The Show Must Go On

Circus Royal Spectacular in Watsonville, April 19, 2024

When I was young I was a rock critic, and everyone I met would say, "oh you are so lucky you get to go to shows for free - can I come with you some time?" But they only really wanted to come when it was the Cure or Bob Dylan or someone like that. More often than not, it was REO Speedwagon, and suddenly they had to wash their hair that night.

Luckily for me my brother NEVER had to wash his hair. We went to UC Berkeley at the same time - he was a grad student when I was an undergrad - and his favorite thing was going to see bad bands, the worse the better. We had so much fun doing that together. One time, for example, we went to see Grand Funk Railroad at the County Fair and he brought a disposable camera:"I thought I'd do a photo essay," he said, thus predating the whole idea of the iphone by about 20 years.

Another time we saw Ted Nugent at the San Jose Civic, and there was this guy in the audience dressed in a fake fur-covered loin cloth with his butt cheeks hanging out and nothing else, and my brother turned to me and said, "...but where does he keep his car keys?" and I laughed so hard I became incapacitated. He had to drive home because I kept bursting into tears, practically, every few minutes again when I recalled it.

(You can hear more tales of my exciting life here, at the Revolutions Per Minute podcast.)

My brother moved to the East Coast a quarter of a century ago and I stopped writing about music around the same time, but he moved back last week so when I called him and said, 'Hey do you want to go to a shitty circus with me,' his positive response was a foregone conclusion.

I don't know what attracted me to the shitty circus since I general I don't like circuses and Corry avowedly hates them. Well, I like Cirque du Soleil, but it costs a fortune to get in. This one was 25$ and it was in Watsonville, just having left a week's engagement in Coalinga and other such communities. The ad said: "Human Cannonball." I have to be honest: I was looking forward to it all week.

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To begin, I should say, it wasn't a shitty circus at all. A better descriptor would be, it was a simple circus, and it was in a little top, not a big one. There was one ring, six performers, and set of folding chairs only four rows deep. (We sat in the third row, in order to avoid being fucked with by the clowns, because we weren't born yesterday.) There was fresh pop corn and icees and nachos and funnel cake for sale. Also, balloons and things that lit up for the kids, who could get their faces painted for free.

As promised, there was a giant cannon in the corner. And I do mean giant.

In every other way it was much like Cirque du Soleil. There was a contortionist, a juggler, a woman who did Lyra, an acrobat, and two clowns. Clowns are a terrible thing, but these clowns' routines were so mild, and so silly, that we laughed despite ourselves. They did a lot of stuff which involved wiggling their bottoms, which made the children in attendance absolutely shriek with laughter.

Then they played a little bit of music: they played "Hips Don't Lie" by Shakira, on a set of colored water bottles, and "My Heart Will Go On" on kazoos attached to their fingers. At one point they dragged a man (who had ill-advisedly sat in the front row) into the ring and pinned him to a large target. Then they pretended they were going to throw knives around him, but instead of throwing them, they blindfolded him, got the crowd to cheer as if they were throwing them, carefully placed the knives around him as if they had actually done it, and took his blindfold off.

Well, the children were besides themselves at this mild jape, and I have to admit even we laughed. It was so stupid, but it was also just funny, and it carried us back in time, not so much to when we were little and scared by clowns, but way further back than that, to the middle of the 20th century and maybe even the 19th, when traveling clowns and circuses would come to town and set up shop, and the townspeople would get a little color and entertainment into their otherwise drab lives. If you think about it, a traveling circus sort of predates the giant rock tour. When Taylor Swift or Beyonce comes to town, they bring a huge number of semi trucks and set up a crazy mass of lights and instruments and glitter and glam, and they do all kinds of weird fancy stuff on stage and everyone buys popcorn and icees, and then when it's over, the set is struck and they move on to the next big city.

So it was kind of heartening to see the Circus Royal do exactly the same thing, only in a tiny town and with a tiny set of twirling lights and bottles and balloons that they probably bought from Michael’s.

What couldn't be bought from Michael’s was the giant cannon, which was cobbled together with some kind of tractor, duct tape, and a metal tube from some psychotic scrap heap near a military base or something. It was impressive, in part because it looked so Jerry-rigged: I mean, it's bad enough to have a human cannonball, but it's worse when the cannon looks like it was made by Bart Simpson.

The truth is, even after we got to the circus, I didn't quite believe in the human cannonball. After the knife throwing skit, I thought that they were going to put a man in the cannon, and then turn out the lights, and then put him - or his twin - on the other side of the arena and go TA-DA! I cynically thought the knife thing was a foreshadowing.

It was only when the entire cast - all 6 performers plus the women from the concessions booth - began rigging a giant net across the arena that I thought maybe it would be real, and when they did it wrong  and had to untangle the net and start all over, I knew it was; and their error only added to the tension. Presently the actual human cannonball appeared and climbed up on the cannon to the accompaniment of the song "We Will Rock You". Then we, the audience, counted down from five, and BOOM! He shot out of the cannon at 65 MPH, just like they said he would on the advertisement. It took him only a fraction of a second to land on the other side of the room, and we IMMEDIATELY wanted to see him to do it again, because it was so goddamned exciting. It was so exhilarating it was almost as if we had done it ourselves.

Except that we aren't nuts. I looked at Corry. "Where do you think they find someone to be a human cannonball?"

Corry shrugged. "Indeed.com?"

Anyway, the point is, going to the simple circus with my brother was super fun and when I tried to pinpoint why, I realized it was because it was the epitome of analog, firmly tethered to the material world. It was very humane, not to mention human, and lately, I have been thinking a lot about both those things. The advent of Artificial Intelligence forces you to consider what it means to be both, especially if you work in a profession like mine (teaching), where people have misguidedly adopted to it so quickly.  

What was so cool about the human cannonball was that he was a human. And also a cannonball! He was both, but what he wasn't was digital, virtual, or a cyborg, like the Terminator and the Six Million Dollar Man, and that was what made the act so fun and funny…poignant, even. In some ways, it was like the knife act and the butt-wiggling, just such a very silly and simple aspect of human-ness on display. I wish that didn't feel like something precious and rare right now, but it sort of does.    

(You can still catch the Circus Royal Spectacular at Ramsay Park in Watsonville, if you’re in the area, it’s been held over until April 28. Click here for more info or see below:

NO TE QUEDES SIN VER AL GRANDIOSO HOMBRE BALA VOLANDO DENTRO DE LA CARPA DEL CIRCO.
HORARIOS

LUNES A VIERNES 7:30PM
SÁBADO 5:30PM & 7:30PM
DOMINGO 3:30PM 5:30PM & 7:30PM
PUEDES COMPRAR BOLETOS EN LÍNEA

https://www.circusroyaltickets.com/