My Next Circus Websites Ratings: Want to be a Judge?

I know, another of my ridiculous offers.   Have I two out there who would like, with me, to form a three-judge panel?  I only ask you to be as fair as you can in assigning points to each of the categories I give you.  Our three scores will be totaled up and averaged, and that will decide the ranking of the circus websites.  Could be fun?  I'm game.   The only restriction: You must NOT be connected to the payroll of  any circus.    Now accepting offe...

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Blandest Big Top on Earth: I Offer You Cirque du Vegan

Introducing a circus to offend none, where performers wear hard hats, animals stay home, and all concessions are trans fat free ... At a local cafe here in Oakland on Piedmont Avenue where I like to hang out, a good old fashioned chocolate chip cookie has been replaced by a Vegan version — heavy and thick, I’d rather have the real thing and suffer the guilt. .... The upscale set with their iPods and laptops are pretending to adore this tasteless substitute. ... Give them Cirque du Vegan (Jim Judkins, are you listening?), and maybe they will come ... Be sure your big top offers Wireless.PC stalks the lot: So depressing -- are we all not in this together? -- to contemplate the fallout from a trial evidently to be, in which Ringling will once...

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MIDWAY FLASH ... MIDWAY FLASH ... Ringling Elephant Abuse Suit to Proceed

After seven years of legal wrangling, a federal judge in Washington has cleared the way for a consortium of animal rights groups to sue Ringling Bros. for alleged cruel treatment to its elephants.   The show owns 55 pachyderms, of which 34 -- not born in captivity -- were owned by the circus when elephants were added to the Endangered Species Act in 1976.  Says the judge, these animals can not be exempt as are 21 others that were born in captivity.   Once again, a national spotlight will cast potentially unflattering light on the nation's largest and most enduring circus. Sadly, all circuses stand to suffer from the media attention, no matter how wrong the plaintiffs might be.  The AP quotes Tracey Silverman, general counsel of the Animal Welfare Institute,...

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A Tale of Two Circus Reviews: Bellobration or Bust?

It’s lonely being a circus critic, for under the big top those two words sound awfully pretentious and irrelevant to a lot of people. When you take on mediocre acts, ill-directed shows and especially sacred cows, you run the risk of resentment and more. I’ve been publicly blasted in print, once likened, many seasons ago, to “vermin” in one of a slew of hate ads taken out against me in the Circus Report. During my tumultuous teens when the Greatest Show On Earth was foundering through its own tumultuous last season under canvas, I sent off a letter to the circus claiming that all of the organizational chaos was making me sick. In return, Henry Ringling North sent me a tactfully tart note suggesting I see a doctor.Blame it on the late White Tops editor Walter H. Hohenadel, who dared to publish...

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Animal Stars Shine in Ringling’s Tacky Bellobration

Circus Review: Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, 137th edition. Oakland, California, August 18. Tickets: $15 to $95.After seeing Ringling-Barnum’s latest, I was surprised to discover that the $15.00 program magazine does not contain a show order listing of the acts. That’s another first from the Felds in recent seasons which I have just now noticed. The strange omission only adds to my sense of sadness and uncertainty about the plight of this once great circus.Perhaps the producers are leaving themselves the freedom to tinker with the program, although it needs more than tinkering to achieve first-rate respect.It is certainly not a bad show — except for a number of things about it that work against its better ingredients and give it a...

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Hold Your Hopes! Here Come the Elephants!?! --- Well, Maybe ...

Holiday Look Backs, this from 2007THEN AND NOW1955, the Ringling-Barnum herd. The herd, 2007Next year?8.16.07 12...

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A Quiz (Please Give it a Chance!): Gaze at This Photo and Tell Me ...

...which of these brothers Ringling would you choose to meet if you had a chance to spend an hour with him ... over tea or coffee, and be able to ask him questions about the circus? (Clockwise, from top left: Al, Charles, Alf T., John -- or you can choose Otto, not seen here, if you like.)And please tell us WHY.Yes, I risk another flop quizorama if nobody from my visiting multitude of five leaves a comment -- yet a plight to which I have grown humbly accustomed.And so I soldier on. And you? Are you reading me at work? If so,isn't this more fun than whatever it is you are supposed to be doing? ...

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America, the Messed Up

Movie Review -- out on dvdThe compelling fascination of director Todd Fields’ Little Children — a suspense thriller that wants to be too many other things — is its ultimate downfall. It is another of those cinematic examinations of a tattered post-feminist landscape in upscale suburbia. Here, it is once again okay for women to raise children and meet in the park to gossip. Here, too, it is okay for a man who aspires to practice law but has yet to pass a bar exam to do the home stuff while his wife, a documentary film maker, brings home the bread. That woman, by the way, has a strange fetish for letting their younger child sleep between her and her thus-denied spouse. Here, too, it is okay for a bored married woman (whose husband pleasures himself...

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Circus World Museum's Hidden Ancient Treasure: The Ringling-Barnum Circus Archives, Forever a Mystery?

In My OpinionAt the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, a goldmine of Ringling documentation called “The Ringling-Barnum Circus Archives” encompass a formidable space at the Robert L. Parkinson Library and Research Center and is technically off limits to researches and interested parties, although special access is allowed on an individual basis. These papers are still owned by the Feld Organization. A long-stated theory is that the Felds fear the vague possibility of something in the heap embarrassing them. That is highly unlikely. What on earth might they contain that would be damaging to the Feld family?Recently reinstated archivist Erin Foley, herself an even-handed professional with a Yale degree, labors in the middle of a petty political...

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New Lingo for the “New Circus”

“Fabric” is a term the Circus Smirkus kids, a lively bunch, toss around, I guess to describe the act of working what a Sarasota insider calls “ the bed sheets.” I think this precious act evolved from the old web routine.Here’s how that same Sarasota smarty described the setting for last year’s Ringless Bros. Circus: “A parking lot.”Following are my own earnest efforts to recast circus terminology in a more modern spotlight, acceptable to fussy spectators of unmessy, blood-free stuff:Equestrian Foreplay: Today’s nouveau horse trainers (excuse that inelegant expression) at shows like Cavalia make a point to prove a loving, wholly egalitarian relationship to their ring partners.Menage Adagio: A threesome intricately related in a series of movements denoting esthetic horniness.Astro Marionettes:...

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Sunday Morning, Looking Back: Big Top Bits: And Astray we Go!

This first appeared on August 1, 2007From Russia with Lust: Not a pretty story, not for the Essex, Vermont Circus Smirkus Academy that was. Smirkus a few seasons back hired an ex-Russian ring star Vladimir Avgoustov, 56, to coach its students, and he did more than that, at least with one 7-years-old girl during a 2006 summer camp. She was a student at the Vermont School of Circus Arts, which succeeded the Smirkus Academy. Our ex-Soviet ring star, pleading guilty to sexual assault, will spend at least five years in prison. He could be deported. It happens not just in confession booths.It Happened on Wallace Bros. Circus many years ago, soon after I had joined on as an “usher”(ho, ho, little did I know about “cherry pie”) and one of the joeys...

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