Speaker 1: The show was on ephemeralist production of I Heart three
Speaker 1: D Audio for full exposure listen with that phones. The
Speaker 1: Circus of today would generally be considered a lighthearted place, fun, polite,
Speaker 1: family oriented. I've always wanted to go to the Circus,
Speaker 1: but historically there was another aspect to this spectacle, a
Speaker 1: more secretive and sometimes darker story. Through the back Kurt,
Speaker 1: past the posters, and Carnival Barker. For a few extra cents,
Speaker 1: you could gain admittance to his space. That questioned the
Speaker 1: very nature of reality. The side Show, the side Show
Speaker 1: as we know it as this brick and mortar golden
Speaker 1: era of entertainment, certainly had a heyday and certainly had
Speaker 1: a decline, but it didn't just appear in a vacuum
Speaker 1: an actuality. The side Show itself is an institution that
Speaker 1: goes back hundreds of years and is continuously evolving and
Speaker 1: shape shifting. I'm Robin Minuter and I am a senior
Speaker 1: producer over at Grim and Mild, and I'm Taylor Haggerdorn,
Speaker 1: and I am an associate producer at Grimm and Mild.
Speaker 1: Robin and Taylor are the minds behind Sideshow. Season one
Speaker 1: of the podcast Grim and Mild Presents, hosted by Aaron Monkey,
Speaker 1: which just wrapped it's thirteen episode run. I've always thought
Speaker 1: of the side show as a foil for American anxiety,
Speaker 1: this feeling of getting so close to the subversive, like
Speaker 1: close enough to be able to touch it, to be
Speaker 1: titillated by it, but also to be able to walk
Speaker 1: away at the end of the day, ricked from the
Speaker 1: of the world. One time I get part of a
Speaker 1: dollar show. If you ruf the dime, this impulse to view,
Speaker 1: and also if you have power to put on display
Speaker 1: and create narratives around otherness, around curiosity, around oddity. Obviously
Speaker 1: that precedes the sideshow. It just perfected and codified something
Speaker 1: that we had always been interested in. While the side
Speaker 1: show has a golden era, there are precedents throughout recorded history.
Speaker 1: If we want to think about the history of touring acts,
Speaker 1: there are certain things you can trace back to ancient Greece,
Speaker 1: ancient Rome, the history of menagerie's collected animals for pleasure
Speaker 1: and then for public display and profit. Also think about
Speaker 1: folks who would be employed by medieval courts, for example,
Speaker 1: folks with Dwarfism, Siamese twins, people who would act as
Speaker 1: an oddity for entertainment, and when you have courts who
Speaker 1: are traveling the world and trying to secure more land
Speaker 1: and resources for their entries in their kingdoms, part of
Speaker 1: what they are acquiring a people and things that they
Speaker 1: deem odd This traveling otherness that we get from the
Speaker 1: courts is a really lengthy precursor but also like a
Speaker 1: direct ancestor to the side show that we get. But
Speaker 1: the sideshow proper truly began with a single figure, not
Speaker 1: just any service, but the most spectacular of old time.
Speaker 1: When we think about the inception of the American side
Speaker 1: show in the collective American imagination, we think of P. T. Barnum,
Speaker 1: and this guy was a match in so many ways.
Speaker 1: You know, is also a very complicated character that goes
Speaker 1: without saying that they didn't wonderful affection sold it my
Speaker 1: voice like my great souls. I have a great as
Speaker 1: I believe happy. He was born in eighteen ten in Bethel, Connecticut,
Speaker 1: which at the time was a very agrarian community. Not
Speaker 1: only was he very creative, but he also used that
Speaker 1: creative energy and became very very entrepreneurial. Like he had
Speaker 1: some grocers he was trying to sell himself for public office.
Speaker 1: He was always down with the hustle. The other thing
Speaker 1: that made him very singular was that he had this
Speaker 1: acute savvy about human psychology. He was always one step
Speaker 1: ahead of the desires of those around him. In that way,
Speaker 1: that made him a very good businessman. He could serve
Speaker 1: up what people wanted, and he was bringing them what
Speaker 1: they wanted before they necessarily understood that's what they were
Speaker 1: looking for. Around eighteen sixty five, in the throes of
Speaker 1: the Civil War, the country was radically shifting. We were
Speaker 1: learning all about Darwin's origin of species. New science was
Speaker 1: being invented and discovered. The world was expanding and really
Speaker 1: strange in new ways. And P. T. Barnum bless his heart,
Speaker 1: his second grade American Museum in New York City burns down,
Speaker 1: and in his mid to late sixties he decided to
Speaker 1: take the different exhibits in his museum, including the human Acts,
Speaker 1: and bring them to communities across the country. They snaked
Speaker 1: across the continent in fifty private box cars. Four hundred
Speaker 1: employees brought up the Big Top for the greatest show
Speaker 1: on Earth. The Sides Show brought with it an atmosphere
Speaker 1: all its own right now, let's go to the side show.
Speaker 1: When he walked into a sideshow space, the thing you're
Speaker 1: going to see are these huge posters six nine twelve
Speaker 1: ft tall, brightly colored paintings on their You might see
Speaker 1: a half man, half snake, an ape woman, the world's
Speaker 1: tallest man, or the world's fattest lady, or the world's
Speaker 1: shortest boy that was also the world's strongest man, the
Speaker 1: pin cushion man, the world's tallest man, and the smallest couple.
Speaker 1: And then, of course you have the barker right up, lady,
Speaker 1: somebody who is welcoming you into this world to suspend
Speaker 1: your disbelief and question really what you're seeing? The sideshow
Speaker 1: traffics in hyperbole, and this was all one big marketing engine.
Speaker 1: Three are kicking in Mare were a man. Though every
Speaker 1: side show was unique, they were each essentially organized in
Speaker 1: the same way. Sideshow acts are historically categorized into three
Speaker 1: different boxes. Who have the born ax, got the made ax,
Speaker 1: got the working ax? And those categories exist historically along
Speaker 1: a hierarchy, with the born ax being sort of sides
Speaker 1: your royalty, kind of at the top of the pecking order.
Speaker 1: Tell me, have you done much circus work in your life.
Speaker 1: I was on the stage for most of my life.
Speaker 1: I was a headliner. Below that you have the made ax,
Speaker 1: for example, tattooed ladies. You could walk in off the
Speaker 1: street and sit for many a tattoo session and then
Speaker 1: decided to join the side show. Then you have below
Speaker 1: that the largest contingency of acts that currently exists in
Speaker 1: this moment, the working acts, astounding acts of body manipulation
Speaker 1: and pain endurance. These are the people who are swallowing
Speaker 1: sores and breathing fire and laying on beds of nails
Speaker 1: going to any side show. These are the three that
Speaker 1: you would expect to see in some configuration. Living as
Speaker 1: a traveling side show performer could have its perks. It
Speaker 1: could also be perilous. Some folks really benefited from this
Speaker 1: world as a result of the skin suit that they
Speaker 1: were born in, Meaning if you were an affluent white person,
Speaker 1: for example, like Lavinia Warren, even though you were living
Speaker 1: with dwarf is um, you could opt into this institution
Speaker 1: and know that you're probably going to do okay. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, in the case of Sarki Bartman Julia Pastrana,
Speaker 1: these women who were both indigenous looked different than the
Speaker 1: colonizer culture that intercepted them. Their existence in the side
Speaker 1: show wasn't so good. In order to really get a
Speaker 1: grasp on be multifaceted institution that the Side Show was,
Speaker 1: we need to understand every person's particular experience and the
Speaker 1: intersections of their lived experience, holding it up like a
Speaker 1: prism and turning it from all of its sides. The
Speaker 1: Sideshow Podcast goes deep into the back stories of characters
Speaker 1: whose experiences run the gamma. Take, for instance, the case
Speaker 1: of Frank Lentini. Frank Lentini is born in the eighteen
Speaker 1: nineties in Italy and had three legs. At this time
Speaker 1: where it's really inhospitable to be any kind of different,
Speaker 1: particularly with a very visible physical difference. He's called a
Speaker 1: monster by the person who delivered him, by his neighbors.
Speaker 1: It was such a harsh existence early on in life,
Speaker 1: and there was really no where that he was accepted.
Speaker 1: There was no place for him to be other than
Speaker 1: locked away in an institution, and he didn't want them.
Speaker 1: Lentini the three legged wonder. And so when Frank finds
Speaker 1: community in the Side Show, he finds I can be
Speaker 1: autonomous here. He is traveling throughout the US with his
Speaker 1: wife who's found through sideshow. He gets to have a family,
Speaker 1: and he gets to play sports with his friends that
Speaker 1: he gets to have drinking buddies. And he even has
Speaker 1: this one acquaintance who had one leg, and so when
Speaker 1: they would buy like the second pair of shoes, he
Speaker 1: was a shoe buddy right, Like they had the same
Speaker 1: shoeice eyes, and so Frank was like, hey, man, I
Speaker 1: got these nice new sandals. Here's the left one for you.
Speaker 1: That kind of ability to exist as yourself without having
Speaker 1: to hide at every turn where you are dehumanized by
Speaker 1: medical professionals and scientists and teachers and midwives and everyone
Speaker 1: else around you. To be in a place where you
Speaker 1: are working and you are getting paid and you are
Speaker 1: also treated as a human doesn't make the side show
Speaker 1: a perfect but that's pretty cool stuff. Frank is just
Speaker 1: one example of many, but not all were as autonomous
Speaker 1: and successful as Frank was. A to be. On the
Speaker 1: other side of the spectrum, you have someone like Julia Pastrana,
Speaker 1: who was an accomplished multi lingual singer, dancer, and performer
Speaker 1: born with her statism. Julia Pastrana was Indigenous woman born
Speaker 1: in Sinaloa, Mexico, covered with dark hair and immediately ostracized
Speaker 1: by her community. There are lots of ingrained fears about
Speaker 1: perhaps why she came to be and also what she
Speaker 1: might become. Then essentially she was trafficked to the United
Speaker 1: States for the side show, and that is where the
Speaker 1: sequence of managers begins and it never ends for her.
Speaker 1: The stories that we're going around promoting her were saying that, oh,
Speaker 1: there were these hunters who were lost, and they came
Speaker 1: across this cave, and there's this strange child coming from
Speaker 1: parentage of a woman and a bear. The big thing
Speaker 1: at that moment, again, the emergence of Darwin's Origin of
Speaker 1: SPECIs a lot of these like high falutinate ideas about
Speaker 1: evolution and race and hierarchy. This was Charles Darwin's idea
Speaker 1: that the living world evolved from lower forms of life.
Speaker 1: But how that manifests for lay people who aren't going
Speaker 1: to these stuffy scientific conferences debating the finer points of
Speaker 1: the evolutionary theory. As they're going up, you know, on
Speaker 1: a Saturday afternoon, they're going to see the barker out
Speaker 1: there saying, come on, come on, calm, see the missing link,
Speaker 1: promoting Julia as the missing link between our primate ancestors
Speaker 1: and now our very evolved modern selves. It's not just saying,
Speaker 1: come and look at this woman with a beard. They
Speaker 1: sort of take the science of the time and fabricate
Speaker 1: this in between space that's enticing to people who want
Speaker 1: to think they are further removed from primates, or further
Speaker 1: removed from the people who they view as iverages. Early
Speaker 1: eighteen sixties, her manager ens up marrying her when their
Speaker 1: child is born. In the throes of childbirth, mother and
Speaker 1: child both passed and he had Julia and their baby.
Speaker 1: Taxidermyte probably the longest career of any sideshow person, because
Speaker 1: she was only repatriated a few years ago. All the
Speaker 1: while she's still being exploited. She has toured through the
Speaker 1: world for over a hundred years. I think that's a
Speaker 1: very extreme example of unique genetic characteristics destined for the sideshow.
Speaker 1: For performers like Julia Pastrana, there just appears to be
Speaker 1: no choice at all. One episode of Grim and Mild
Speaker 1: Presents typifies this gulf between experiences by looking at three
Speaker 1: different sets of conjoined twins changing named Bunker were brought
Speaker 1: over from Siam now known as Thailand, again as an
Speaker 1: oddity to tour across the America, but they eventually were
Speaker 1: able to more or less enter into high society. They
Speaker 1: both got married, they had something like nineteen children between
Speaker 1: the two of them. They ended up getting separate houses
Speaker 1: right next door to each other, so they could like
Speaker 1: split time between the two families. They lived in North
Speaker 1: Carolina and by all accounts, became members of the Southern aristocracy,
Speaker 1: so they were able to subvert this idea that they
Speaker 1: were forever going to be an oddity. In the case
Speaker 1: of Millie Christine, she was born into slavery and was
Speaker 1: sold when she was eleven months old. That was when
Speaker 1: her side show career began. She was kidnapped, kidnapped a
Speaker 1: second time. She came home to North Carolina, where it
Speaker 1: is debated whether she was kept in servitude or if
Speaker 1: she chose to stay there. Millie Christine did indeed write
Speaker 1: her own biography that was sold at her show. But
Speaker 1: when your manager is also maybe your captor, the story
Speaker 1: is told very differently. But Millie Christine eventually gets her
Speaker 1: freedom and buys land and brings her mother and father
Speaker 1: and siblings home. We then have Daisy and Violet Hilton,
Speaker 1: who appeared in the movie Freaks. Well Well, Well come
Speaker 1: a big night. Yes, the sister is getting married, and
Speaker 1: I'm real too dead anything. In the nineteen fifties sixties,
Speaker 1: the side show had so fallen out of favor. Their
Speaker 1: act was no longer learning any money, and their manager
Speaker 1: abandoned them without a job, without a way out, and
Speaker 1: without any dollar bills. And they ended up getting a
Speaker 1: job at a grocery store, and they worked there for
Speaker 1: a number of years. But when they stopped showing up
Speaker 1: to work, it took a few days to figure out
Speaker 1: what had happened and where they had gone, and come
Speaker 1: to find out they had passed away together but alone.
Speaker 1: That's to say, just because your body in this world
Speaker 1: may have looked similar to other folks or other acts,
Speaker 1: does not mean that anyone's experience was going to be
Speaker 1: at all similar to somebody else's. It had so much
Speaker 1: to do with race and with class, with circumstance. One
Speaker 1: unique artifact that remains from this side show era is
Speaker 1: the ninety two film Freaks, which features a litany of
Speaker 1: real life side show performers. The better you will seat
Speaker 1: him on the inside, maybe reading mons property and was
Speaker 1: the passion project of director Todd Browning, most famous for
Speaker 1: his ninety one version of Dracula. Aren't you Drinking? I
Speaker 1: Never drink? Why? When he was sixteen he had literally
Speaker 1: run away to join the circus, and so I think
Speaker 1: he had a deep affection and deep affinity for the
Speaker 1: people that he met there. This seemed like great father
Speaker 1: for a film to be made. It was, from what
Speaker 1: I understand, the first time that these characters who had
Speaker 1: long toured in the sideshow really jumped mediums and went
Speaker 1: from the stage to the silver screen, sort of end
Speaker 1: mass Oh, I'm so I am as I am in
Speaker 1: my sil Oh what an amazing setting. And of course
Speaker 1: then he mixed in the element of love and murder
Speaker 1: and intrigue. You can't get away with it, I'll tell
Speaker 1: the copper. Sounds like a blockbuster to me, but freaks.
Speaker 1: When it was made, it was a total flop. People
Speaker 1: hated it. At first. I could not believe my own
Speaker 1: lives a lot of horrible twists, thinking what were you
Speaker 1: drinking that? Right? The reaction was so strong for the
Speaker 1: horrors that he dared to put on screen that they
Speaker 1: had to recut it, and so in that recutting, not
Speaker 1: only do we lose his vision, we also lose a
Speaker 1: lot of the autonomy of the actors and their characters
Speaker 1: that they brought to life in the film. Try doing anything,
Speaker 1: don't want to bust. You're right, she don't know what,
Speaker 1: but she'll find out where in the first cut they
Speaker 1: might have come across as just a person who happens
Speaker 1: to been born with dwarf is um, you're only something.
Speaker 1: They still exist as characters with their own agency, and
Speaker 1: it's part of the setting them left. Yes, wine, don't
Speaker 1: help me. But in the recutting, they just become archetypes.
Speaker 1: Oh let's see what pretty dread? Oh how beautiful you look?
Speaker 1: To nine like? Show me Freaks as I want them
Speaker 1: to remain. Come on, come on, the bigger ladies, babies.
Speaker 1: The original cut of Freaks no longer exist, but there
Speaker 1: was a resurgence in the nineties and enough change within
Speaker 1: those intervening years that when people found it again, they
Speaker 1: realized that this was a really iconic piece of cinema history.
Speaker 1: Has founding Living month property a time, and in it
Speaker 1: was selected by the National Film Registry as one of
Speaker 1: the most influential films of all time. He got that
Speaker 1: way will never be known. So even before Dracula made
Speaker 1: that registry, this movie did yes freak. In the mid
Speaker 1: twentieth century, the side show as we knew it suffered
Speaker 1: a decline. The side show does not exist like it
Speaker 1: once did, and there are a few reasons that it declined.
Speaker 1: One was entertainment innovation. First we had radios and then
Speaker 1: we had television, and this all was happening while the
Speaker 1: Golden Age of Hollywood was taking off. From what I understand,
Speaker 1: the film industry was one of the only industries that
Speaker 1: wasn't greatly impacted by the Great Depression, so folks were
Speaker 1: able to still go into be entertained if they had
Speaker 1: a few extra sents on them. Post War era, the
Speaker 1: American highway system totally blew up. More and more people
Speaker 1: got their own automobiles, and so people were going further
Speaker 1: afield than they ever had been before. A covered wagon
Speaker 1: on a modern boulevard is out of place old fashioned
Speaker 1: transportation on a modern highway. They had some more leisure
Speaker 1: time and they were able to go into seek out
Speaker 1: other kinds of entertainment. And then around the second wave
Speaker 1: of adminism, there was more and more conversation around bodies
Speaker 1: and other own bodies and disabilities, and for the first
Speaker 1: time ever, with the passing of the a d A
Speaker 1: folks of disabilities, for the first time, we're guaranteed work.
Speaker 1: The sideshow have for a long time been one of
Speaker 1: the only options, and now there were more options for
Speaker 1: people to choose from. And so as we went along
Speaker 1: in the years, the sideshow just became less relevant. With
Speaker 1: the changing geography, you also have changing social mores, and
Speaker 1: audiences are kind of becoming a little self aware and
Speaker 1: self conscious about the entertainment that they're ingesting. I think
Speaker 1: it does become harder for audiences to justify being entertained
Speaker 1: in these ways, or at least being publicly witnessed to
Speaker 1: be entertained by things presented in the side show. And
Speaker 1: maybe we still indulge in it and hold onto some
Speaker 1: of those biases pretty strongly, but we can more do
Speaker 1: it in the safety of our home and we're not
Speaker 1: going out with the entire town. Everybody and their brother
Speaker 1: doesn't know what we're watching on TV or on our phones.
Speaker 1: We can't maybe be judged for that. But there is
Speaker 1: a descendant of the sideshow extant today. The sideshow is
Speaker 1: still here, but it looks a little bit different than
Speaker 1: it once did. I guess it didn't realize. The sideshows
Speaker 1: are still weary assistance. They're about two or three strong.
Speaker 1: There is a sideshow still at Coney Islands Island, the
Speaker 1: world's greatest fun probing its long, all peppered with people,
Speaker 1: the place where merriment is king, and everybody in this
Speaker 1: room has the ability to sign up and to go
Speaker 1: to sideshow school to become sideshow performers. Today, for the
Speaker 1: most part, it is a collection of made acts or
Speaker 1: working acts, fire eaters and sword swallowers and nail bed
Speaker 1: liars doing some pretty spooky and maybe death defying things.
Speaker 1: And as it fades, there is still linger nostalgia for
Speaker 1: that brick and mortar experience. Nothing that we watch on
Speaker 1: our phones or computers is going to replicate sitting in
Speaker 1: the audience, that smell of gas and fire and as
Speaker 1: someone's walking over glass, seeing the sweat beat on their forehead.
Speaker 1: Nothing will take that away. But I think our curiosity
Speaker 1: and our voyeurism we're carrying forward, whether it's a smattering
Speaker 1: of things now, I don't think we've left that behind.
Speaker 1: Even if these traveling institutions no longer hit the rails anymore,
Speaker 1: Everything by the Super m This episode of Ephemeral was
Speaker 1: written assembled by Alex Williams, with producers Max Williams and
Speaker 1: Trevor Young and additional editing from Jesse Funk. Here more
Speaker 1: from Robin Miniter, Taylor Haggard Dorn and the rest of
Speaker 1: the team over at Grimm and Mild dot com, and
Speaker 1: you can find Grim and Mild Presents, Side Show and
Speaker 1: more podcasts from i Heeart Radio on the i Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to your favorite shows.