Sideshow

By Crispin Sartwell

Last Friday, in what was perhaps the summary moment of my academic career, I found myself driving around the city of Baltimore with a mummified corpse in the backseat of my Subaru. He didn't quite fit, so my friend John and I had to decide whether the head or the feet should stick out the window. We concluded that the feet might be a bit less conspicuous.

A dignified policewoman we drove by looked concerned, but - deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, or that we looked like we knew what we were doing - she let us pass.

After we hauled our stiff into the tent and laid him out on a table, I asked Matt Hely how we should label him. I was thinking in terms of Ramses II or John the Baptist. But Matt, with his unerring sense for the plausible, composed the following: "Big Mike, an alcoholic who died in 1924 in Sioux City. His family refused to pay for his embalming, and so the funeral home displayed his remains in its window for 37 years."

Later that night, Matt broke a cinder block over his head with a sledge hammer. He escaped from a straitjacket while jumping barefoot in broken glass. Then he sewed a button to his arm.

The sideshow is a great, if disturbing, American art form. We were putting one together for the students at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where I teach, as both a contemporary spectacle and a lesson in history.

We had Pancho Villa's head. We had a pickled two-headed baby. And we had Bobby Reynolds, one of the last great sideshow talkers, who got his start at Coney Island when he was thirteen, and has been providing questionable entertainments ever since.

That the sideshow has, in perhaps its final tour, traveled from small town America to the college campus, is a pretty good indication that it is over. And indeed, it was a hard sell at the college, too, though the students who attended last night seemed to love it inordinately. But the very idea of freaks and geeks disturbed some of the administrators, who were worried about whom we would offend.

And so we laid a surface of legitimacy over our spectacle, with lectures, experts, critiques, histories. But when you cut to the chase, people still, in their heart of hearts, want to gape at a two-headed baby.

Our sideshows have moved off the midway and onto television, where, for example, we see conjoined twins on CNN, or watch the folks on Jackass or America's Funniest Home Videos hurt themselves for our amusement. We still live in America, a country largely invented by P.T. Barnum-- who, incidentally, conceived of himself as an educator as well as a showman.

The rise of the sideshow coincides with the rise of modern science: with Darwin's theory of evolution, for example. And though the sideshow may have at times used the rhetoric of science, people went there, too, to comfort themselves with the idea that the world was fundamentally irrational.

There might, in the world of the sideshow, be a monstrous mating of any two species. There might be people two feet or eight feet tall. There might, in short, be things at the extremes and in the interstices, things that destroyed the attempt to comprehend the world in categories and control it.

The world, which science was threatening to make comprehensible, might still provide wonders, mysteries, and miracles. And you could see it all for a dime.

Perhaps the decline of the sideshow coincides with our discovery, renewed every day on our televisions, that there is simply no chance at all that the world is going to make sense. The literal explosions of irrationality we see around us every day have made the sideshow redundant.

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The World Famous Insanitarium appears through this week between the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall and the MICA Station Building.