The little tent pitched on the lawn at Encanto Park is quickly filling up with noisy children who have dragged their parents to yet another circus. It's getting crowded and hot, but the kids seem only to notice that the Center Ring is so close they can almost touch it. The predictable canned circus music is blaring from the back of a truck poking into the tent. Inside the ring, a motherly-looking woman in denim coveralls and remarkably heavy make-up is giving pony rides for a buck apiece. Suddenly, she and ponies disappear. Inexplicably, the orchestra swings into a bluesy version of "Kansas City." The Ringmaster bounds in, dressed in a red cutaway embroidered with red-sequin stars. He booms a welcome for "Miss Heidi Wendany and her Hollywood Doggy Revuuuuue!"
Miss Heidi--my God, the pony woman--prances into the ring and no matter how many circuses you've been dragged to, you're not quite ready for this. Her Rubenesque form is now encased in a startling, shiny red stretch jumpsuit. She's wearing see-through plastic spike heels. The lights bounce off her matching rhinestone choker and ankle bracelet. Her Hollywood Doggies burst into the ring and it takes but a moment to recognize they're a half-dozen mutts she's rescued from the dog pound.
But today they're having their fifteen minutes of fame as Miss Heidi snappily presents each hound executing improbable canine stunts. This one rolls a barrel with his front paws; that one climbs a ladder using all fours; the smallest balances between two ladders. Her panting devotees run dizzily between props garnished with gaily colored feathers. All the while Miss Heidi vamps like the star of an Andy Warhol movie.
Finally she retakes center stage and opens her arms triumphantly as the last pooch completes its trick more or less successfully and rejoins its distracted companions in more or less a straight line. The audience roars back in delight.
Those old enough to recognize high camp are helpless with laughter. But the considerable number of children who dominate this audience sees it for exactly what it is--good old-fashioned entertainment. For them it matters not that the "orchestra" is a pair of retired nightclub musicians enjoying a second childhood or that the props are decorated with common household feather dusters.
It is opening week of the 1990 tour of the combined Culpepper & Merriweather Circus, Arizona's very own real live (not to mention "Magnificent, Moral and Stupendous") circus, ladeez and gentlemen.
RINGMASTER Robert "Red" Johnson grew up loving old-fashioned tent circuses long before life swept him into the direct path of one. And when the opportunity finally came to start his own six years ago, he vowed to create a circus connected to its sawdust-and-canvas roots--something he says the huge, Las Vegas-influenced shows lost the moment they moved indoors.
So if the first few shows of this year's tour seemed just a leetle loose, the stagehands so clumsy they seemed to be wearing shoes one size too big, no matter. The tour sailed majestically forward, buoyed by the enthusiasm of fans who are young enough to understand what's important here: Plenty of animal acts, stars who are friendly to persons shorter than themselves, and the freedom to scoot forward on their bellies until their noses nearly touch the ring--these are the true measures of circus greatness.
And judging from the reception among young fans, this year seems destined to vindicate Robert Johnson's faith. "Mom, can we go again?" "I want to meet Miss Heidi and her dogs." "Geez, the best part was . . . "
As for adults, welllll, the Culpepper & Merriweather Circus isn't P.T. Barnum's idea of the Greatest Show on Earth. But it could well be the funniest. Only part of its comic appeal is intentional and you're never sure if they know the difference. Did they really not notice that the blue-velvet noose used by the aerialist would be perversely humorous to anyone who's seen the twisted cult movie Blue Velvet? Was it just thriftiness that prompted them to try disguising a collapsible laundry hamper, embellished with metallic letters, as a stage prop? But the most delicious moments come when fate's devilish hand tugs a feather loose here or a string there to confound the best-laid plans. Whether by design or accident, the undercurrent throughout the show is hilarious camp. It's almost as if the crew of a tramp steamer woke up one morning and decided to run away and join the circus or, failing that, had started its own. And then hired Warhol with his peculiar perspective on American culture to be artistic director.
The Culpepper & Merriweather Circus, in short, is the perfect prescription for a city stewing in recessionary gloom.
THE TOUR LAUNCHED in late February from its winter quarters in Buckeye--there is no kinder way to put this--had its share of rough spots.
To begin with, Miss Heidi had just escaped the Circus Tour From Hell: an odyssey among twelve microscopic dots in the South Pacific as guest star of a circus based on Guam. It was supposed to be a short, off-season gig that would bring in a little extra money but quickly took on the characteristics of a Joseph Conrad novel.
"The heat and humidity were incredible," she says. "The houses, everything, were covered with mold. The islands were so primitive; on Yap, the women were bare-breasted, they all chewed betel nut and they'd never seen a horse. I was catching rainwater on a tarp for my animals because the local water supplies were full of weird diseases. One of my dogs died from drinking contaminated water."
Worst of all, she had trouble convincing the show's impresario to let her return to the U.S., or to fly her, her dogs and three ponies home in early February as promised in her contract. "We were supposed to be finished three weeks before I was due to join Red, but nobody had any sense of time and the way they're going, they won't be finished before April," she says. "I got here three days before the first show."
But being a veteran circus trouper, Miss Heidi was resilient enough to open that first show displaying no outward sign of the ordeal. Her pooches, not having the advantage of parents in the business, showed more of the strain in their early performances, gazing about the packed crowd in search of half-naked women with black teeth.
The Hollywood doggies are followed by a collection of acts that range from extremely polished to works-in-progress. Top of the shine was an exotic, sizzling aerial act called Sugar & Spice that reminded one of how much skill and nerve a dangerous circus act demands. On the other end was Mr. James Zajicek and His Spinning Diablos--a juggling act bedeviled by buttered fingers. At times, as if opening-week jitters were not enough, the Imp of Fate interjected a touch of kinky humor: In one show the aerial soloist, Miss Lynn Marie, lost her feathered hair ornament while suspended by the neck from the blue- velvet noose. The attention of the audience, exhorted to keep their eyes on "this extareemely difficult and dangerous" stunt, was teased away by the feather, mimicking her own spin as it drifted angelically to earth.
Like almost everyone else in the little troupe, Miss Lynn Marie does more than one job. Later in the show she reappears dressed as a dancehall girl to assist Mr. Terrell Jacobs in his bullwhip act, performed to the accompaniment of "Ghost Riders in the Sky." Mr. Terrell enters the ring cracking twelve-foot bullwhips, one in each hand, as the announcer cautions fans--for the only time in the show--to stay well back of the ring. Mr. Terrell is a short, muscular man with flowing brown hair and mustache. He holds his head far back, like the famous bust of Buffalo Bill Cody, as he lashes the cork off a champagne bottle, held by Miss Lynn Marie. Then he deftly wraps his whip around her waist and pulls her onto his waiting knee. The audience responds warmly to this touch of romance (in keeping with the show's chaste tone, it should be noted that the pair are husband and wife).
Mr. Terrell completes his act by snapping the end off a lighted cigarette, held in his own mouth, without decapitating himself.
Known by the honorary title "Captain," Mr. Terrell is the thirteenth generation of his family to be a circus performer. His grandfather, also named Terrell Jacobs, was a famed lion tamer with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey combined circuses. The elder Jacobs' record for assembling the largest number of big cats in an arena at one time (1938, 52 cats) remains unbroken to this day. Miss Lynn Marie's own father is ringmaster of the Circus World Museum, a sort of Smithsonian Institution of the circus world, in Baraboo, Wisconsin. Miss Lynn Marie took her first classes in acrobatics there, and says, "It's funny, but the only kids in my class who ended up in the business were the three who spent all their time in the bathroom telling dirty jokes."
REGARDLESS OF WHETHER they grew up in circus families or not, all the members of the Culpepper & Merriweather circus share the guiding philosophy of founder Red Johnson. "Our only objective is to put on a good, clean, honest show where people can bring their kids and enjoy themselves," says Johnson, a wiry, intense man with bright, strawberry blond hair (hence his nickname). "I thought if you treat people with a lot of respect, give the folks a good, fast-paced show, you could be a success without getting greedy. We have no caged animals, that's also part of our philosophy, and everyone works. The circus is a culture based on work."
Ron Pace, one-half of Sugar & Spice, says the big circuses are, by comparison, "like factories." Pace, one of the few blacks in the circus business, and partner Chris Kennington have worked some of the biggest shows in the country. But both say they wouldn't trade their current spot for any other. "We really like it here," Pace says. "Red gives a good, intimate show. It's not a rip-off."
Johnson, 38, says he bounced through a lot of odd jobs before signing on as a roustabout with a tent show in 1976. From that point on, he eagerly sought experience as a performer (he was a high-wire artist) and manager, eventually lucking into some financial backing to start his own show in 1985.
The troupe began in Florida with Johnson and three friends performing at campgrounds in a tiny secondhand tent. Lynn Jacobs (Miss Lynn Marie), who was one of the originals, remembers that first year. "I was working as a cook in Bozeman, Montana, when I heard Red was starting a show," she says. "Something inside said, `Just do it!' I went from eighty-degrees-below-zero to weather in the nineties in Florida, and when I arrived, I thought I'd made a terrible mistake.
"Everything seemed really unorganized: I was supposed to do the cooking and they didn't have any equipment for me, and all their dogs attacked my cat," Jacobs recalls. "But come show time, everything was transformed."
Like Cirque du Soleil, perhaps the most elegant small-tent circus in existence, Johnson's troupe began much as the medieval street circuses where the art was born. "At that time, we just passed the hat, but from the first people just backed us," Jacobs says. "Sometimes we'd play a campground and afterwards we'd find a fifty-dollar bill in the hat; things like that happened all along the way.
"The show just grew from there," she says. "This is our best year yet. We're all proud to be here." The show, appearing locally at various elementary schools and community rec centers through March, is booked on cross-country tour through October. Johnson says he won't book more than 37 weeks a year for fear of burning out his troupe.
"Here it's a family, people would do anything for each other," Jacobs says. "It is a hard life, but this is the best show I've ever been on." Her sentiments are echoed throughout the troupe, which now numbers 27 people.
"The whole thing about a tent circus is, this is just a vacant lot for 364 days a year, and then we come along and all of a sudden it's an enchanted village," says elephant trainer James Zajicek. "People have to leave the dishes in the sink, leave their TVs, to come to the show. If there's wind or rain, they experience that, too.
"The way I look at it, a tent circus kind of brings them back to the planet, and you just lose [the effect] the minute you go on concrete," he says. "It's like Clint Eastwood says in Bronco Billy, here you can be anything you want. I've been a [high] wire walker, I've booked dates, worked with animals. Now I'm heading more towards elephants."
Zajicek's primary job is to care for six-year-old Barbara, an African elephant whose mother was killed by poachers when she was less than a year old. She was brought to the U.S. with a shipment of other orphaned elephant calves and sent to live on a private ranch in Florida before being bought by Johnson.
Barbara now stands about six feet tall and weighs 2,500 pounds. Her emotional and physical maturity compare with that of a human six-year-old, since elephants are very high on the animal IQ list and their life span is similar to humans, Zajicek notes. Under his direction, Barbara performs feats designed to display her nimbleness and dignity. Zajicek, who scours used-book stores for literature on elephants, appears in the ring with her in the khaki military-style uniform of an old-time animal trainer.
He refuses to deck himself, or Barbara, in gaudy costumes. "Nowadays, people are real critical of animal acts," he says. "They think you're being mean to the animals. If you can take away the flash and stand back and just show the beauty of the animal, I think people won't feel that way as much."
Barbara is the largest animal in the show, which primarily features small versions of traditional circus animals. Like the two-legged performers, she has more than one job. Before and after the show, Zajicek and Barbara give elephant rides, the clowns sell circus toys, and, of course, Heidi gives pony rides.
THE CIRCUS MOVED its winter quarters to Buckeye four years ago, becoming Arizona's first--and, so far, only--home-based circus. Next fall, it will come home to new quarters in Queen Creek, a quiet farm community thirty miles southeast of Phoenix where Johnson recently purchased land.
Several members of the troupe, most of whom live full-time in motor homes, will remain in Queen Creek throughout the winter layover. The esprit de corps fostered by Johnson carries over between seasons, and few members stray far even in the off-season. Most just pull their RVs onto Red's place and spend the time doing repairs, working up a new act and resting.
"As far as I'm concerned, I've found a circus home," says Heidi Wendany, one of the few who owns a stationary, as well as a mobile, home. The daughter of career circus people, Wendany has been performing since childhood and is now 32. She professes to cherish the independence of circus life, but is trailed by a growing entourage of motherless creatures. In addition to caring for her dogs, ponies and two horses, Wendany cooks for the show's thirteen-member working crew and looks after Oran, a teenaged Truk Islander she felt was being exploited by the Guam circus and offered to bring back with her. For help, she relies on her boyfriend, whom she met in Buckeye and who also works on the tour, and Red, her friend and employer. "People ask me `Why are you doing that little mud show?' which is a derogatory term, and it's because I like it," Wendany says. "It's the best circus I've ever worked for. Red has made it his life's goal; he puts every penny he earns back into it, and he never asks anyone to do more than he would do."
By the second week out, the show has tightened up to a brisk ninety minutes (Johnson, like the legendary Walt Disney, understands that ninety minutes is about all the excitement most children can stand.) The prop men, at one point as much fun to watch as the performers, appear to have grown into their shoes. The tent fills night after night with eager, pint-sized fans and their less-than-eager parents.
No matter how they look going in, they all come out smiling.
Her Hollywood Doggies burst into the ring and it takes but a moment to recognize they're a half-dozen mutts she's rescued from the dog pound.
"Mom can we go again." "I want to meet Miss Heidi and her dogs." "Geez, the best part was . . . "
Mr. Terrell completes his act by snapping the end off a lighted cigarette, held in his own mouth, without decapitating himself.
"The whole thing about a tent circus is, this is just a vacant lot for 364 days a year, and then we come along and all of a sudden it's an enchanted village."
