goofball on a train

This week was my first at the new job.

So. On to the Topic You've All Been Waiting For. By the time you're reading this, the Blue Unit has completed their final show and the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus has ceased to exist.

Not surprisingly, there has been a lot of media interest in capturing some of the emotions surrounding this unprecidented, historic event. If you'd like to cry some more, here are the final days of the circus as covered by various outlets:

BBC
NBC
NPR
NPR "Kingdom on Wheels"
CNN
NYPost (thanks for trying to inject some humor!)
CircusTalk
NPR: All Things Considered
NPR: Morning Edition

I'm sorry for not having "insider" photos of the last days of Ringling, played out on the Blue Unit. Like many others, I watched on facebook live as the Blue Unit cast and crew took their final bows, thus ending a 146-year American icon. Being hundreds of miles away, I stopped where I was and watched until the end of the feed.




At no point in life did I ever expect that ANYTHING in this world would effect me the way that the circus has. You don't typically take a job and expect it to become a part of your heart, a part of your being, a standard for the way you live your life. But that's what happened, and that's what circus people will carry with them until the last circus on earth folds its tent. I wasn't born into it, but a part of me is and will always be "circus". And I am a better person for it.

Anyway, that's it. That's the end. I really can't find much to say. Every day, every moment in the circus was intensely real. It was life times a thousand. Everything, good and bad, seemed magnified by the history and culture of the circus. Waking up was intense because you woke up on a 1950s passenger train. Going to work was intense because you were climbing through mud and rusty nails and broken glass just to get to a normal road. Preparing for the show was intense because there would be someone juggling knives, and over there was a husband holding his wife's body twenty feet off the ground with just his teeth, and over there were the elephants rumbling to each other as they had their morning bath. And the show itself was intense, because one mistake could be the end of it all...one mistake could end a career, or a life. Circus performers did not use stage names, and there's a reason for that. It was all real.


Running away to join the circus may have been a fantasy, but it was always possible. It was always real. And tonight, that ends. There's no more magic to give, nothing left to stand between us and our final bows. Treasure your circus memories, for they are your last. And pity your children, who will never know the magic of the American three-ring circus. Maybe they can run away and join the TSA or something.