The Mocsow Circus
I’m sitting on a rubbed-smooth-by-many-arses blue wooden bench three rows back from clouds of sawdust erupting from the giraffe’s massive hooves. The wild animal, seven thousand miles from home and barely contained by the electric-yellow rope lassoed just beneath its huge jaws, lurches in fear at the searing circus lights and the big top echoing of children’s screams and adults’ loud-nervous guffaws. The giraffe drags the ring mistress, and her strapless, black velvet evening gown, at the other end of the yellow lasso around the sawdust covered circus ring: Her eyes transfixed with panic-inducing panic.
The waxy red apple she had been holding to lure the wild animal into the ring, streaks to the sawdust as she grabs the lasso with both hands to prevent an escape. The first row of seats jammed full of jostling twelve-year-old boys, their faces smeared with Curly-Wurly toffee-chocolate, bolts backwards, arms flailing, into the scratching-hair-pulling ten-year-olds in the second row. The giraffe’s hooves, the size of a side-plate, stamp the sawdust until particles of pine glint in the too-bright circus lights.
My eyeballs, struggling to stay in their sockets, dart from the enormous hooves to the ring mistress’ panicked eyes as my arms enfold my two children who are on their feet ready to flee.
Arriving to the ever-growing cloud of brightly lit wood dust, the clown, his pasty white face and bulbous, fire-engine-red nose aimed up at the giraffe’s big head, joins the ring mistress in attempting to pull the enormous animal towards the back of the tent. A third man arrives and grabs the rope; beneath his skintight tank top well-defined muscles ripple; but his lack of height forces him to line up behind the ring mistress.
Together all three bend the giraffe’s head toward the sawdust. The African animal’s long, beautiful neck arches as they drag it toward a charcoal-grey blanket that separates circus ring from the rest of the planet.
The hand of an unseen circus person yanks the charcoal blanket open at the last second as the three humans drag the giraffe out of sight.
Emerging moments later from behind the blanket, grabbing the microphone, shaking its cord straight, the ring mistress, the hem of her black velvet dress fringed with sawdust, strides to the middle of the circus ring.
“Sorry ‘bout dat folks,” she says in a strong Dublin accent, her voice languid despite moments before being a mere trip away from releasing a thousand pound, fourteen-foot-tall wild animal to charge across the fields of Mayo looking for some to get home to the Serengeti.
Wiping a bare forearm across her brow, she continues:
“Loike I says, we’s de on’y circus in de whirled currantly havin’ a giraffe act, but he’s on’y a pup, so does a get a bit frikened.”
The crowd of maybe twenty-five people, three of them over the age of twelve, take a collective deep breath, settle back onto the blue wooden benches and munch into their high-fat-sodium-sugar snacks.
The day before, while engaging in the time honoured Castlebarbarian tradition of stopping for ice cream in Westport on the way home from the beach, we saw a sign on a light pole for “The Mocsow Circus.”
Laughing a bit too much at the printer’s honest, if funny, mistake, we thought what better way for our children over from Boston to experience Ireland with their cousins other than an Irish, or potentially Russian, circus.
Raised on steady, but lean, circus diet of the Big Apple Circus every January, one failed Circe De Soleil (they fell asleep) and Barnum & Bailey’s specials on television, our children were excited for another big top experience. But the bar for Irish circuses got set low when my eldest sister recounted a story about, as young girl, attending a circus on the fairground in our mother’s home village of Dowra.
“Ah, sure the ring master, a big fat fella, was dead drunk. We couldn’t hear a word he was slurrin’ – wah-wah-wah!” she threw her arms and head back in carefree laughter, “an’ the poor ould white ponies dashin’ round the little ring an’ their bellies splotched with brown circles from where they had them lying in their own shite in some tiny pen out the back.”
“Is dere clowns in Irish cir…cusses,” our five-year-old daughter asks with tentative anxiety. She’s a decidedly ambiguous fan of the Big Apple’s Granny the Clown. Sometimes she loves him but is oft times scared as this renowned master of the clownish arts appears suddenly in the audience playing the role a confused-bemused-belligerent grandmother in a fire-engine-red dress, frequently mock-hitting people with her-his huge handbag.
“I’m … eh, probly,” I say searching for words that won’t have her worrying, “but you know how everyone in Ireland is fierce silly anyway, so the clowns here would just be even sillier, not makin’ fun a other people.”
The Mocsow circus’ pasty-white-painted-face-bulbous-red-nosed clown dressed in raggedy royal blue pants and a too-busy-stripey red shirt proves me badly wrong and right at the same time. He mercilessly sprays children and adult faces with way too much water from an oversized flower stuck to his shirt, then exhorts them in a thick Eastern European accent to “step yours zilly crya…ings!”
But he is also impressive with his acrobatics, his repeatedly dunking himself in barrels of water, his habit of sneaking up behind the ring mistress mimicking her ring mistressy slow-dramatic movements with eerie perfection. His boundless energy fills the substantially empty big top, as he single-handedly creates moments of the wondrous make-believe world that we unreasonably expect for £3 admittance, £2 for children from the circus.
The Serengeti quadruped safely back in its ten by fifteen-foot pen out back, excuses for its near rampage behind us, the ring mistress gets down to circus business:
“An’ … now ladeees an’ gentle…mens, buys … an’ gurls, I presents ta youse, all de way from Rhew…may…nia, de outstandinest best excellent trapeze act in Europe an’ de world, unmatched fer dearin’ an’ verbs an’ never de likes a seen before west a de Shannon!”
She gasps out her last words, slowly and regally drawing back her pudgy bare arm to call onto the sawdust the next act.
From behind the charcoal blanket emerges a slight, muscle-and-bone woman in a once-upon-a-long-time-ago white leotard and way too much makeup for ‘west a de Shannon.’ She walks on her toes like a ballerina, though the puffs of sawdust from each drag of her toes impedes her attempts at elegant movement. Walking behind her is the short, muscular man in a tight white tank top who was part of saving my family from a giraffe trampling just a few moments before. He also attempts, and fails, at strutting elegantly across the sawdust.
Together in the middle of the ring, they hold hands and take three slow-deep bows, two of which are unfortunately to empty rows of seats.
From the darkness of the big top drops a slender swing held by two ropes.
The man extends his arm ushering the woman over to the swing.
Slowly, on the tips of her toes, she struts to the swing, sits on the slender bar, reaches out and grabs hold of the ropes. She smiles to the audience, making a slight bow with just her head.
The swing starts to rise above the sawdust, initially in a smooth ascent, then with jerking movements that send my eyes roving. There in the back, just to the side of the charcoal blanket pulling on a thick rope that runs through a pulley is the clown, the ring mistress and a thickset, middle-aged man, a cigar jammed between his teeth and dress shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
Each of them pulls individually and irregularly on the rope, creating the jerking movements of the swing.
The trapeze artist, a smile frozen on her too-red lips, waves one hand at her paltry audience below as she moves high above us. Next to her, on a different thick rope that had dropped in unseen, her partner, legs and torso rigid, arm muscles flexing, pulls himself up to a swing fixed high in the big top.
For the next fifteen minutes they transfix their open-mouthed audience with their balance, dexterity and split-second timing. Little clouds of chalk dust puff from their hands as he grabs her tumbling body mid-air, hands grasped together he swings them across the big top and sends her flying through the tent back to her swing which comes into her range just as she arrives.
We all gasp, clap and anxiously stuff so-bad-it’s-good food into our faces.
Their act completed, adulation granted, her swing lowers to the sawdust in jerking movements, while her partner, with brisk hand swaps on the rope, returns to terra firma.
On the sawdust, their bodies sheened with sweat, radiant smiles on their faces, they execute three deliberate bows. Jogging off they pass the ring mistress as she rouses the microphone cord out of the sawdust with a violent sweep of her arm, raising tiny wood particles into the air.
She takes a few steps, stops, balances on one foot while she pulls up the sawdust encrusted hem of her black dress and with a grimace, adjusts a very tall, high heeled shoe.
“Now ladeees an’ gentle…mens, buys … an’ gurls” she huffs into the microphone, pauses, stands upright, brushes her hand down the velvet and continues as she confidently strides towards the middle of the ring:
“Youse is in fer de treat a treats, de greatest, most excellent, fascinatin’ an’ onbelievable show on de planet, youse’d have ta go ta Mars ta see bitter,” she stops for a breath, swings the unruly microphone cord out of the sawdust to give herself freer movement.
“In just a few minutes, dey’re finishin’ up a cuppa, youse’ll see de whirled famous packyderm, de grey mammoth a de east parformin’ tricks an’ movements jus’ fer yours entertainment … ladeees an’ gentlemens, buys … an’ gurls, I gives ta youse de famous ellyphants Topsy ‘n Turveeeee!”
She tries to jog off, but the high-high heels prevent rapid movement. She stops and retreats before she’s trampled by an elephant who lumbers out into the ring followed by a second, saggy-baggy, sad-eyed pachyderm, who doesn’t even bother to lumber but instead plods along, its one visible eye roving over the audience.
Behind the elephants prances the cigar totting, thickset man, now in a rumpled top hat, his dress shirt barely buttoned but cinched closed with a bowtie and partially covered by an ill-fitting black tuxedo jacket with two long scraggly tails. He’s using a pole with a large hook on the end as his walking stick.
He waves impatiently at the ring mistress who’s still trying to effect her escape, but is impeded by the circus ring’ small radius relative to the two elephants size and long footsteps.
The sight of these enormous animals, controlled only it would seem by the hooked stick, ambulating along just twenty feet from my tiny human offspring releases a wave a panic down my body. I suppress the urge to grab my children’s hands and leave. But when I look at their smooth-skinned little faces, mouths open, eyes widened at the sight of these majestic creatures just three rows of seats and a two-foot-high red-painted-plywood ring enclosure away, I realize the problem is mine alone.
The elephants move gracefully around the ring, their enormously heavy limbs seeming to move with ease. The lead elephant’s frying-pan-sized footpads disappear into the sawdust with surprising speed and regularity. But the following elephant halts occasionally to deepen its survey of the audience; the circus lights reflecting white of its one visible eye buried in the folds of grey skin.
The saggy bulk of the elephants, frightening thick trunks, puny-scraggly tails; the handler’s square-jawed mouth flapping open and closed like some cartoon-goon; his rumpled top hat, cigar smoke billowing out above his triple chins; his dress coat wrapped girth; the frazzled black tails dangling behind him; it all adds to the sense that what I’m witnessing is not reality.
But real this is!
The handler jams the cigar between his teeth, barks out an unintelligible monosyllable and gaffs the recalcitrant elephant with his dastardly hooked stick.
The elephant’s massive body doesn’t flinch, but his reflected-white eye flinches and he immediately returns to motion.
As the elephants repeatedly circuit the ring, closely followed by the handler with his stick held threateningly, the clown and the male trapeze artist appear from behind the charcoal blanket carrying a sparkly-red-metal circular platform. The trapeze artist, now in a black sweatshirt with PARIS in thick pink letters on the front, scowls distractedly while the clown’s clownishly exaggerated steps, further accentuated by his long-wobbly red shoes, raise and lower the heavy platform.
Passing by the elephant handler, the clown impishly reaches out and slaps the handler’s top hat into the sawdust. The reach he made to hit the hat being too far, the clown drops his side of the metal platform onto the end of his long shoe. The trapeze artist, dragged sidewards and down, swears in Rhewmaynian. But the clown has already moved into pogoing around the ring on one leg, holding his wobbly crushed shoe in both hands, his overly rouged lips turned down as he mock-bawls in mock-pain.
The elephant handler grabs his sawdust encrusted top hat off the ground but doesn’t have time to clean it off as the recalcitrant elephant has taken the opportunity to almost turn itself fully around. The handler not-so-mock whacks the clown across the head as he rushes over to the get the elephant back on track.
The trapeze artist, Rhewmaynian swears still bubbling from his lips, sighs visibly and rolls the metal platform to the middle of the ring and mock-jogs off with the mock-bawling clown hopping along behind him on one leg.
The elephant handler has barely turned the recalcitrant elephant back to follow the other, when he executes his first trick: Barking harsh monosyllables and prodding both huge animals he turns them fully around to walk in the opposite direction.
Now it’s the turn of the former lead elephant to develop curiosity about the audience. As the majestic animal turns its broad grey head to survey the humans staring back at it, its head twists so far that the bright circus lights catch its iris, illuminating their beautiful amber hue.
More prodding, lumbering, clowning, scowling ensues; all in a sawdusty haze until there’s a second circular red-metal platform in the ring, placed ten feet from the first one. The elephant handler stomps around the ring, manipulating his charges with his dastardly little stick and barked commands that we barely hear but know have been issued by the changing colour of the cigar smoke propelled from his mouth.
“Ladeees … an’ gentlemens …,” the ring mistress voice boom out of the speakers, though she herself is unseen, presumably somewhere in the back of the mayhem that is now the circus ring, “buys an’ gurls, get ready for de greatest … most magnificent an’ spellbindin’ packy…durm act on de planet, de great Gustavo an’ he’s two Asian gurl ellyphants TOPSY … AN’ TURVY!”
The handler barely stops to turns to the audience, gives a small rapid bow, careful to remove and replace his sawdusty top hat and with anxiety provoking speed returns to prodding the elephants.
Is all that protects my family from two rampaging elephants the handler’s verbal threats? The dastardly stick is surely just a distraction. Of course, there is that two-foot-tall painted plywood ring enclosure which should slow down an enraged Topsy and Turvy for about five seconds.
Bathing myself in anxiety, I return my attention to the ring.
The handler, standing in the middle of the ring, halfway between the two circular metal platform, stops Topsy and Turvy, one on either side of the ring, both facing him. He touches the dastardly stick on the top of the platform to his right.
Topsy or Turvy, it’s impossible to know which, steps cautiously forward. The handler’s horizontal mouth keeps flapping open and closed as he taps the stick off the flat metal platform.
“UUUPPP!” the handler positively screams, his mouth a cartoon black circle.
My shoulders twitch at the suddenness of his rage.
The elephant tentatively approaches the platform, stutter stepping tiny advances until it finally, with great caution, places one of its frying-pan sized footpads on the flat metal.
The handler spins around to the other elephant whose eyes, now completely black, stare back; her head moving from side-to-side, like a boxer approaching her opponent; her trunk swinging pendulum-like exactly opposite to her large-flat-grey forehead.
My whole torso tightens.
The front row of twelve-year-olds is out of their seats, standing transfixed, hands whitening against the red two-foot-tall wooden circus ring enclosure.
The dastardly stick taps the metal platform three times; the handler takes a few steps backwards, turning to bark something unheard at the other elephant who stays with her two pads still on that platform.
The swinging trunk approaches the platform, one huge pad after another sinking into the sawdust. More barked instructions take the elephant slightly past the platform and turn her until she’s facing the audience head on, her rear end, puny tale swinging over and back, aimed at the platform.
Now the dastardly stick swings into action as the handler hooks and prods the elephant backwards, the huge head bobbing and weaving to avoid the hook, its trunk flailing wildly; its pads dragging through the sawdust; the handler barking louder and louder with each step backwards he forces the elephant.
When he has the elephant’s droopy rear end hanging over the metal platform, he steps in fast toward his enormous charge, slashing the stick in front of her eyes, waving his free hand to make himself look, larger.
The elephant, its back pads touching the platform as it tries to back up some more realizes that it has nowhere left to go but up: And up it goes.
Her back legs buckle at the knees, her rear end flops down onto the platform as her massive torso rises, thick-round front legs clawing at the air.
It can’t be up for more than a few seconds but it’s enough to get my kids, eyes widened, mouths open, out of their seats next to me.
“LOOOOK AT … DAT LADEEES an’ gentlemens!” the ring mistress’ voice rings out of the speakers hanging above us. “Poor ould Topsy got a bit tipsy taday an’ had ta take a seat.”
The handler spins around fast, gravity almost getting the better of his bulk, but a fast right foot saves him; he bows rapidly, then turns back to Topsy and Turvy. He doesn’t need to wave them out of their poses as they’ve already broken them and stand swaying their huge torsos and trunks.
He screams a few monosyllables, aims the stick and his free arm at the charcoal blanket, toward which both elephants start to trot.
“LADEEES an’ … gentlemens, buys … an’ gurls,” the ring mistress reappears, her step a little lighter, her face forced into a broad smile, “tanks ta youse all fer comin’, we’d ‘preciate youse tellin’ yer friends an’ family about de greatest show on urth! We’re here again tanite for ours last show in dis town.”
Without a word, my daughter jumps in my arms, hugging my neck.
“That was the bestest circus ever daddy, can we come back tonight, please please!”