Three Rings of Number One

Welcome to what, for legal reasons, we cannot refer to as the Greatest Show on Earth!

Today I saw five tigers perform ‘The Wave.’

Actually, today I saw four tigers perform ‘The Wave’ while the second one from the left just looked at the other tigers like they were idiots.

But that’s about the ratio you get when humans do ‘The Wave,” so it totally counts.


Yep today I went to the circus with my three-year-old. Which if you need to go to circus, is really the way to do it.


Adults may find a bargain circus lame at best and depressing at worst.


A three-year-old just sees magic, wonder and clowns.


It’s amazing.


One of the greatest things about circus, are those brief moments when something happens that is not ‘all part of the show.’ Something small goes wrong, and for a moment everyone thinks something horrible is going to happen to the performer. The audience holds its breath in unison and as the acrobat regains his balance, a collective oooooohhhhhh escapes the crowd.


The greatest one of these in this show came in the final act. Three elephants paraded around, sitting on stools and lifting scantily clad women. Suddenly one of them (the elephants, not the scantily clad women) began to pee. The stagehands had obviously been here before and one of them through a convenient bucket of sawdust over the urine and got ready to scoop it up.


The elephant however, didn’t stop peeing.


I know elephant are enormous animals, but it was impressive how much piss this one had.


The wee just kept coming. It was officially pouring peepee at this point. While the other elephants continued their show, the stagehands ran around in a panic looking for more sawdust to cover their growing problem with.


Guys kept coming with buckets from the emergency sawdust store they had in the back.


One of them wasn’t watching where he was going and he stepped in the puddle..


He began to slip.


We began to hold our breath.


He flailed his arms.


We moved forward in our seats.


He regained his balance.


We let out a giant oooooooohhhhhhhh.

Earlier in the show, a tight rope walker slipped and had to catch himself with his hands on the way down.


We were more relieved that this guy didn’t fall into an overturned kiddie pool’s worth of pee.


I think it’s because as normal people, we can’t imagine a situation where we could fall to our deaths from a one inch wire that we intentionally walked out onto.


And yet, we can all see a future where we fall into pee.