Shelf Life

Kelly Miller was playing in nearby Millbrook on Friday, so I drove out to see them.

Long-time readers may or may not recall that I spent six months living with a circus back in 2009 after the world fell apart. I haven’t been near a circus since. I was a little apprehensive, in fact, that yesterday’s jaunt might stir up memories.

It didn’t.

Kelly Miller was actually the very last stop on my mudshow tour. We’d been traveling with Culpepper & Merriweather where Ben had been doing – Well. I don’t exactly know what. The only thing I can remember him doing (besides being hateful to me) is driving 600 miles once, from Charles City, Iowa to Milwaukee and back again, when Francis the lion, and Solomon and Delilah the tigers, needed fresh bloody meat.

Culpepper ended its season in early September. This was very bad for us. It cut us off from our only source of income, and I’d lost everything when I lost the Little Store. Ben didn’t – couldn’t or wouldn’t – work.

More to the point, though, it forced consideration of a question I was too scared even to think about asking myself: So! What happens next?

We spent a week or so in Hugo, the grim little Oklahoma town that serves as winter basecamp for America’s last three traveling tent circuses – Kelly Miller, Carson & Barnes, and Culpepper & Merriweather.

Hugo is also the place where Circus Chimera had been headquartered. Readers with even longer memories may remember that I did PR for Circus Chimera and its owner Jim Judkins at night while I tried to wring profitability out of the Little Store during the daylight hours.

Culpepper’s winter headquarters, in fact, were right across the road from the remains of Judkins’ burned out house.

I asked Jim once, “Why don’t you rebuild the place?” and Jim – who was convinced the place had been torched by his enemies – snapped, “I’m leaving it the way it is. I want them to see what they’ve done to me.”

Funny. Jim’s enemies were equally convinced that he torched the place himself for the insurance money.

“Winter headquarters” is a pretty grandiose term for half a dozen RVs on an acre and a half of mud and mosquitoes across from a burned out house. Ben would have been happy to stay there forever.

Eventually, though, we decided to move north. North is a pretty big place, I realize. But we couldn’t get any more specific than that.

Fort Smith, Arkansas, was on the way to north. That was where Kelly Miller was playing a rare two-night gig. Their season didn’t end till October, and Ben was pals with Casey, their tiger guy.

Fort Smith, Arkansas is a cool little town that remembers what life was like back in the 1830s when it was still a gateway to the unsettled reaches of the Louisiana Purchase. Its biggest tourist attraction is a gallows with a bunch of fake corpses dangling from it, just outside the historic courthouse where Isaac Parker, the infamous “Hanging Judge,” used to hand down sentences.

But when it was time for Kelly Miller to push on to their next lot, we had to go, too. Lurching to Lew’s place in Erie, Pennsylvania, and – eventually – to upstate New York.

The ancient RV was constantly breaking down, stranding us for days at a time in Missouri, Indiana, Ohio. Ben was mean and furious. Robin was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. We lived in squalor on a diet of canned Vienna sausages and molasses cookies, which we bought at a buck a pop from the Dollar Store. Bad times.

The worst was still to come.

Yet now – a mere six years later – my life is a breeze. I am beholden to nothing but my own entertainment, and I have the wherewithal to make sure I stay entertained.

A small wherewithal.

But then, I’m easily entertained.

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I’d actually gone to the show to see Rebecca Ostroff, Kelly Miller’s supremely talented aerialist – she did all Reese Witherspoon’s aerial numbers in that awful Water for Elephants movie.

There were some other good acts, too. There was Radar and the Siberian tigers. Radar inherited Casey’s tiger act after Casey decided it would be a good idea to sidestep any legal ramifications that might possibly arise from that incident in Cairo, New York where one of the tigers ran away from the show for a couple of hours. This was back in 2010, kept very much on the hush-hush, but the arm of the USDA is long.

There was a pretty cool act that paired camels with zebras, an extraordinary juggler, a group aerialist ensemble, and, of course, Anna Louise, the African elephant.



I’ve never seen an animal mistreated on a small American traveling circus, by the way, just so you know. Can’t speak for European or Central American traveling shows, of course, or for Ringling where economies of scale impact the highly personal bond between a trainer and his animals. But the circus people I know love their animals and take excellent care of them – animals are their livelihood, after all.

The one person I sorta kinda still know from Kelly Miller was someone I wasn’t going to talk to.

Fridman. Married to my friend Valerie.

I’d emailed Valerie to see if she was with the show for the summer yet and available for coffee. She emailed me back that she wasn’t with the show because Fridman had left her. That was a shock. As far as I was concerned, Fridman had married up.

Valerie is a French photographer. She's a great photographer. (You can see some of her work here.) She met Fridman when she was sent to interview him. Fell instantly in love. Ended up marrying him, having two kids. For years she kept a brilliant online photo journal of her adventures on the road.

She and her kids are flying to France in a couple of weeks. Out of JFK. So I invited her to spend a couple of days here with me in the oh-so-incredibly beautiful Hudson Valley.

I didn’t ask – and I won’t ask – why she and Fridman broke up.

Because honestly? I can’t actually figure out how they managed to stay together so long. He is very pretty, but she is so much smarter than he is. I suspect it’s because Valerie really, really liked being a nomad. When Dylan and Nicholas finally hit school age that wasn’t possible anymore, though. Valerie could only travel for six weeks in the summer during the kids’ breaks.

Fridman’s act yesterday was the worst in the show. He’s tabled the rolla bolla and the upside down spider walk for some balance thing he does with spinning plates. And he dropped the spinning plates.

Fridman is an acrobat. The problem with being an acrobat on a circus is that you have a limited shelf life. Circuses tend to travel the same routes year after year. Managers don’t want their audiences to get bored. You can maybe do the same act in a different costume two years in a row, but by that third year, you’ve got to find yourself a new skill or a new circus. Fridman’s been with Kelly Miller for six years now. I doubt he’ll be there for a seventh. I don’t know what he’ll do, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to go back to Peru, so he’ll have to figure out something.

Also – and this is really odd – Jessi – Culpepper’s clown while I was there – contacted me this morning. Turns out she is going to be in NYC next week, so she is coming up to stay with me, too.

The circus vibe is str-r-r-ong right now.

What’s up with that, I wonder?