Behind the Scenes of the Carnal Carnival
by Jeff Booth

The Sideshow

Section 2 of 5
Go to section 1: Carnal Carnival Introduction
 

There are many things to see on the virtual midway of the Carnal Carnival, but just west of the entrance is a tribute to the sideshow where we did our performances hundreds of times. Our virtual sideshow is called the Women of Wonder (WoW) sideshow, and features an all woman cast of strange and unusual performers, including performers such as Persephone, the Impermeable Princess of Pain, and Erica the Escapist.

The sideshow we worked for presented acts continually; from the time we opened until closing, which could be a 14-hour day or more. Kris and I were often performing as much as half of the show. It was exhausting work.

Although the show ran continuously, the first real act was the fire-eater. The first summer, the fire-eater was a guy who lived in a trailer tent behind the large red, white and blue show tent with his two wives. Carny law does not limit how many wives you can have, but a marriage only lasts a season, with an option to renew next season. It certainly makes sense as a social convention for such a vagabond lifestyle.

I was offered the chance to learn to eat fire, which was pretty exciting until I realized that you actually got burned a lot. I became completely convinced it was not for me when our fire-eater caught a gust of wind while doing the Human Volcano stunt and became the human torch.

The next summer we had a woman fire-eater. Well, barely a woman. She was quite young actually, under the legal age in many of the states that we played in, but she along with another underage girl in the show lived with the show owner and his wife in a trailer. I was a little too naïve at the time to completely understand what was going on (I was only 19 and not all that sophisticated).  Over time, it became quite clear that they were all sexually involved with each other.

The fire-eater in the Women of Wonder show is Ferrara (actually the very talented, real life fire eater Venus De Light, who is definitely of legal age).

In the WoW sideshow, Yvonne, “the Woman with the Iron Tongue”, was inspired by Hadji Ben Ali, billed as the "Man with the Iron Tongue". He would thread a hook through a hole in his tongue, hang a sledgehammer from the hook, and swing it back and forth. Nowadays you can actually find a lot of people with holes in their tongues, but for the act we used a very simple gaff that did not require any actual piercing.

I had to introduce this act, and I played it pretty campy. One of my favorite lines was that "Hadji has to be in very good shape to do this... he does forty laps every morning".

Although we had a costume and everything for Hadji, the current one seldom lasted very long. It was a simple act that you could train anyone to do. Whenever we were looking for a replacement, I wound up doing the act. One night though, three very large drunks were giving us all a pretty hard time, and I knew they were going to make doing Hadji miserable. Instead of having fun with it, I got very somber and told the crowd how Hadji had passed away just last week and that we were still all in mourning. The show owner had paid me to learn the act, but I had refused to have a hole put in my tongue. Hadji had always wanted his act to live on, so in his memory, I had had my tongue pierced just a few days ago, and would present the act as a living memorial to a man who had been one of my best friends. The drunks were quiet during the entire act, about the only time they were quiet the entire show.

Our WoW sideshow opens with one of the classic sideshow stunts, Electra, the Girl in the Electric Chair. This was also an act we presented live. As on a lot of the acts, we hired whoever we could get to do them, as the talker did most of the work while the performer had only to walk through it. This meant hiring carnies and sometimes locals of somewhat limited capacities. Consequently, this stunt had a very high turnover. It is perfectly safe as long as you stay in the chair, but inevitably, when we lit the torch from a tiny spark from her finger, she would jump startled out of the chair. This would cause a much larger spark to arc up right into her butt, she’d run off stage, and we'd never see her again. No matter how we tried to warn them, it happened time and time again. I guess we should have made it more authentic and strapped her in.

Another one of the features in the show that made its way into the WoW sideshow is the Headless Woman. The inside talker (usually Kris or I, although sometimes she was the one headless, and on rare occasions late at night, I would be) tells a story about a woman killed in a horrible automobile accident where her head was completely severed from her body, and a scientist managed to keep her body alive. The curtain would open and you would see a woman with tubes going into her neck where her head should be. She was obviously alive and could move her hands and feet. It was in reality just a classic magician's illusion

When I got to talk the headless woman, I always strayed from the script and made the story increasingly more ridiculous. One night, the curtain opened and inside was the headless girl holding a headless teddy bear. I had given it to her after finding it mangled on the show grounds.

On another night, I had been told that we were doing the last show and I was done, but that I should change clothes and stand in the back of the show during the headless woman presentation. Ski, our main inside talker at the time, was talking that night.

When I came into the tent, there was a pretty good sized crowd for the last showing. Ski kept on talking, opened the curtain, and heard a gasp from the audience. He looked in the cabinet and then did a great double-take, as the headless woman was completely nude. He quickly closed the curtain, knowing that this was a very conservative area and something like this could get the show shut down and him possibly arrested. The audience broke into a roar of laughter at his obvious discomfort. He did not realize that the show had been emptied of locals and the crowd was all carnies there to help play this trick on him.

Kris was also the Helium Girl, who breathed helium and floated in the air. It was just a standard levitation trick, with a lot of window dressing. During one show a power surge blew out the lifting mechanism and she was stuck floating high in the air about 8 feet above the crowd. The stage had no curtains, so we got a sheet and covered her up and left her there. Later, when the audience moved to a different stage, we snuck her off the back, leaving the sheet floating in air, apparently still covering the Helium Girl. The ticket taker reported to us that two kids came out afterwards to talk to their friends, and they told them "Don't go into that show. It’s horrible. They had this girl breathe this stuff and she floated, then she just died up there. They just covered her with a sheet and left her!"

We did not have a sword swallower in the show, but we did get to meet a sword swallower, and learned that he perfected the art of controlling his gag reflex by practicing on large male appendages. We figured that would be a definite skill for our WoW sword swallower, Satari, to demonstrate in an intriguing set of pictures.

The real sideshow also had a sharpshooter, but unlike our keen eyed Cassidy in the WoW sideshow, his job required very little skill. At this point it will probably come as no surprise that this act was also rigged, making it easy for him to snuff out a candle with his rifle.

When we played the Summerfest in Milwaukee, pretty much everyone in the crowd was intoxicated, and they had a terrible habit of going behind our tent to pee, which made it smell awful back there. After finishing his act, our sharpshooter saw a guy behind the tent about to unzip himself. He walked up behind the guy, put the tip of the rifle to the guy’s head, and suggested in the typical carny profanity laced way that he find somewhere else to pee. He did: in his pants.

The Wow Sideshow has two dings, Chloe (an hermaphrodite who shows a little something extra) and the Museum Gallery of Strange and Unusual Women (a collection of rare antique photos of sideshow freaks and other unique performers- most in the nude or in minimal attire). A ding is anything for which you charge people extra money after they have already paid to come in. Of course, in our fantasy sideshow, it doesn’t actually cost you any money, but in our real sideshow, dings raked in a lot of extra money for the show.

Sex was used to entice, but of course never paid off for the people giving their extra quarter. One of the dings featured a long box and a spiel about this young lady who's mother had done this act and perished in it at the Chicago World's Fair, and now the young woman depended upon contributions from the audience to make her living.

Of course, how this girl could be so young if her mother perished many years ago went without explanation. It mainly had to do with the fact that the script for this act was written over 40 years ago and had never been updated.

She would lay down in the box and a number of blades would be thrust through, with the "explanation" that her bones were almost like rubber and that she had learned to twist and turn around the blades. For a “silver” donation, you could come up on the platform to look down into the openings in the top of the box. It was a standard magician's trick, but it did look strange looking down into the box, as she appeared twisted around the blades in an odd way.

Almost everyone in the tent would pay the extra quarter, and some would even contribute more. Did I mention that the talker made a point of the fact that the young lady had to remove her costume to perform this act, and that she handed it up to him through the top of the box? Of course, when you saw her she was just wearing a swimsuit, but who is going to complain that they did not get to actually see the girl naked? Didn't happen, and the quarters rolled in.

There is a night when the show is open just to the carnival folk as part of an annual carny fundraiser for the Showmen’s Association. That night the girl did actually get naked. Of course, that was the night I volunteered to baby-sit for someone else in the show, little knowing what I would miss. I think the price was a quite a bit more than a quarter that night.

The other ding was in a separate closed off section of the tent. Inside was what was billed as a true hermaphrodite, being displayed as an educational exhibit. Not only that, she was also a giant. It was inferred that Chloe would be viewed without a stitch on. Again, most of the people paid their quarter. Inside they saw a mummified giant hermaphrodite in a upright glass enclosed coffin, and the talker gave a spiel about how she was found and other background information about her.

The speech was as authentic as Chloe, who was finely constructed out of authentic fiberglass. She came from a manufacturer in the fine tradition of the two-headed babies that have appeared in sideshows across the nation. These babies, made of rubber and known as bouncers, were often confiscated by outraged townspeople and given a proper Christian burial. There are rubber babies buried across the country.

Educated people in particular took the Chloe exhibit seriously, and would ask all sorts of questions. The talker was good about giving complete bullshit answers, and if he ever got caught, he could just explain that he was not a scientist and defer to the questioners' knowledge. I never heard of a single instance where someone accused it of being a fake. They, of course, did get to see a completely nude woman, albeit a very “mummified” one, but not exactly what they expected. No one ever complained.

By the way, one of the features of the Carnal Carnival is that you only have so much virtual money to start with, and when you run out, you have to leave. This is inspired by the fact that the purpose of a real carnival is to extract as much money from you as possible, and not always in the most legitimate of ways.

We recreate an interesting aspect of that each time you enter the sideshow. You will want to see the show several times, as each time you leave, you are given the opportunity to follow the last act you saw back behind the tent to view some of their post performance carnal cavortings in the form of a series of erotic photos.  (Of course, going behind the tent of a real world sideshow and into the private territory of carnies can get you in serious trouble). The show is billed as only costing $5.00, but sometimes it actually costs you more than that from your virtual stash of cash.

This is because each time you pay for it, there is a good chance that the clever ticket taker has managed to short change you. This happened in our real carnival, and the ticket taker kicked back money to the show owner for the privilege of having that job. He made a $100 a day short changing, and on a busy day he could make much more.
 

Next section: The Midway