the travaling show

Over the weekend.
Between driving the wee ones from place to place to complete everything I needed to before the working week, we past a carnival.

I get to hear a clammier of, "Mama Mama Mama stop the car!"Money is tight with me. So I think about this. Fun, a few moments on rides, it comes only a few times a year, usually in spring and during harvest festivals in fall. So it really comes down to, two times a year, the wee ones know, mama will open here coin purse, where she hides her mad money, and let them have total kid time with the traveling show.

So I tell them, I have an appointment, than we will come back.The appointment was renting some space to put my art in a consignment store. I hope it sells. People tell me they like it, but paying cash for it is another thing all together. But you might as well try. Sometimes it is all you can do. And if you try enough times, Sometimes things work out the way you want.


But the long trek to the store and back, gave me a chance to explain the the children how the traveling shows started and gained popularity. In the industrial revelation, when workers needed some cheep thrills. They played for the poor and the working poor. For the rich had their holidays. Mindless fun.But back than, they were much different. My grandmother would warn me not to go to the carnival. She said they were immoral. My wee ones than chimed in "Why?". Well she would tell me about the hoochy coochy girls. I had no clue what she was talking about back than. But once or twice when I was younger there we some traveling shows that still had freak shows. My mother would never let me go. She said they were immoral, wrong, made fun of other people. So I never went. When I was a kid, I wanted to know what all the other kids saw. Forbidden fruit.

The wee ones ask me what these freak shows and hoochy coochy girls were. Now got to say once I watched the HBO series Carnival, which I was addicted to, even though it had a bit of 1970's drive in film about it towards the end, I really didn't know what hoochy coochy girls or what was in the freak shows. I really never understood my grandmother's objections to the traveling shows. But than I got it.

So I explained that hoochy choochy girls were a stripper act that the men would go to. And sometimes they made extra money as prostitutes. The Freak shows made fun of people with deformities. In the old days some of the traveling shows would buy children from their parents for the shows. But as far as I knew as long as they were born, there were no traveling shows like my grandmother's day.

Yes, I do use many excuses to give the wee ones history lessons. If I relayed on what school teaches, they would not be able to have to understand Eddie Izzard's stand up or any movies made before they were born, or most people around the world, well the list could go on. Unfortunately the other children in their class don't always get what they say and the argue with their teachers, because they are dumbing down their teaching. You know they actually did not teach my child's class that the Muslims eventually won the Crusades.

Now, Strippers are in clubs or at private parties. Prostitutes are, well, on the streets and in brothels in Nevada. I am sure brothels are else where but they aren't legal else where. Oh and we have stripper work outs. You can buy the hoochy choochy girls, in the magazines, look at them on line, go down to the "red light " district of you local city, or "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas".

The Freak show, well most of it is not politically correct. I would hope most people no longer found the need to make fun of people with physical deformities. but if you haven't, well there is the Internet and American reality shows, Jerry springer come to mind. I am sure there can be far more examples, like the biggest loser equates the fat woman, The medical show are fascinating why? Physical defects. And every time there are conjoined twins or a baby born with extra arms and face they are world news. Or at least it seems that way.

Amazing a lot of the cases I see are in India, rural India, where they always remind us that these children are revered as the return of gods or goddesses. But modern medicine is not good with that. "Let's make them normal", they proclaim. And they remind us of the risk of death that their miracle will have go along with it. I often wonder, why not let these children be revered as reincarnations of the Divine.

What if they are.

They are surgical altering the second coming or 29th coming of their goddess. Isn't that akin to giving Jesus' second coming a dangerous operation that may kill him as a child. And if not killed, altering him so much that almost no-one knows who he is?


Though I spent $50 in food and rides. A bit of fun for the wee ones and the realization that the carnival is the least likely place to find the immoral acts now a days. the freak show is so common all around us that they would never make money in a traveling show. Showing your breasts mean nothing anymore, where you can get it for free on line, or at the local bar, or t.v. on Jerry Springer. The caravel near a church was the more moral thing I could do with my children.