It is Summer 2008, and we’re performing again. For those readers who may know the Significance of the first of May, rest assured I am very glad to be able to dance and gyre over the green glades performing nonsense for thousands with my true love. It is a blessing direct from all the mad gods.

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.

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