The circus went through a whole week of dry runs and Giovanni concluded that he had a show. Not a great show. Certainly not the Greatest Show on Earth, but a show. At dawn, his three clowns plus the three men he hired to be the primary roustabouts and put under the direction of Borges, husband of Gabriella the cook, and father of Rosa of the Flying Flutinis, along with as many performers as they could get took down all the tents. After breakfast, they put them all up again. They would do that regularly over the next seven months, and speed was important, but care was more important. It would be a disaster if a tent fell down during a performance.
The circus tent went up with equal care. Presently, it anchored one end of the midway, but it got the most use. It was the size of the tent Giovanni’s grandfather used, the one he started with. Three sides could be rolled up to accommodate an overflowing crowd. The fourth side had a slit door in it. The acts got ready behind that fourth side. Most people had a short, amended version of their act that they could perform in the smaller space. The acts suggested what the audience might see in the big tent, though they were miniature acts themselves, like the acts the performers might have done back in the days of traveling alone on the road. As long as it was not raining, they could put on the small version of the circus in every village and small town where they stopped for the night. The big tent got saved for the big towns, and the cities enroute. It did not get put up in the smaller places.
They also had a small tent they set at the entrance to the midway across the way from the food wagon. It was the tent of wonders where they showed off the magnificent diversity of God’s creation, which was the only safe way to describe things in 1000 AD in Italy under the church. It was never called the freak show though that name was hard to resist. They also had seats, charged a penny, and the show only lasted around a half hour.
Piccolo the juggler had a glib tongue. He got the job of introducing the various wonders and such. It was safer to put him on the stage so he would not be tempted to play any practical jokes and thus mess up his own chance to shine. Piccolo showed off the carcass of the mermaid which was really a cat and a fish sewn together by a talented taxidermist. He showed the unicorn horn and the dragon tooth telling a little story with each. It was not really possible to bring in Leonardo’s magnificent white horses or Sir Brutus the bear, but Constantine the tightrope walker brought his pet monkey, Pinky, the one dressed like a pink clown, and the children loved that. Children under a certain height were free in every tent when accompanied by adults. They had a sign in front of every tent to show the height and were pretty lenient about it, so they always had some children at every performance in the small tent of wonders, the circus tent, and the big tent.
When Constantine walked the tightrope in the big tent, the rope that got stretched between the two massive poles, like ship’s masts in size, that held the tent up, he always got a Ta-Da when he safely reached the other side. After he bowed, he waved to his monkey and the monkey easily scampered across the rope and jumped into Constantine’s arms. Constantine held the monkey like a baby, and they both waved to another Ta-Da before they climbed down the ladder.
Madigan the musician and two men from his orchestra once made a week-long winter trip to Padua the roads were slushy in the middle of January from recent rains. Madigan heard about a fiddle player who was the best anyone ever heard. He came back with a young woman with surprisingly Asian features. Merci had been born and raised in Brittany so her music sounded decidedly Celtic. How her Asian family got to Brittany remained a mystery, but Giovanni quickly learned the girl could also play the mandolin, though one hardly better than a Ukulele, and she had a remarkably good singing voice. Giovanni quickly took advantage of that. He put her in charge of the incidental music in the tent of wonders, and with the help of the drummer, they developed theme music for the various show people.
Merci was credited as coming from the land of silk which most people thought of as India, but who was Giovanni to correct them. Constantine came from Constantinople, even if the man had never been there, and his monkey came from the mysterious land of Egypt, which most people heard of. Umberto the contortionist came from France, and at least he spoke passable French The dwarfs, Oberon and Needles lived under the Alps, deep underground, where their brothers and sisters dug for gold and fine jewels, and iron for their forges. Sabelius the strongman came from the far north, the land of snow and ice, where it got so cold, even the bears turned white and ordinary men have been known to freeze like statues until the spring thaw. Sabelius was the only one who came from the place he was credited with. Then there was Titania, the bearded fat lady.
When Titania, supposedly from Iberia, came out to face the gawking audience, she sat on a stool and invited all the children to come to the front and sit cross legged on the ground. She talked about the other side of the Alps as being filled with dark and deep forests in Swabia and Bavaria. Piccolo, supposedly from that area, though his German was rather poor, called them the haunted forests filled with wolves, witches, trolls, goblins, and monsters to terrible to name. The curtain got pulled back showing the iron bars of a cage, though it was only the one side. It just looked like a cage.
Baklovani, the wolfman came roaring up to the face of the cage and stuck his hands made up to look like claws through the bars. The children, and plenty of the adults dutifully screamed. When things settled down, Titania told a story from the haunted woods called Little Red Riding Hood. Rosa got to pantomime the part of Red carrying her basket of goodies to grandma’s house. She loved the hood Needles made and often wore it even when she was not performing. When Titania said the line, “The better to eat you with,” Baklovani reached through the bars again and roared as the curtain got slowly closed. Piccolo played the woodcutter and rescued Rosa, and they all lived happily ever after. The end.
Of course, once again Giovanni scolded himself for stealing from the future, but he figured the Brothers Grimm collected their stories from the oral tradition. Most of the stories, including Little Red Riding Hood took place in Bavaria and the Black Forest, but later research suggested that many were rooted in Italian stories, so Giovanni figured he was safe enough.
People took bows in the tent of wonders, and in the bigger towns and cities, the people got the pitch to see the big show at five o’clock in the center ring—though they only had one ring. The big show ran a little over an hour or about as long as people could sit still. It ran a good bit over an hour until they got the timing down.
In the smaller towns and villages, people were encouraged to see the performances in the circus tent at the end of the midway. The show in the circus tent lasted about forty-five minutes, and everyone performed there once or twice in the day, roughly at one and at three, if a second performance was likely to gather enough of a crowd. Piccolo’s show of wonders could be performed three times, at noon, two, and four before the big show in the cities which started at five in order to be done well before dark. The show of wonders at noon was usually a small audience, but then people talked and tended to bring their friends and neighbors.
Storyteller Tales & Thoughts 