Word: circusing
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...favorite for long with Argentine circusgoers was "Blackamon, the Living Corpse." A swarthy, stocky Italian, Corpse Blackamon favored satin turbans and gaudy oriental robes, fascinated the steeply banked audiences in Buenos Aires' permanent single-ring circus by sticking pins through his cheeks and arms. Invariably he climaxed his performance by shuddering, screaming, and going into a trance. Uniformed attendants lifted the rigid Blackamon into a specially prepared glass-faced coffin, buried him eight feet deep in the sandy floor of the circus ring. For three hours he would remain there while clowns tumbled and horses cantered above...
...With the circus as a business enterprise, with circuses as corporations, the average person is no more concerned than he is concerned with the old swimming pool as a source of waterpower...
Last week, however, came a reminder of the fact that the circus business is an industry, subject to profits and losses, to fat seasons and lean, and subject also to mergers, combinations, monopolization. It was the monopolistic aspect of the circus which last week attracted attention. For, through buying out American Circus Corp., John Ringling, large, two-chinned proprietor of Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey Combined Circus became owner of every U. S. circus of any considerable size. American Circus Corp. was the management company for Sells-Floto, John Robinson, Hagenbeck-Wallace, Sparks and Al G. Barnes circuses. In absorbing American...
Before he was 20, Asa Yoelson ran away from Washington, D. C, where he had learned to sing in the synagogue with his father, Cantor Yoelson. He got a job barking for a side-show with a country circus, later went into vaudeville and started blacking his face because he noticed that crowds always laughed at a black man. He worked with Dockstader's minstrels, then for the Shuberts. He was the first minstrel to get down on his knees when, in the chorus of a song, he came to the word "Mammy." Now a multimillionaire, third* richest actor...
Novelist Oursler met the lady only spiritually and after considerable research. Noting in her written remains the kind of dour, ineffectual yearning popular in Victorian days, he endows her with a faithless first lover, from whom, as a circus horsewoman at 17, she galloped away...