management sooner rather than later. I’ve proven I can work well remotely and I have instructors who will no doubt back me up on that if need be. The Masters Program is all about finding and coordinating funding for the arts, the very thing I want to know about in order to feel my educational toolkit is complete. I’m not the only degreed performer out here doing this sort of work. In point of fact another performer I know completed a very similar Individualized Studies degree program to my own and took her Masters in Folklore the same day I took my BIS in Multimedia Storytelling. We worked the same Renaissance Faire for two years running without knowing who each other were. The world is small in very cool ways a lot of the time.

I’ll be experimenting with a work schedule for myself that includes not more than two hours at a time sitting at the computer or the sewing machine and mandatory moving about in between those periods. Yoga, long walks on the beach, anything to get me up and romping that gets my blood moving about will do nicely. This should net me about 6 hours worth of work between the Mac and the Singer on any given day when implemented.

Got into the gym for a great workout and got my house in order for West Coast company arriving this evening. Off to fetch them from the airport presently. Then perhaps it’ll be time for a spot of dinner.