Ode to the Circus

“The day before the circus opens, the company manager would gather the whole crew — roustabouts and elephant handlers, clowns and acrobats, tightrope walkers and jugglers — to help raise the canvas roof to the peaks on its poles, wafting above the fairgrounds the largest single piece of cloth most people would see in their lives. And early the next day, the crew would gather again to create the compound odor of the circus. The caramel smell of sugar burning on the cotton-candy machines and the faint reek of animal manure. Wood shavings and hot peanuts. Old dust shaken out of faded tents. The greasepaint and the popcorn. The sweaty hint of a ginned-up excitement, or maybe a tamped-down despair.”

From, "The American Circus in All Its Glory" by Joseph Bottum and Justin L. Blessinger for Humanities; Portrait of a clown from 1902

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