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Nephi, UT Warm and windy. 170 mile jump. The circus is a society that lives by its mobility. Like other nomadic societies, gypsies, or travelers, or carnivals the circus is a world of two faces. The public face bedecked in spangles, and the private faces behind the bigtop where individuals and families live out their daily lives celebrating successes and mourning loss. The circus is rarely glamorous. The days are either too hot, too cold, too wet, or too windy. Nobody gets rich in the circus business. For many the circus has been a way of life for generations, for others it’s a love that can’t be denied, for a few its an escape or a hiatus from another life that just didn’t work out.. On the circus you are with it and for it, supporting the show despite the fatigue and the long hours and the low pay and any gripes you many have with the management. You remain with it and for it for the few moments when everything comes together and magic happens.
Then you wander to a trailer or a sleeper or a bunkhouse and in the dawn on a new lot you reinvent the show over and over again. Maybe only the elephants remember yesterday. Jackpots aside the circus relentlessly chases tomorrow. We live and work here and tell our tales. When we blow the show we are forgotten and only our stories remain beneath a summer sky on a hard lot where the stake driver breaks the morning’s quiet in the next town.
