Side show

“ Sometimes the waters widened like a sea so that one could not discern the dim shadow of the farther shore; again they narrowed, snake-like, crawling so craftily that the side-wheeler boomed through the chutes with the willows brushing the decks. ”

“ Outside show is a poor substitute for inner worth. ”

“ Its reverse would show the greens and browns of leaves and tree trunks in a forest scene. Both economy and lack of stage space were responsible for this. Painted by a clumsy and unimaginative hand, each leaf daubed as a leaf, each inch of wainscoting drawn to scale, the effect of any Cotton Blossom set, when viewed from the other side of the footlights, was unconvincing even to rural and inexperienced eyes. Ravenal set to work with paint and brush and evolved two sets of double scenery which brought forth shrieks of ridicule and protest from the company grouped about the stage. ”

“ Who are the people who during the working hours of the day can assemble in their tens of thousands at the popular race-meetings, the great cricket-matches, the afternoon performances at the theatres, the Palaces of Variety, the concert-rooms, the exhibitions, and the side-shows? ”

“ On his off nights he and Magnolia went to the theatre. Curiously, they seemed always to have enough money for that.
Usually they dwelt somewhere north, just the other side of the Chicago River, at that time a foul-smelling and viscid stream, with no drainage canal to deodorize it. Ravenal, in lean times, emerging from his dingy hotel or rooming house on Ontario or Ohio, was as dapper, as suave, as elegant as that younger Ravenal had been who, leaning against the packing case on the wharf at New Orleans, had managed to triumph over the handicap of a cracked boot. ”

“ When arrived at the show place, unlike the audience collected to witness any spectacle of human invention, the multitude, with their eyes all bent one way, stood immoveable, and silent as death, till the tumult ceased, and the mighty commotion was passed by ”

“ Now she's trying to cage Joe.”
Miss Ewing controlled an impulse to laughter.
“My nephew was going to help you?”
“Yes—to go to business college and study stenography.”
“Stenography?” Miss Ewing was dazed.
“You can't imagine, Miss—Miss Ewing,” said Freda with appeal in her voice, “what the atmosphere of a freak-show is like. Everyone has got something the matter with them. They're not normal; they're monstrosities of some kind so terrible that people will pay money to come and stare at them, and while you'd think they'd get hardened, they never do. ”

“ But if an Englishman entered a packed theatre on his hands with his feet in the air, and thus proceeded to make the rounds of the house, the audience would only give one glance, just to make sure that it was nothing more abnormal than a man in evening dress, carrying his crush-hat between his feet and walking on his hands, and then they would return to their exciting conversation of where they were “going to show after the play.” ”

“ While evidently the innocent victim of one of Chauncey's absurd impulses, her situation had been most awkward; yet the simple little thing had borne herself admirably.
“Well, that is a pretty how-do-you-do, isn't it?” commented Miss Henrietta in tones that managed dexterously to convey sympathy for the girl and condemnation for the mother. “And who is the one you love?”
“Joe Holmquist, the strong-man in the show.”
“Strong-man! H'mph! And he let your mother outgeneral him?”
“Oh, but Mother can outgeneneral anybody,” explained Freda dolefully. ”

“ They're sensitive, and they brood and crab. There's a little man in our show fifty-two years old and thirty-two inches high. I have never seen him smile. He just stands or sits and broods all day on his little platform. The tones of his voice are the saddest I've ever heard.”
“The poor young man!” ejaculated Miss Ewing.
“Mother's not a freak, of course,” went on Freda, “but she don't mind the associations and wants me to stay with her till I get a chance to marry well. She thought I might marry Chauncey, but I couldn't.” ”

“ Nay, when we attended the exhibition, and saw an old lady reverently kiss a yellow handkerchief, which we had borrowed from an hostler of our acquaintance, and labelled “Lafayette,” we retired to a side apartment and wept tears of joy. We had afforded [20] that old lady a gratifying reminiscence for the remainder of her existence.
The Washington family came out particularly strong. In a pavilion in the garden, seventeen aged females were seated. ”

“ When you sit in front and see a show going along prettily and smoothly, you little think of the amount of brain work, foot work and executive power and force that has been necessary behind the curtain to make the performance what it is! ”

“ Miss Ewing, unconsciously perhaps, withdrew abruptly from the vicinity of the suit-case, now open on the coach.
“And you?” she inquired apprehensively, as prepared to hear the worst concerning one who had slept in her bed. “You are a snake-charmer also?”
“No,” smiled Freda. “I do a dance in the bally.”
“In the ballet, you mean,” corrected Miss Ewing with careful consideration.
“No—on it,” insisted Freda,
What use to argue with one ignorant? Miss Ewing returned to the main point.
“Where did you meet Chauncey?”
“There! He was always hanging round.” ”

“ Of scarf and leaf and laughter—ay, it was
The scene for her; she sat, self-mimicking,
The center of her central-whirling world,
And tuned her mood to mockery, and skirled
A showman's lilting flourish on the string. ”

“ And, provided with these simple refreshments, they squat down upon the ground—the men on that side of the wayang-screen where they will see the puppets, the women on the other where the shadows are seen—and prepare to restfully enjoy the drama. ”

“ The idea of Chauncey Ewing, with all those rooms in his house, sleeping in his garage on her account!
“Isn't that being rather—rather particular?” she inquired, blushing in the darkness, because of anxiety not to say the wrong thing.
“Can a young lady be too particular?” rejoined Chauncey in a self-effacing sort of way.
“No, I suppose not,” admitted Freda, and to emphasize her intention to accept the hospitality of the aunt's bedchamber so generously extended by proxy, she got out of the automobile. ”

“ It is the custom of showmen running these sort of mixed entertainments in small provincial towns to stand at the entrance to the hall at the conclusion of the show and be introduced by the manager to the people he knows as they are leaving the building. ”

“ And they too—these talkers—so very far away; as remote and yet as clear as the characters in a play when they have made their final bow, and have left the curtained stage, and one is standing uncompanioned and nearly the last of the spectators, and the lights that have summoned back reality again are being extinguished. ”

“ The audience, panting, all in a heat, gesticulates and howls. All the faces are as red as if a fire were burning within their bodies. They crowd each other, hustle each other to get out—the men without hats, the women without mantles! ”

“ Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of the spectacle that has enthralled him, the spectator knows no one but the fictitious speakers who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle as a whole serves as his looking glass. ”

“ Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness. ”

“ Because we, no more than the men of the past, exhaust all the possibilities. The whole wonderful drama of life is unfolded in time, and we of this century are only one scene of it; not the most passionate either or the most absorbing. As actors, of course, we're concerned only with this scene. But the curious thing is, we're spectators, too, or can be if we like. And from the spectator's point of view, many of the episodes in the past are much more interesting, if not more important, than those of the present. ”

“ The mirror in its silver frame was like a stage, brilliantly lit, in which a drama was in progress. There was no mist now. The oppression of my nerves had wrought this amazing clarity. Every feature, every movement, was as clear-cut as in life. To think that I, a tired accountant, the most prosaic of mankind, with the account-books of a swindling bankrupt before me, should be chosen of all the human race to look upon such a scene!
It was the same scene and the same figures, but the drama had advanced a stage. The tall young man was holding the woman in his arms. ”

“ VI It was the theatre, perhaps, as the theatre was meant to be. A place in which one saw one’s dreams come true. A place in which one could live a vicarious life of splendour and achievement; winning in love, foiling the evildoer; a place in which one could weep unashamed, laugh aloud, give way to emotions long pent-up. When the show was over, and they had clambered up the steep bank, and the music of the band had ceased, and there was left only the dying glow of the kerosene flares, you saw them stumble a little and blink, dazedly, like one rudely awakened to reality from a lovely dream. ”

“ Yet if other men sigh for it, why do I stand apart from them? If the world be a stage, and all the men and women in it merely players, am I to be the solitary spectator, with no part in the drama and no interest in the vicissitudes of its plot? ”

“ Democracy on the front of the stage before an applauding audience; performers absorbed in their parts, forgetting that the landlord has to be paid in money yet to be earned. Behind the stage, the real play, the absorbing interest, the high stakes—occasional discreet laughter through the peep-hole when an actor makes an impassioned appeal to the gods. ”

“ Hence the match—the harmony—between the words and the personality—though it may exist, is apt not to be nearly so effective in the book as on the stage, and a line that misses its mark as written in the one may triumph in the other, thanks to the man who speaks it—to his skill, to his emotional power, not seldom, and especially in comedy, even to his personal appearance. In a word the independence of dialogue on the stage is qualified by its dependence on the actor. ”

“ Do you know that even when there is no such conflict of comic and tragic on the stage, the strain of performing is greatly increased if the performers have to attend to the audience as well as to their parts at the same time? ”

“ I speak of my own feelings—I can judge
Of others but by outward show, and that
Is falser than the actor's studied part.
We dress our words and looks in borrow'd robes:
The mind is as the face—for who goes forth
In public walks without a veil at least? ”

“ They vanished, and I then imagined a theatre where men appeared in their turn, said what they had been taught, and arranged themselves in good and proper order, some [Pg 207] to speak again, others to dance, some to carry heavy loads, and others to die. Across the top of the stage a word was engraved which I could not make out, but which suddenly became luminous when I heard the spectacled young man on my right whisper to his comrade:
“It is a convention—a great convention in the midst of all the other conventions of life. ”

“ How simple, after all, was the created world on the stage to the real world in the auditorium, with its thousand complexities and dramatic situations, and if the little knot of players of parts for an hour could have had leisure to be spectators of the audience, what a deeper revelation of life would they not have seen! ”

“ The scene travels, and our scene-shifters, scene-painters, mechanists, and the whole theatrical commissariat go along with it. The variety, the gaudiness, the expense is endless: to pay for the getting up such an immense apparatus, the houses must be enlarged to hold a proportionable rabble of ‘barren spectators:’ the farther off they are thrown, the stronger must be the glare, the more astonishing the effect, and the play and the players (with all relish for wit or nature) dwindle into insignificance, and are lost in the blaze of a huge chandelier or the grin of a baboon. ”

“ The oldest being hard of hearing and short of sight, would naturally, in an unconventional society, collect at the front of the audience. Looking at them all together, they are found to be exactly what one might expect—a congregation of hard-featured, bucolic faces, sun-tanned and deep-lined. ”

“ In a word, during an interruption of the representation, it is not more difficult for a spectator to imagine himself carried from place to place, and from one period of time to another, than at once, when the scene first opens, to be carried from London to Rome, or from the present time two thousand years back. ”

“ They put on their dresses and masks, and rig up something to resemble a town on the stage with hangings, and then so associate the bare scene with their life-like imitation of action that they are a marvel to the spectators—both the actors themselves of the incidents of the play, and the hangings, or rather their imaginary city. ”

“ But there the members of the society are shut off from the audience both by the physical barrier of the table and by the striking effect of their appearance in full dress, while here the fellows chiefly compose the audience, there being only a small company of "strangers" present, and these in no way to be distinguished by dress or location from the fellows themselves. ”

“ With gold-stockinged, shapely legs and ankles cunningly clocked and daintily crossed, and with bosom heaving gently from recent exercise, the girl sat in a chair on a platform some four feet above the sidewalk along which streamed the first instalments of a Saturday afternoon throng at Coney Island. ”

“ The root of the spectacle is that oldest of all social specializations, the specialization of power. The spectacle plays the specialized role of speaking in the name of all the other activities. It is hierarchical society’s ambassador to itself, delivering its official messages at a court where no one else is allowed to speak. The most modern aspect of the spectacle is thus also the most archaic. ”