Sideshow

The history of the American Sideshow with guests Robin Miniter and Taylor Hagerdorn, the team behind the podcast Grim and Mild Presents: Sideshow. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
The show was on ephemeralist production of I Heart three
D Audio for full exposure listen with that phones. The
Circus of today would generally be considered a lighthearted place, fun, polite,
family oriented. I've always wanted to go to the Circus,

(00:24):
but historically there was another aspect to this spectacle, a
more secretive and sometimes darker story. Through the back Kurt,
past the posters, and Carnival Barker. For a few extra cents,
you could gain admittance to his space. That questioned the
very nature of reality. The side Show, the side Show

(00:45):
as we know it as this brick and mortar golden
era of entertainment, certainly had a heyday and certainly had
a decline, but it didn't just appear in a vacuum
an actuality. The side Show itself is an institution that
goes back hundreds of years and is continuously evolving and
shape shifting. I'm Robin Minuter and I am a senior

(01:09):
producer over at Grim and Mild, and I'm Taylor Haggerdorn,
and I am an associate producer at Grimm and Mild.
Robin and Taylor are the minds behind Sideshow. Season one
of the podcast Grim and Mild Presents, hosted by Aaron Monkey,
which just wrapped it's thirteen episode run. I've always thought

(01:29):
of the side show as a foil for American anxiety,
this feeling of getting so close to the subversive, like
close enough to be able to touch it, to be
titillated by it, but also to be able to walk
away at the end of the day, ricked from the

(01:52):
of the world. One time I get part of a
dollar show. If you ruf the dime, this impulse to view,
and also if you have power to put on display
and create narratives around otherness, around curiosity, around oddity. Obviously
that precedes the sideshow. It just perfected and codified something

(02:15):
that we had always been interested in. While the side
show has a golden era, there are precedents throughout recorded history.
If we want to think about the history of touring acts,
there are certain things you can trace back to ancient Greece,
ancient Rome, the history of menagerie's collected animals for pleasure

(02:38):
and then for public display and profit. Also think about
folks who would be employed by medieval courts, for example,
folks with Dwarfism, Siamese twins, people who would act as
an oddity for entertainment, and when you have courts who
are traveling the world and trying to secure more land
and resources for their entries in their kingdoms, part of

(03:02):
what they are acquiring a people and things that they
deem odd This traveling otherness that we get from the
courts is a really lengthy precursor but also like a
direct ancestor to the side show that we get. But
the sideshow proper truly began with a single figure, not

(03:22):
just any service, but the most spectacular of old time.
When we think about the inception of the American side
show in the collective American imagination, we think of P. T. Barnum,
and this guy was a match in so many ways.
You know, is also a very complicated character that goes

(03:43):
without saying that they didn't wonderful affection sold it my
voice like my great souls. I have a great as
I believe happy. He was born in eighteen ten in Bethel, Connecticut,

(04:09):
which at the time was a very agrarian community. Not
only was he very creative, but he also used that
creative energy and became very very entrepreneurial. Like he had
some grocers he was trying to sell himself for public office.
He was always down with the hustle. The other thing
that made him very singular was that he had this

(04:31):
acute savvy about human psychology. He was always one step
ahead of the desires of those around him. In that way,
that made him a very good businessman. He could serve
up what people wanted, and he was bringing them what
they wanted before they necessarily understood that's what they were
looking for. Around eighteen sixty five, in the throes of

(04:54):
the Civil War, the country was radically shifting. We were
learning all about Darwin's origin of species. New science was
being invented and discovered. The world was expanding and really
strange in new ways. And P. T. Barnum bless his heart,

(05:15):
his second grade American Museum in New York City burns down,
and in his mid to late sixties he decided to
take the different exhibits in his museum, including the human Acts,
and bring them to communities across the country. They snaked
across the continent in fifty private box cars. Four hundred

(05:36):
employees brought up the Big Top for the greatest show
on Earth. The Sides Show brought with it an atmosphere
all its own right now, let's go to the side show.
When he walked into a sideshow space, the thing you're
going to see are these huge posters six nine twelve
ft tall, brightly colored paintings on their You might see

(06:00):
a half man, half snake, an ape woman, the world's
tallest man, or the world's fattest lady, or the world's
shortest boy that was also the world's strongest man, the
pin cushion man, the world's tallest man, and the smallest couple.
And then, of course you have the barker right up, lady,

(06:26):
somebody who is welcoming you into this world to suspend
your disbelief and question really what you're seeing? The sideshow
traffics in hyperbole, and this was all one big marketing engine.

(06:46):
Three are kicking in Mare were a man. Though every
side show was unique, they were each essentially organized in
the same way. Sideshow acts are historically categorized into three
different boxes. Who have the born ax, got the made ax,

(07:08):
got the working ax? And those categories exist historically along
a hierarchy, with the born ax being sort of sides
your royalty, kind of at the top of the pecking order.
Tell me, have you done much circus work in your life.
I was on the stage for most of my life.
I was a headliner. Below that you have the made ax,

(07:29):
for example, tattooed ladies. You could walk in off the
street and sit for many a tattoo session and then
decided to join the side show. Then you have below
that the largest contingency of acts that currently exists in
this moment, the working acts, astounding acts of body manipulation

(07:52):
and pain endurance. These are the people who are swallowing
sores and breathing fire and laying on beds of nails
going to any side show. These are the three that
you would expect to see in some configuration. Living as
a traveling side show performer could have its perks. It

(08:13):
could also be perilous. Some folks really benefited from this
world as a result of the skin suit that they
were born in, Meaning if you were an affluent white person,
for example, like Lavinia Warren, even though you were living
with dwarf is um, you could opt into this institution

(08:33):
and know that you're probably going to do okay. On
the other hand, in the case of Sarki Bartman Julia Pastrana,
these women who were both indigenous looked different than the
colonizer culture that intercepted them. Their existence in the side
show wasn't so good. In order to really get a

(08:54):
grasp on be multifaceted institution that the Side Show was,
we need to understand every person's particular experience and the
intersections of their lived experience, holding it up like a
prism and turning it from all of its sides. The
Sideshow Podcast goes deep into the back stories of characters

(09:16):
whose experiences run the gamma. Take, for instance, the case
of Frank Lentini. Frank Lentini is born in the eighteen
nineties in Italy and had three legs. At this time
where it's really inhospitable to be any kind of different,
particularly with a very visible physical difference. He's called a

(09:37):
monster by the person who delivered him, by his neighbors.
It was such a harsh existence early on in life,
and there was really no where that he was accepted.
There was no place for him to be other than
locked away in an institution, and he didn't want them.
Lentini the three legged wonder. And so when Frank finds
community in the Side Show, he finds I can be

(10:00):
autonomous here. He is traveling throughout the US with his
wife who's found through sideshow. He gets to have a family,
and he gets to play sports with his friends that
he gets to have drinking buddies. And he even has
this one acquaintance who had one leg, and so when

(10:20):
they would buy like the second pair of shoes, he
was a shoe buddy right, Like they had the same
shoeice eyes, and so Frank was like, hey, man, I
got these nice new sandals. Here's the left one for you.
That kind of ability to exist as yourself without having
to hide at every turn where you are dehumanized by
medical professionals and scientists and teachers and midwives and everyone

(10:41):
else around you. To be in a place where you
are working and you are getting paid and you are
also treated as a human doesn't make the side show
a perfect but that's pretty cool stuff. Frank is just
one example of many, but not all were as autonomous
and successful as Frank was. A to be. On the

(11:02):
other side of the spectrum, you have someone like Julia Pastrana,
who was an accomplished multi lingual singer, dancer, and performer
born with her statism. Julia Pastrana was Indigenous woman born
in Sinaloa, Mexico, covered with dark hair and immediately ostracized
by her community. There are lots of ingrained fears about

(11:27):
perhaps why she came to be and also what she
might become. Then essentially she was trafficked to the United
States for the side show, and that is where the
sequence of managers begins and it never ends for her.
The stories that we're going around promoting her were saying that, oh,
there were these hunters who were lost, and they came
across this cave, and there's this strange child coming from

(11:52):
parentage of a woman and a bear. The big thing
at that moment, again, the emergence of Darwin's Origin of
SPECIs a lot of these like high falutinate ideas about
evolution and race and hierarchy. This was Charles Darwin's idea
that the living world evolved from lower forms of life.

(12:13):
But how that manifests for lay people who aren't going
to these stuffy scientific conferences debating the finer points of
the evolutionary theory. As they're going up, you know, on
a Saturday afternoon, they're going to see the barker out
there saying, come on, come on, calm, see the missing link,
promoting Julia as the missing link between our primate ancestors

(12:37):
and now our very evolved modern selves. It's not just saying,
come and look at this woman with a beard. They
sort of take the science of the time and fabricate
this in between space that's enticing to people who want
to think they are further removed from primates, or further
removed from the people who they view as iverages. Early

(13:01):
eighteen sixties, her manager ens up marrying her when their
child is born. In the throes of childbirth, mother and
child both passed and he had Julia and their baby.
Taxidermyte probably the longest career of any sideshow person, because
she was only repatriated a few years ago. All the

(13:23):
while she's still being exploited. She has toured through the
world for over a hundred years. I think that's a
very extreme example of unique genetic characteristics destined for the sideshow.
For performers like Julia Pastrana, there just appears to be
no choice at all. One episode of Grim and Mild

(13:45):
Presents typifies this gulf between experiences by looking at three
different sets of conjoined twins changing named Bunker were brought
over from Siam now known as Thailand, again as an
oddity to tour across the America, but they eventually were
able to more or less enter into high society. They

(14:07):
both got married, they had something like nineteen children between
the two of them. They ended up getting separate houses
right next door to each other, so they could like
split time between the two families. They lived in North
Carolina and by all accounts, became members of the Southern aristocracy,
so they were able to subvert this idea that they
were forever going to be an oddity. In the case

(14:32):
of Millie Christine, she was born into slavery and was
sold when she was eleven months old. That was when
her side show career began. She was kidnapped, kidnapped a
second time. She came home to North Carolina, where it
is debated whether she was kept in servitude or if
she chose to stay there. Millie Christine did indeed write

(14:56):
her own biography that was sold at her show. But
when your manager is also maybe your captor, the story
is told very differently. But Millie Christine eventually gets her
freedom and buys land and brings her mother and father
and siblings home. We then have Daisy and Violet Hilton,

(15:19):
who appeared in the movie Freaks. Well Well, Well come
a big night. Yes, the sister is getting married, and
I'm real too dead anything. In the nineteen fifties sixties,
the side show had so fallen out of favor. Their
act was no longer learning any money, and their manager
abandoned them without a job, without a way out, and

(15:42):
without any dollar bills. And they ended up getting a
job at a grocery store, and they worked there for
a number of years. But when they stopped showing up
to work, it took a few days to figure out
what had happened and where they had gone, and come
to find out they had passed away together but alone.
That's to say, just because your body in this world

(16:05):
may have looked similar to other folks or other acts,
does not mean that anyone's experience was going to be
at all similar to somebody else's. It had so much
to do with race and with class, with circumstance. One
unique artifact that remains from this side show era is

(16:26):
the ninety two film Freaks, which features a litany of
real life side show performers. The better you will seat
him on the inside, maybe reading mons property and was
the passion project of director Todd Browning, most famous for
his ninety one version of Dracula. Aren't you Drinking? I

(16:49):
Never drink? Why? When he was sixteen he had literally
run away to join the circus, and so I think
he had a deep affection and deep affinity for the
people that he met there. This seemed like great father
for a film to be made. It was, from what
I understand, the first time that these characters who had

(17:13):
long toured in the sideshow really jumped mediums and went
from the stage to the silver screen, sort of end
mass Oh, I'm so I am as I am in
my sil Oh what an amazing setting. And of course

(17:39):
then he mixed in the element of love and murder
and intrigue. You can't get away with it, I'll tell
the copper. Sounds like a blockbuster to me, but freaks.
When it was made, it was a total flop. People
hated it. At first. I could not believe my own
lives a lot of horrible twists, thinking what were you

(18:05):
drinking that? Right? The reaction was so strong for the
horrors that he dared to put on screen that they
had to recut it, and so in that recutting, not
only do we lose his vision, we also lose a
lot of the autonomy of the actors and their characters

(18:28):
that they brought to life in the film. Try doing anything,
don't want to bust. You're right, she don't know what,
but she'll find out where in the first cut they
might have come across as just a person who happens
to been born with dwarf is um, you're only something.

(18:51):
They still exist as characters with their own agency, and
it's part of the setting them left. Yes, wine, don't
help me. But in the recutting, they just become archetypes.
Oh let's see what pretty dread? Oh how beautiful you look?
To nine like? Show me Freaks as I want them

(19:12):
to remain. Come on, come on, the bigger ladies, babies.
The original cut of Freaks no longer exist, but there
was a resurgence in the nineties and enough change within
those intervening years that when people found it again, they
realized that this was a really iconic piece of cinema history.

(19:35):
Has founding Living month property a time, and in it
was selected by the National Film Registry as one of
the most influential films of all time. He got that
way will never be known. So even before Dracula made
that registry, this movie did yes freak. In the mid

(20:01):
twentieth century, the side show as we knew it suffered
a decline. The side show does not exist like it
once did, and there are a few reasons that it declined.
One was entertainment innovation. First we had radios and then
we had television, and this all was happening while the
Golden Age of Hollywood was taking off. From what I understand,

(20:23):
the film industry was one of the only industries that
wasn't greatly impacted by the Great Depression, so folks were
able to still go into be entertained if they had
a few extra sents on them. Post War era, the
American highway system totally blew up. More and more people
got their own automobiles, and so people were going further
afield than they ever had been before. A covered wagon

(20:45):
on a modern boulevard is out of place old fashioned
transportation on a modern highway. They had some more leisure
time and they were able to go into seek out
other kinds of entertainment. And then around the second wave
of adminism, there was more and more conversation around bodies
and other own bodies and disabilities, and for the first

(21:07):
time ever, with the passing of the a d A
folks of disabilities, for the first time, we're guaranteed work.
The sideshow have for a long time been one of
the only options, and now there were more options for
people to choose from. And so as we went along
in the years, the sideshow just became less relevant. With
the changing geography, you also have changing social mores, and

(21:30):
audiences are kind of becoming a little self aware and
self conscious about the entertainment that they're ingesting. I think
it does become harder for audiences to justify being entertained
in these ways, or at least being publicly witnessed to
be entertained by things presented in the side show. And
maybe we still indulge in it and hold onto some

(21:51):
of those biases pretty strongly, but we can more do
it in the safety of our home and we're not
going out with the entire town. Everybody and their brother
doesn't know what we're watching on TV or on our phones.
We can't maybe be judged for that. But there is
a descendant of the sideshow extant today. The sideshow is

(22:12):
still here, but it looks a little bit different than
it once did. I guess it didn't realize. The sideshows
are still weary assistance. They're about two or three strong.
There is a sideshow still at Coney Islands Island, the
world's greatest fun probing its long, all peppered with people,
the place where merriment is king, and everybody in this

(22:33):
room has the ability to sign up and to go
to sideshow school to become sideshow performers. Today, for the
most part, it is a collection of made acts or
working acts, fire eaters and sword swallowers and nail bed
liars doing some pretty spooky and maybe death defying things.

(22:57):
And as it fades, there is still linger nostalgia for
that brick and mortar experience. Nothing that we watch on
our phones or computers is going to replicate sitting in
the audience, that smell of gas and fire and as
someone's walking over glass, seeing the sweat beat on their forehead.
Nothing will take that away. But I think our curiosity

(23:20):
and our voyeurism we're carrying forward, whether it's a smattering
of things now, I don't think we've left that behind.
Even if these traveling institutions no longer hit the rails anymore,
Everything by the Super m This episode of Ephemeral was

(24:09):
written assembled by Alex Williams, with producers Max Williams and
Trevor Young and additional editing from Jesse Funk. Here more
from Robin Miniter, Taylor Haggard Dorn and the rest of
the team over at Grimm and Mild dot com, and
you can find Grim and Mild Presents, Side Show and
more podcasts from i Heeart Radio on the i Heart

(24:30):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to your favorite shows.