Word: sideshows
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...second book Grass has turned to another grotesque-a gawky adolescent named Joachim Mahlke who is afflicted by a quivering excrescence of flesh over his Adam's apple. But if Grass still views life largely as a kind of Gothic sideshow, he permits himself, as he did not in the earlier book, a saving touch of human compassion. As a dwarf who had seceded from the adult world in order to survive in it, Oskar remained a skeptical spectator of absurdity. Through the muted and melancholy chronicle of Mahlke's brief life, Grass seems to say that deformed...
...Exit. The idea of hell has gradually been going to hell. In the ancient Hebrew tradition it was a bottomless pit where "the fire is sixty times as hot as the fire of this earth." To St. Thomas it was a sort of overheated sideshow that the saints in heaven were permitted to watch in order to "enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly." To the poet Shelley it was "a city much like London." To Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, whose most celebrated theatrical tract can now be seen in a free cinemadaptation, hell is just...
...Sack likes to roam his lobbies, reminding women patrons that "this place is clean enough to bring your children to, right?" He has been known to step out of his $15,000, chauffeur-driven Cadillac in front of a Sack theater to hustle customers into the house like a sideshow barker...
...would be in some rehabilitation center"), the Porcupine Man, or the Bird Girl with "skin as rough as a turkey's foot and a downy fuzz of body hair." Says Eagle: "If somebody now is born with short arms, you don't put him in a sideshow and bill him as the Seal Boy or the Frog Boy; you try to make his arms as normal as possible...
Eagle, who once towered over a troupe of 187 little people, now has to make do with only one midget-Felix, the smallest Perfect Man-who sells the World's Tiniest Bible for 25?. The sideshow's giant, Eddie Carmel-the World's Largest Giant-allows children to take a huge ring off his finger for 25? a take. They get to keep the ring-Eddie's supply is endless. According to Eagle, Carmel would be 18 inches taller than he looks if he could straighten up; he is billed at straightened-up height...