http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/Timerick3405/The circus is in town -- in fact, it's on your pc right now! These are the lurid and sometimes lucid memoirs of one of the last professional circus publicity agents in the western hemisphere! Step right up, folks, and read all about it!hourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/Timerick3405/501914The Guest Ringmaster will have to wait, if that's what you tuned in for today. Instead, let us travel to the quaint shanty-town of Tucumcari, New Mexico, this past March. One of my first assignments as publicity director was to visit this town and submit to the third-degree by the police chief....http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/Timerick3405/501729There is a photograph that appears with predictable regularity whenever a book on circus history is published. It shows the inside of the Ringling cook tent, circa 1934, with picnic tables demurely drapped with snowy white linen and everyone but the disgraceful clowns gussied up in white shirt...http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/Timerick3405/501497Unless you work for a tented traveling circus you probably have no idea what they need all the room for. So, mine kinder, let ol' Professor Torkildson give you a lecture on what all there is to find room for on a circus lot. The elephants take up more room than anything else except the big top....http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/Timerick3405/501296A traveling tented circus is at the mercy of a different lot each day. Is it big enough? Wide enough? Does it slope? Will it flood in a rainstorm? Is there potable water we can hook up to? Are there underground utilities that a tent stake may puncture? Is it grass or gravel or quicksand?...http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/Timerick3405/499981Working for a shrine circus, in theory, is a plush job. The pay is tremendous and you get a week here and a week there off, to trifle away as you please. Howsomever, the drawbacks are that you have a hellish travel schedule, sometimes having to jump 400 miles from one date to the next, and you...http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/Timerick3405/499748Now where was I, re: BJ? Ah yes, the boss, Trey Key, told me to bunk with him for a week while I looked over the show prior to hitting the open road as publicity director. Now one thing you need to know about circus folk is that sometimes they do not like people to know their real name. I don't...http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/Timerick3405/499244As I was saying... I packed up my little red Ford Mercury convertible and headed down to Texas. I thought I was going to be putting on the war paint again, fooling around in the ring like my honored ancestors Fredie the Freeloader and Weary Willie. But the boss, Trey Key, a wiley and astute...http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/Timerick3405/498829The winter of 2005 was a tempermental one up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Sunny thaws were followed by arctic blasts. Through a series of billiant career moves I was spending the winter living with my mother and working as a warming room attendant at the Van Cleve Park warming room. The pay was...http://www.blogit.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/Timerick3405/498446Swede Johnson, an old Ringling clown, prefaced all his stories this way: It ain't the truth, but it's close enough. Wiser words were never uttered by a circus veteran, of which I am one. So hold on to your cotton candy and sno-cone folks; I'm taking you into the world of a one-ring tented...