Word: circus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What do you remember about the circus? Maybe you remember gaudy costumes, or carved wooden emblazonry, or thick crowds, their collective waistline at your eye-level. Maybe you remember the smells: sawdust, roasted peanuts, canvas, hot caramel and the wet-leather-on-a-radiator musk of exotic animals...
...leave a particularly durable image. As a boy, I accepted the skill of the acrobats, equestrian and trapeze artists with some indifference, but the elephants had bulk. Like the blue whale and the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History, the elephant is an undeniably massive presence at the circus...
...elephant is a skilled performer as well, and this is the real attraction. Some claim that a circus is incomplete without clowns and elephants. I only partially agree. I've never liked clowns. I'm repelled by their enforced hilarity and mask of painted smiles. I don't trust a person who is always happy. I wonder what lurks under the facade. An elephant, on the other hand, not only never forgets; it never smiles...
Last Thursday I went to The Big Apple Circus, a one-ring show with the big-top pitched at Marine Industrial Park, twenty minutes by foot from the State T-stop. The Big Apple is a two-elephant circus. That is how a circus used to be advertised, by the elephant-count. In the late nineteenth century, circus owners competed for the elephant crown. In 1881, Barnum had four elephants, Forepaugh had five, and the Sells Brothers called their gig the "Great European Seven Elephant Railroad Show." No match for Pompey, who is 61 B.C. advertised a celebration...
...rats have watched as the Harvard masses turned what was once a decent, wellkept gym into a noisy, overcrowded circus where one must scramble for weights, fight for dumbbells and stand in long lines for the most popular (and most misused) equipment. That's why so many of us wake up early to beat the crowds...