Thank you Deroy Murdock…..Some events in New York City are unforgettable…..watching the elephants crossing the street to enter Madison Square Garden and then going to the circus was one. Getting hot dogs and a pickle from a deli on Hoe Avenue in the Bronx was memorable. Making the hot dog last for two blocks was Olympian. Going to the movies on Grand Concourse in the majestic Loews Paradise, now closed, and arguably, the most luxurious movie house in New York City, was another. Outdoor concerts in Lewisohn Stadium of City College were fabulous even with the noise of airplanes overhead. And the best of all, was a performance by the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. Last summer, with a friend I attended their summer performance which included dancing in the rain onstage with parasols shaped like flowers. For an immigrant like myself those events ” only in America”were awesome and they are all disappearing swiftly….rsk
Uniondale, N.Y. — Send home the clowns.
After 146 years, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus rolled up the net. Sunday evening’s performance was its last.
My friend Neal K. Carter and I attended Friday night’s presentation of the Greatest Show on Earth. I went to say goodbye to a part of America’s heritage and compare the current show with the production I attended about eight or nine years ago and what I recall from my first such encounter as a little boy.
This was the first Ringling Bros. experience for Carter, a pentalingual Manhattan attorney, free-market activist, and performing cellist.
The crisply renovated Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum — now called NYCB Live — was the last stop for what Ringling Bros. CEO Kenneth J. Feld called a traveling “town without a Zip code.” On Friday, this legendary act showcased visual wonders, daring feats, and constant surprises.
Neal K. Carter and the author at the circus, May 19, 2017.
The often-stunning highlights included a half-dozen giant, silky balls that dangled from the ceiling like Christmas-tree ornaments. The silken cloth suddenly fell away and revealed a contortionist inside each plastic globe. These incredibly flexible young women twisted themselves into knots while cracking the plastic containers like eggs. They then hung by their ankles from the two clear hemispheres, perhaps 30 feet from the ground. Naturally, they made it look easy.
Before long, seven motorcyclists zoomed inside a see-through sphere of cross-hatched steel bars. Within this structure, their paths swiftly crisscrossed, but never collided. The slightest miscalculation would have made this look like a pileup at the Superbowl of Motocross, but inside a space smaller than a one-car garage. The effect resembled electrons hurtling within a nucleus, rather than outside of it — the laws of chemistry be damned.