Giving Circus Critics Around the World Their Due...

In a recent post about my brief flirtation with a casting agent from NBC’s Celebrity Circus who told me that I am about the only real circus critic out there, I took gleeful flight in flaunting my agreement with the guy, Ashton Ramsey. If I lent the impression that I was dismissing serious circus scholars and critics around the world, that would not be the first time I’ve been boastful or stupid — or both.I must say, I do not see critical circus reviews in this country — that is, outside of the occasional big city newspaper based movie, theatre or dance critic now and then filing a real review of a circus. When I looked in one issue of The White Tops, I did not see it other than, to be fair, a review by Dominique Jando of the New Pickles Traces. His was a tactfully worded critique of the show,...

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Mid Week Scramble. We toss, you catch ...

Okay, in no particular order, I’m taking one piece of paper at a time, off the top and working down, and if you sense a roll of wagons off a train oddly loaded last night, trust me, we’ll get the tents up somehow...A one-word note “Logan” reminds me to wax rustic about Logan Jacot's new rabbit act in training, which has me enthrall. At county fairs, I’ve often spent quality time gazing into little cages housing mature bunnies of all facial expressions, and read into every one a whole different attitude. So much fury fun. I’d reach a finger in to touch the little darlings, feeling as brave as Clyde Beatty in the Big Cage. The World is never far away from this humbly rising blog. At any given point, as many as a quarter of my stampeding patronage...

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Showbiz David's Ring of Shame

Coming Soon! Scoundrels of the Sawdust Honored for Distinguished Denigration to Circus Art!Among the leading candidates for inaugural induction: PETA's Hypocrite of Horror, Ingrid Newkirk.Honorees will be feted in high style in the circus train parlor car on the all-night Red Light Expre...

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Into the Last Sawdust Night ... With a Fanfare or a USDA Escort?

(correction, 4/19: I erroneously reported animal problems with Circus Vargas; The show is Circus Vazquez)Update 4/21: Read Ben Trumble's comment at the end of this post, stressing that local Los Angeles County officials, not the USDA, banned the animals.“Not with a bang, but a whimper,” this is how the world ends, wrote poet T.S. Elliot. And the circus? With a Merle Evans Crescendo? --- or the last episode of the last reality show making fools of actors pretending to be ring stars?Some say it will vanish like vaudeville. Others, like barely 20-something Logan Jacot, say not at all. Read on: “I have great respect for the circus industry,” writes he on his new blog, Sawdust Nights. “They have conquered all odds and somehow the circus is still...

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The Circus Vazquez Matter --- Another View from L.A.

Note: I am reprinting in its entirety the following comment from Alex Smith, which appeared on Topix, to give another view of the situation and how it may have developed. Text highlighting is my own."This is sensationalizes nonsense. CIRCUS VAZQUEZ was already in LA playing Huntington Park for 3 weeks. All permits and inspections by LA City, Fish and Game, and USDA were cleared DAILY. It wasn't until the animal rights PETA people showed up in Panorama City to protest that this occurred.They inspected the elephants and equipment head to toe and even followed the trainer and the elephants during the show with a camera to make sure there was no abuse and THERE WAS NONE.A rule enacted only 6 weeks ago that claims any trainer with a negative cite from USDA (the agency responsible for enforcing...

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NBC to Me: Do You Want to Judge “Celebrity Circus?”

Monte Carlo is one thing. A bunch of Hollywood actors trying to look like circus artists, quite another. (BTW: whatever became of David Nelson on the flying trapeze?)Still, ego is ego, and so when somebody calls me (as they do every two or three years), my own inflated sense of superiority goes for a wild ride. Usually, to nowhere. This time, it was an e-mail from one Ashton Ramsey, his name right above “NBC’s Celebrity Circus.” He wanted to talk to me “about maybe being a judge” (Yes, I know, that headline above that got you in here was a shameless tease.). I called back.“So, you’re the only real circus critic there is,” he began. Immediately impressed, and hardly feeling vain, I told him, yes you are correct. After all, who else is there out there? White Tops? One of the blogs that selectively...

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A Fairgrounds of Memories ...

Beyond the creamy bark of Eucalyptus under a cool April sun, I glance down upon a grassy open field where once upon a spring I helped set up the Clyde Beatty Circus. Upon it now are a trio of tots chasing after a ball while a father figure looks on. I like this setting most of all when I have it all to myself, for then my boyhood memories are pure, unmolested by the passage of time...I am sitting with laptop at a picnic table where people never come except for when the Sonoma County Fair is here in late July. In my boyhood, the field at my feet was an open lot across the street, later annexed to the fair. Up here once stood an old shed filled with abandoned metal strips that I collected for model building. Once upon another day when Carson...

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Sunday Morning, Looking Back: Do Circuses Face Another 1938?

This first appeared on April 12, 2008Seventy years after arguably the worst season in American circus history, today’s smaller shows are already foundering, and it’s only April. Cry, clown, cry?Seventy years later, at least two U.S. circuses that I know of (Cole and Vargas) do not offer the public program magazines or handbills. At least two (Cole and Kelly-Miller) have web sites that feature act photos from previous editions with no reference to current offerings. Virtually all U.S. tenters are ominously short handed, desperately awaiting temporary Mexican workers held back because of the Visa issue. All face the ugly realities of skyrocketing gas prices. What else? Despite a recessionary economy dumping more Americans into unemployment lines,...

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Big Tops in Bits & Pieces ... We Report, You Assemble

The new circus Easter arrow hunt is a challenge for our Jack Hunter, stationed somewhere I think in the Carolinas. E-mails he, a guy desperately seeking Cole Bros Circus in or around a precinct known as Murrells Inlet, “I knew there was a problem when I didn’t spot any route markers.” Turns out, not to turn this into an engineering enigma, that MI was put back or ahead or under or over ... First, now comes Wilmington, then MI. “I would assume they are on the way to NC but who knows !!!!!” My non-paid east coast stringer then chatted with some carnies in the know, who raise the Big Visa issue as the Big Question Mark. (Wanting to do my park, Jack, here is a map that I hope will help you find your way.)To Live and Die in Deland? A few arrows...

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Eye on the Big Top: Mired in Cherry Pie, New Cole’s Renee Storey Could be Spinning Cotton Candy Soon...

The Circus previously known as Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros is finally up and at it, valiantly mired in shorthandedness but moving ahead with long suffering spirits — stars pitching in to drive stakes and lay out canvas. Said Renee Storey to Rosa Ramirez of the Daytona Beach News, the show is still short by about 30 workers, the brown hands waiting for green lights from U.S. immigration officials. The article, shot my way by Jack Hunter, makes clear what most of us have observed over the years: Performers tossing aside egos between acts to dig in and rig up. “We help them so they can help us, too,” said teeterboarder Oscar Julia Preciado. Bravo, Mr. Circus Everyman!Joked VP Renee Storey — a lady who, from what I gather, has sawdust in her spine,...

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Showbiz Scramble on the Oakland-Brooklyn Line

Here at L’Amyx in Oakland — and I stress Oakland (known locally as the armpit of the Bay Area), I am feeling a new coolness, for in the New York Times last Sunday, I read that Oakland and Brooklyn (as in NY) are considered kindred spirits in new wave art & stuff, stress stuff ... That is, they both exist in the shadows of the larger cities that hog all the attention. A bit of Brooklyn in my bones? My Mom, a dreamer, grew up there, worked on the Brooklyn Eagle. Her mother, Florence Simpson, made “surgical belts,” eccentrically sizing each lady up and offering her a charge based upon perceived economic status ... One of the letters she had published in a New York paper ended with “Live and Let Live.” A lesson on my young ears never forgotten.Homesick...

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