If I had a dime for every time I’ve fantasized about dropping out of school and joining the circus, I would probably have enough dimes to start a circus. At the very least, I would have enough dimes to employ some street performers from the French Quarter.
However, mimes and people painted silver are not typically what I envision of when I imagine the circus. When I think of the circus, I imagine the world of Kafka’s Hunger Artist, Katherine Dunn’s Aquaboy, and Tod Browning’s Feathered Hen.
I’m not sure whether or not those kinds of places are still in existence. If they are, I would be pleasantly surprised. If they are not, I blame their disappearance on the masses’ ever-increasing desire for political correctness and ever-decreasing attention spans.
Having never actually gone to a circus, I cannot say for sure how close my assumptions about these three-ring spectacles are to reality. Perhaps it is precisely because I have never been to a circus that a life of tightrope walking and lion taming seems so glamorous to me.
Unfortunately, even if I did drop out of college, I don’t know what circus would take me. After spending the last three years studying creative writing, Spanish, and women’s studies, I’m not sure what kind of skills I’d have to offer under the big top.
I could stand in the center ring and recite poetry about the oppression of women and translate my poems into broken Spanish, but I don’t think that’s what people go to circuses to see. That’s more along the lines of what people go to 1718 to see.
Perhaps I could recruit a whole team of college dropouts and start a circus of my own.
I’ll need visual arts and graphic design students to make posters and costumes and to decorate everything while theater majors don clown makeup and entertain the crowds.
The music students can play their instruments, hopefully while juggling and breathing fire. I don’t know if they teach that at the music school, but those seem like skills musicians should have.
Math and physics majors can probably calculate the perfect rope tension for tightrope walking and the exact timing needed for trapeze artistry, so they will be the acrobats.
Ex-biology majors could maybe work out some sort of animal breeding program so that the circus can have real unicorns and hippogriffs, and the pre-med kids could treat injuries from any lion taming or fire breathing gone awry.
Hopefully some mass communication students will drop out so that the circus will have a promotional team, and then we’re pretty much set.
Philosophy and English majors, not to worry, this circus will need plenty of snack vendors, ticket ushers and janitors.
There’s something for everyone at Holly’s Circus for College Dropouts!
Holly Combs can be reached at [email protected]
