A snort.

That’s really what it was.

A big, loud, wet, inward snort, and suddenly the end of that slippery white condom she had been showcasing for the past 20 minutes shot up into her nasal passage like a lubricious booger from hell. Reaching deep into her mouth with her ‘pincher’ fingers, she dragged it from the pit of her throat to where we all could see it, and using her other hand to grasp the end that was still sticking out of her nose, she flossed her tonsils, peering at us sideways, as an immensely satisfied smile spread across her widely parted lips.

The audience roared with laughter. Disgust. Incredulity.

Awe.

It wasn’t what I expected.

But what should I have expected upon hearing that a circus was coming to JSC? A bear riding a unicycle? Clowns running in circles? Pies in faces? Dogs in tutus?
What I got instead was a night full of glass-walking, fire-eating, sword-swallowing goodness, all delivered with a heavy dose of humor, much of which revolved around alcohol, smoking, and most of all, sex.

“Now, for those of you who know me, you know that when it comes to deep-throating, I’m a professional,” Mr. Pennygaff said matter-of-factly from the center of the Dibden stage, poker-faced through the surprised laughter of the audience, feet together and chin up in a very business-like manner. His voice was high and nasal, emphasizing every fourth or fifth syllable with a rise of pitch as if in a constant state of lecture. Sounding something like Bugs Bunny, if Bugs Bunny were a used-car salesman, and clad in an improbably sleazy red and black pinstriped suit that might have belonged to a manic pimp or a modern-day sideshow barker, he bantered easily with the by-now rapt audience.

Waiting for that perfect moment to slap the beguiled crowd with a punchline, he leaned forward slowly, as if to tell a secret. “For those of you who don’t know me” he said with a raise of his eyebrows, “I’ll talk to you in the bathroom right after the show.”

Flashing a mischievous smile, he tilted his head back to greet the ceiling and slid a cold, shiny, 24-inch blade of steel “all the way down” his throat, “past the heart, the liver, the lungs, the kidneys a-tickling, to the bottom” of his stomach. It was very much like the way a long-necked swamp-dwelling bird will spear a fish with its beak before jerking its head back and slipping it smoothly down the length of its gullet. The motion was almost effortless.

But Mr. Pennygaff does more than that. In addition to the hazardous act of sword-swallowing, he’s also proficient at fire-breathing and fire-eating, juggling, rope-spinning, plate-spinning, and top-spinning—even when the top is nine pounds, made of wood, and spun on the palm of his hand. He can twirl pistols, make balloon animals, and swindle the crowd out of its money, perhaps not simultaneously, but in this circus, it seems that anything is possible.

Is it any coincidence that gaff is slang term for cheat?

In a traveling circus, is it any coincidence that bindlestiff is a synonym for hobo?

Keith Nelson, cofounder of the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, is responsible for such personas as Mr. Pennygaff and Kinko the Clown, a penniless hobo with a five-o’clock shadow, both tragic and clever in his silence, and capable of scoring a joint, a beer, a butt for now, a butt for later and a light to smoke it with without even going so far as to ask. After all, gesturing does the job so well, and no one can resist a sad clown.

The other half of the dynamic duo, cofounder Stephanie Monseu, the aggressive, seductive, though not-so-subtle Mistress of Ceremonies, is a bizarre jill of all trades. Known in-costume as Philomena Bindlestiff, Monseu entices as well as entertains with a variety of skills such as fire-eating, juggling, trapeze artistry, stilt-walking, rope-spinning, plate-spinning, dancing, singing, clowning, and pounding objects into her cranial cavity. She holds the world record for long-distance broken glass-walking, having strolled a 51-foot carpet of broken glass bottles. Perhaps most memorable. however, is her target bull-whipping.

Who knew that it could be an art?

I’ve never seen so many men transfixed by a woman who was fully clothed. The entire audience was mesmerized as she moved boldly across the stage with broad, sweeping steps, the red lights overhead catching in her synthetic black knee-high lace-up boots and deepening the multiple tattoos that snaked across her ropey, muscular arms. The click of her heels on the wooden stage floor was nothing to the harsh cracks that split the dusty air. She stopped mid-snap, the epitome of control, to allow the mean edges of those whips to wrap harmlessly like vines around the slender frame of her body.

She stood like that for a moment, lashes hanging at her thighs, clad in belled, knee-length pants and a tight, black bustier, and asked for a volunteer from the audience. At least eight hands shot up. She dropped her whips and sauntered down the stage steps and circled the room, eyes narrowed predatorily, searching the waiting faces for intimidation, seeking an involuntary volunteer.

She spotted Kevin Paquet from across the room, not making eye contact, and pointed to him with the finality of a targeted homing missile.

“You!” she yelled decisively and strode across the room in a frenzy of clicks, donning a merciless grin. The ferocity of it was lovely. There was no escape.

The audience erupted into a frenzy of whooping and applause.

 

Seizing him by the hand, she half-escorted half-dragged him out of his seat, her confidence and his anxiety made all the more apparent by the glaring white spotlight that trailed them back to the Dibden stage.

She encouraged him to lead her in a tango, playing with him like a cat batting a mouse between its paws, before positioning him on a tape-marked T on the floor. She bent to pick up her whips and turned to the illuminated vase of long stemmed roses that had been waiting, dormant, on the left side of the stage.

“When she put the rose in my teeth, I came back down to earth and was a little tentative,” Paquet said later. “Once the out-of-body feeling ended, and it was over pretty quickly, I was just in shock.”

He stood onstage, stiff and bent slightly at the waist, holding the stem-end of a red rose between his teeth. Philomena strode fluidly away from him and turned. They were about 10 feet away from each other. The audience held its breath. Silence. A wave of her arm. A blurred flash of cord.

CRACK!

The head of rose fell to the stage floor.
Paquet looked faint.

Applause.

There’s something about the circus that grabs us. It’s universal.

Maybe it’s the smell of hotdogs and elephant dung in the summer heat and the way the air gets thick with dust kicked up by thousands of scuffing sneakers, the roars of lions, the precarious balancing of trapeze artists, the flips of Russian gymnasts, the slapdash antics of clowns and the bellowing voice of the ringmaster with his coattails and top hat.

Maybe it’s the risk.

“I think the real reason why you’re all sitting here is because of the element of danger,” Philomena Bindlestiff said at one point during the show. “Something in the fire-eater’s part could go terribly wrong. If it was one of those big shows with lions and tigers, at any given moment the jaws of that wild cat could snap shut, crushing the windpipe of its beloved trainer. It’s real and it’s dangerous. It’s exciting!”

But on Nov. 9, 2007, although there were no lions or tigers, no crippling injuries or scandalous deaths, there were laughs, and risks, and bold statements.

I watched a hobo-clown smoke a cigarette and down a bottle of beer. I saw him make a balloon-penis instead of a balloon-poodle and hand it to a front-row member of the audience. I witnessed a dominatrix ring-mistress eat fire and crush a beer bottle with a hammer, spread it across a pile of glass, and jump on it. I observed over a dozen people buy a four-piece box of Milk Duds for a dollar each.

I listened in shock as Mr. Pennygaff announced onstage to dozens of people that “We are currently living in a country that will  spend $40 million on the inauguration of a shit-head no one elected,” before he snipped a dollar bill in half with a pair of shears to wild applause.

I felt both liberated and insulted right then, and in that moment I realized something.

As I sat front row and center, best seat in the house, struggling to balance my notebook and my voice-recorder, watching half the show through the lens of a camera, and close enough to see the sweat break on his skin, I realized that this was not any circus I had seen before.

It was the circus I had been waiting for.

The sound of applause was both encompassing and deafening. I clapped my hands and joined in, my voice hoarse from yelling, and waited to see what came next.