Word: sideshow
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...given way to the hardtop, the circus (TIME, April 13) has undergone many a change. But nothing has changed more than its co-attraction, the sideshow. Once a traveling chamber of biological horrors, it has now been tamed into a sort of Ed Sullivan variety show with cotton candy and Cracker Jack. Rationalizing the metamorphosis is Nate Eagle, 62, the corpulent, mustachioed talker and general manager of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey's sideshow. Says horn-voiced Eagle: "You don't find freaks in sideshows any more. You find strange people, odd people, unusual people-sword swallowers, tattooed...
Gone is the sawdust; rubber matting is much easier to put down and neater to take up in the auditoriums where the tentless circus now plays. The freaks are still there in the sideshow, but it is considered discriminatory to call them by that name any longer, and the placards that identify them are like something out of a natural history museum. Gone is the little house that caught on fire; gone are the Living Statues; gone is the calliope; gone is Emmett Kelly, Gargantua, and Jo Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy. But gone, most of all, is the innocent...
...promote the Seven Sutherland Sisters' Hair Grower, the farm-bred New York girls exhibited their tresses, totaling 36 ft. 10 in. in length, at a Barnum & Bailey sideshow. William F. ("Buffalo Bill") Cody "partnerized" with Dr. David Franklin Powell, alias "White Beaver," to promote Yosemite Yarrow for the cramps; Wonder Worker, to be taken internally for cholera but externally for rheumatism; and Cough Cream, which, it was claimed, "heals diseased lungs...
...Premier of the Soviet Union for some two hours on TV's Open End (recognizing that he was overmatched, Susskind had asked Khrushchev if he would meet with a panel of experts, but K. refused). It could not have been a more incongruous interview-or a more fascinating sideshow-if Rumpelstiltskin had been interrogating Jimmy Hoffa, and about as much useful information resulted...
...Baltimore's H.L. Mencken-who called Bryan "a tin-pot pope" and lamented that Darrow might as well be "bawling [his eloquence] up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan"-the monkey trial made screamlines all over the U.S. and Europe. Bryan and Darrow put on a spectacular sideshow, bellowing like snake-oil salesmen, crassly subverting judge, jury and the rules of evidence as they addressed their elocution to the larger court of public opinion. "We have the purpose," Darrow thundered, "of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States." And Bryan roared: "If evolution...