Sideshow 13: The Legacy of Looking

it's a story that you don't want to miss. And now on with the show. Hey Taylor, good to see you over here. Hi friend, we meet again. So this is the first time listeners are meeting you on the side of the mic. It sure is. I am Taylor Haggerdorn, producer over here. I've been lurking doing some research behind the scenes through it this see in of Grim and Mild Presents. So, Taylor, we are officially coming to a close for this season. This last episode marks the end

of our sideshow story. It does, but but we've got some good news for everyone. Though we might be closing out this season for Grim and Mild Presents, there's a really big takeaway for us and for the listeners, The physical side Show story isn't over yet. That's totally right. So while this has been a history show, the side

Show itself isn't history. It's still alive, it's still evolving, and it really has proven itself to be this totally dynamic institution that continues to shape itself in response to the current moment. I mean, even as we're recording this. Oh, that's so true, and that reminds me. I got an email the other day that I want to share with you. So if you remember episode seven, we talked about Bloomington, Normal, Illinois, is this really important training ground for acrobats from across

the world. But what we didn't get to talk about in that episode is that Illinois State University, which is based in Normal, Illinois, has the oldest and longest running collegiate circus in the United States. They've been performing since nine. So this email that came in was announcing a return to the Big Top this year for the first time since COVID shut everything down. Oh. I love that. I

know you and I have both been wondering. We've been talking about, you know, where we could go and experience some of these things I've been learning about for the past year. I mean, don't get me wrong, you know me. I love books, and I love archives, and I love being a general super sleuth. But what I really love is getting up and close and personal to experiencing the real deal. I couldn't have said about her. I feel

the exact same way. You know. Really, early on in our research, I had been looking out for the real deal, you know, thinking maybe there's this living person out there who could help us tell the story not only where the side show has been, but where it's going. And then I sent you this piece that this Gale published in Box. You know, as our project was evolving and we started thinking, oh gosh, are we going to interview folks for this? Who can we bring on to help

us tell this story? We just kept chatting about this piece, so it became evident that we just had to talk to her. It's exactly right. So we called up the author. We sure did so without further ado. We would love to hear from Kim Kelly, which me, are you interested in here? I'm a bunch of things. Kim's a journalist and community organizer, but recently she's become someone new, freshly minted down on the sandy shores of Coney Island. She's conjured and alter ego by the name of Greta the

Lobster Girl. I've always been interested inside show history, just because they've always been interested in human history, you know, especially in like the weirder dustier corners. Of course, you know Sid has fed the bill now, I know that you can't see her, but Kim's inked just about head to toe. She's got a guillotine, a lit match, a Molotov cocktail. She's all tatted up in a way that

would make any union buster quiver. But though she's tattooed all over, she still had some prime real estate left to fill. So she found herself a tattoo artist and got to work that there for four and a half hours and get a big old lobster etched into my ribs. Kim was born with extrodactility. It's the same genetic mutation carried by the Styles family, the Lobster family from our last episode. About one out of every nine babies is born with it. It often causes limbs to fuse and truncate,

but it affects everyone differently. For Kim, that means she was born with eight fingers, with two of her digits on her left hand merged into one. Once I learned how to paint my nails like, it's fine, and I'm still pretty good at paint in my nails as long as I have you know, oh cute tip with no abolish, but everyone needs that. Growing up in New Jersey, she lived in a tiny working class community and went to school with the same handful of kids until she was

a teenager. And as a kid, her claw was a non issue. When you're around the same kids for the first half of your life, everyone just got over it. I mean, it wasn't really that interesting because I saw like it was doing everything they were. The thing is, I did never made a big deal out of it, because I was like, well, this is well, what do you want? You want me to grow more? I tried and life was pretty good, but becoming a teenager is

never that easy. She eventually went to a new school, and there she had to confront a whole flock of new faces, teachers and students who probably meant well but weren't quite sure how to accommodate her. I was just trying to figure out how to fit in, and I had to go to typing class and I sat down and I was like, oh, this is gonna be a problem. I went up to the T shirt and was like, hey, I can't do this and just kind of like waggled my fingers at her and she looked shell shocked, like

oh um okay, Like, well, we'll figure this out. And the accommodation that they offered was like, okay, well you can sit off to the side and like you can look at the keyboard for tests. I basically bullied them into letting me drop the class and do homemak instead. So then I just spent the rest of the year using the sewing machines to alter my band T shirts. Worked out great. She eventually made her way out of

New Jersey and into the world. She hung around in the metal scene, touring as a roadie before signing a lease in New York City. She was working as a writer, getting byelines from big name publications on topics ranging from music to labor rights to disability issues and sometimes you should know work and play intersect for Kim in really amazing ways. It was her partner, her Coney Island Baby as she calls him, who told Kim something really interesting. Now.

Remember that old saying about running away to join the circus, Well, at one time there was a lot of truth to it. People did indeed do that, but Kim didn't need to take any drastic measures to get a taste of that circus life. Instead, herner told her that she could go and roll inside shows school and one right in Coney Island at that So Kim set her sights on enrolling, and even better, she thought, if she could get paid

to do it. So she pitched the story and an editor gave her the green light, and just like that, it was go time. It was a muggy summer morning on Coney Island. The air smelled like salt and hot dog grease. Kim was sleepy, nervous, and didn't know what to expect, and as it happens, she didn't have to wait long to find out. I was definitely the only hustler.

They're handful of people. It was such a cool mix, and some of them still in touch with There is a husband and wife duo from I think Massachusetts there and maybe they're fifties or something. They're retired and they're just kind of daredevils. They're very cool, uh, there was a magician's assistant from Colorado who had been doing amateur fire eating and had managed to poison herself at one point, so she wanted to learn how to do it for real. There was a magician from France. There was a chaos

magician from Chicago. Came in. Her classmates were welcomed in by the head of school. At one point he was like, oh, now, do we have any natural boards here? And I raised my hand and never kind of turned looked to me and were like, WHOA, And I don't think they've ever had a natural born show up to take the classes.

She suddenly found herself sitting a little bit taller, like it was the first sort of little lightning bolt moment where it was like, oh, this is so in this strange little world, like I'm like, I'm coming out on top. While her hand never felt like much of a detriment here, it was definitely an asset. This aspect of my existence has always been a little bit of a thorn in my side is actually regarded as something that's positive and desirable.

Even for the next week, she found herself working on a bunch of new skills fire reading, sword swallowing, hammering nails, upper nose, and setting mouse traps with her tongue, just to name a few. The difference between sideshow and magic is this ship is real, like you're really sticking tenant is a steel down your throat or putting a burning torch in your mouth or walking on glass. You just have to figure out the way to do it that it won't kill you. But it wasn't just the tease

of mortal injury that made this experience so exciting. It was also the fact that Kim showed up here at Coney Island at a pivotal moment in the history of American entertainment. Coney Island isn't what it used to be. In fact, it's far from it. Coney Island is a neighborhood in Brooklyn, but it was also once one of the most famous amusement destinations in the world. It was Disney World before while Disney was out of diapers, and

the side show was a main draw. But the side show as we remember it in this series has fallen out of fashion in some of the most spectacular ways. Today. The side shows, with all of the trains, the glitz, the glamour, the larger than life characters have almost all but disappeared. When I go to the circus today, I feel it akin to going to colonial Williamsburg, that it's as much a um, a step back in history, museum

piece as it is an actual form of entertainment. This is Dr Robert Thompson, or Bob as he likes to be called. I'm a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. We still have traveling circuses, and we still have sideshows, but he says they're stuck in time. They just can't compete anymore. I can get way better entertainment watching nine episodes of squid Game in a row than I can watching a bunch of dogs jumping through hoops. I again

apologize to the circus industry. Bob studies the history of mass entertainment television specifically, He's been doing this since the nineteen eighties, back when ABC, CBS and NBC Reigns, Supreme and weekly TV sides were a north star from millions of people. I can tease Bob about watching TV for a living, and there's a lot of truth to it, but his journey has been far more expansive. And here you mean he is far from a professional couch potato,

he's a curious seeker, a professional time traveler. They quickly became apparent. To understand television, you really had to understand what had happened in radio. To understand radio, you had to understand what happened in vaudeville. To understand vaudeville, you had to understand what happened in the circus. That leads

to the side show. The enduring appeal of the side show, Bob says, was that you saw stuff there that you just couldn't see anywhere else, and the fact that it came straight to your hometown was a huge deal in This formula worked for a really long time, But as the twentieth century ticked on, the American side show began to lose its hold on our attention and to lose

its sparkle. The American entertainment diet was growing. There were now more in different kinds of excitement and write in our own homes too, And at the same time, conversations around disability were beginning to change. Back in the heyday of the side show, you aren't necessarily going to see disabled folks just kind of going about their day because

there are very few options for that day. You're either staying at home with relatives, or you're institutionalized, or maybe you're able to participate in society if your disability was deemed acceptable. But really, the side show is one of the very few options for people who are disabled to work and get out in the world, and also for you know, people who weren't to see people disabilities out

in the world. Famously, disabled President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, in which secured general welfare rights for all Americans. Medicine has advanced as a disability rights movement has made major gains. I think it's less yeah, it's less exotic to see someone who's missing a couple of bits and pieces on his stage. And in trying to protect performers, laws started cropping up outlong human exhibitions.

Often this caused willing performers to lose their livelihoods. As all of these changes were implemented, Kim says, the general public began to feel more conflicted about human spectacles. Not only were they not sure if it was right to go see them, the visitors weren't sure if they wanted to be seen at the side show, and at the same time, travel was becoming easier too, and more and more car more on our road than last year, and

there will be more next year. Highways have been around for a minute, but thanks to a federal push, we began to more seriously strive for roadway connectivity. In the post Second World War economic boom, people were taking to the roads in flashy new cars, recreating harder and faster, and in greater numbers than ever before. By the late nineteen fifties, more than seventy five percent of American households

owned a car. Starting in nineteen sixty seven, over forty miles of interstate were constructed under the Federal Highway Administration. People didn't have to wait until the circus train showed up once a year. Now they could go find fun on their own. But in all of that, in the slippery, shifting tectonic plates of culture, one thing didn't change, the acute truth that time and attention was money, something of

course that P. T. Barnum had mastered. I think Barnum, for the most part, really understood the sense that human beings liked to see things that would amaze them, and I suppose that's part of what defines us as humans is that we are curious and we are constantly looking for new stimulation. Barnum's legacy is, as you know by now, really complicated, but we can't deny that he was in the right at the right time to do what he did.

What Barnum did was to simply bring together all kinds of things that were happening in the relatively young country of the United States in an era where industrialization, a new technologies, new audiences coming from all over the world in waves of immigration. All of that stuff was happening at once, and his visionary DNA, the double helix of fact and fiction that made him so rich and so infamous, can still be seen threaded throughout almost all of one

century media. In fact, the side show as pe Team Barnum engineered it has simply relocated to our television sets Enter Reality TV, SMI Jam, First Person Voted off the Island Sorry. The genre has been kicking around since the nineteen fifties, and when it appeared, audiences loved the upclose and personal feel and the surprise element of it too. They clung to the alert of authenticity that they felt

unscripted television could give to them. After all it was a look into other people's lives, and it's gone through many evolutions and mutations since then. Today, reality TV is a veritable treasure trove of characters. Flip through the channels and you'll find every kind of head turner, from Island Castaways two Giant Cakes, from rich Housewives to supernatural huntings, all with the press of a button. And these shows,

without a doubt, have long been starmakers. They've created fortune, they've launched careers, and famously, as we saw in the presidential election, even political campaigns and baked into this kind of TV is something Quintus actually barnems clever editing big personalities, dramatic storylines which altogether make for some pretty potent optical catnip.

I mean all this stuff that was completely fabricated from start to finish, because once Barnum got ahold of you, you may have been a real, living, breathing human being, but you became the actor in a very complex fiction

of they're making not yours. When you agree to go on Jerry Springer, when you agreed to go on the Real World back then, you were essentially agreeing to be an actual person going onto something called reality but you were inserting yourself into a dramaturgical setting that someone else was controlling. There's a whole genre of shows where the body is center stage. Sometimes those bodies are being celebrated, and sometimes they're suffering is put on display, and other

times it's somewhere in between. And maybe you've tuned into some of the programming yourself. You know My six Pound Life, My Strange Addiction, seven Little Johnston's, the Gypsy Sisters. On these shows, the cameras work like a thousand electronic barnums. They direct and even exploit our attention so that we see exactly what they want us to see. They brought

us into shock, into awe, and into amazement. And it's worth acknowledging too that some of the people featured in these shows, such as Little People, Big World, are also the executive producers. This gives them varying degrees of control over their stories. We can see them as modern day air as of performers like Lavinio, Warren Zip and Frank Lentini, just to name a few. French philosopher Guide de Board wrote that we live in a world united by our

consumption of two d images. He is a term for this, the society of spectacle. Here, he tells us our reality has been fractured into pieces, pieces which in turn become commodities. We work hard at appear in a certain way every time we post for a selfie or agonize over the perfect caption we perform. Performance, of course, has always been a part of social engagement, but it wasn't always captured

in two dimensions. Debor proposes that we have become a world of isolated people, united only through collective exposure to the same pictures. Debor died, but his words still hit close to home at a time when we live our collective lives on the digital stage. You see long Gone or the side show barkers, but we still use their language. We still have platforms. It's just that now instead of the bally shouting for attention above the crowd, we are

the ones doing the work. The folks who we all watch on these new pocket sized platforms Instagram, TikTok, YouTube are becoming the main character of their own stories. As gen Z likes to say, one person is no longer in charge of the narratives of many, as Barnum was in the case of choice, heth and in the case of Julia Pastrana, Sarkee Bartman, and countless other people who became ensnared in the Traveling sideshow world. Creators, the performers

are taking back control. They produce their own content, they control their own storylines, and they make their own money. And by they, I am very likely talking about you and me. In September of the Washington Post published the story of twenty two year old Coparanga Tatoyo, a woman from the Tattoo indigenous community deep in the Amazon Rainforest. Conaparanga is her own content. She posts about her day

to day life, her community, and her cultural traditions. Conaparanga has over six point four million followers, a sizeable audience Barnum could have only dreamt of. People come to learn from her, They see things they haven't seen before, and straight from the source. In the old school side show world, we've heard countless tales of Indigenou people being conscripted into labor. They've been given new names, wildly fabricated stories, and no exit plan. It's hard not to be struck by how

much smaller our world has become. And now who gets to control of the story As viewers Bob says, this desire to have our attention captured is programmed into who we are. Human beings are always going to want to be amused, and I think they're probably always going to enjoy being amused more than they enjoy doing this stuff that they have to do. So Uh, entertainment is always

going to be with us. I think entertainment, like sex and eating and keeping warm are is one of the properties of things human beings are always going to be looking for. Kim, on the other hand, puts it more simply. I mean, hughes are pretty simple. From the dawn of time, we wanted to see other people do crazy shit. If you were alive today, I'd have my money on Barne being out in Palo Alto somewhere, trading in his coat,

tails for a hoodie and caviare for red bull. He would be knee deep in the trenches of attention economics, fine tuning those algorithms that riddle our brains with feel good hits of dopamine. He would be making big money to keep us scrolling for our next fix, and he would be very very good at it too. Barnum was able to capitalize on our very human need for novelty, and now we hold his legacy in the palm of

our hands. And as for the quite literal, quite physical entity of the Side Show itself, it continues to evolve, and Kim is now part of that legacy. She would have stayed on at Coney Island Side Show had the pandemic not shuttered its doors, but she says, the form and the community will continue to innovate as technology does it always has. Over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, performers have moved into more digital spaces, making a little

bit of magic in an otherwise dark time. I hope, and I think that there's always going to be an Apple date to see something a little weird and see something a little freaky. It's one thing to watch a performance on your laptop on your phone, but there's another to feel the flames on your cheeks and see the sweat pouring down someone's face when they're walking on glass. Now you can't replicate that until that time comes again. Kim keeps busy. She hasn't been keeping up on her

new skills, but that's okay, yeah, right. All my nails have gone all rusty this past year from my blockhead routine. I gotta guess some new nails, COVID casualties. What we do know to be true that whatever form the Sideshow next takes and continues to take, the audience will be waiting. It just might look a little bit different. But as humans, we just can't help ourselves. For better or for worse,

we can't look away. This season of Grim and Mild Presents couldn't have happened without my troop of amazing colleagues, including and not limited to, Taylor Aggernorn, Sam Alberty, Aaron Minky and her friends over at iHeart Media, Alex Williams, Josh Thane, and Jesse Funk. I'm Robin Minteer, your host today and writer and producer of the series. To learn more about the side show, head on down to Coney Island or visit the P. T. Barna Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut,

or even the Barnam Archives at Tufts University. And while you're there, go say hi to Jumbo. A special thanks to Casta Alba, Carl Nellis, Dr Bob Thompson, and Kim Kelly, who all helped give this season just a little more shine. But Grim and Mild Presents isn't over yet, and if you stick around for just a few more minutes, we'll give you a preview of what's ahead. Everyone loves a good story, and since you're listening, chances are you're also

fond of pirates. From sailing the high seas and buried tre pisure to swilling rum and singing shanties, pirates have come to represent a lot about the human spirit. Through the centuries, we've fallen in love with adventure, danger and exploration. Honestly, we never tire of hearing about pirate life. In Sweden, for example, there's a story that's been handed down from generation to generation, and like other pirate tales the world over, people love it so much they don't care whether it's

true or not. The story goes that back in the fifth century, there was once a mighty Scandinavian king with a lovely daughter, young Princess a wildness. Beauty was such that her father, King Sanartis, locked her away in a tower. For her protection, of course, and to ensure that no ordinary man could easily scale the tower, he surrounded it

with deadly snakes and traps. While many men failed. Prince Alf of Denmark succeeded in breaching the castle and then asked the king for his daughter's hand in marriage, to which the king agreed. They had a problem. Though the princess had vanished from the tower, you see, a Wilda's beauty was matched only by her feistiness and sense of independence.

With her mother's help, the princess had made her escape, accompanied by her strong willed handmaidens and other young women, who, much like the princess, were also promised to men they had never met. They dressed as sailors and made off with a ship, deciding to explore the world, and during their travels, the women came across a pirate ship that had recently lost its captain. Enamored with a Wilda and her crew, the men voted her to be their new leader,

knowing that her father still searched for her. A Wilda and the other women wore helmets to hide their long hair. The princess, pirates and her crew earned a fierce reputation raiding many merchant ships on the Scandinavian seas, and like all pirates, they soon had a bounty on their heads. The King of Denmark placed his son alf in charge of the navy sent him to eliminate the troublesome pirates. The prince quickly located them, and a great battle ensued.

While his crew engaged with a Wilda's, he and the princess faced each other, swords drawn. They dueled, neither of them getting the better of the other. Having become impressed with her rival and seeing something familiar about him, a Wilda removed her helmet. The prince instantly recognized the princess and dropped to one knee to propose, which she accepted. Of course, the battle ended and a wedding took place instead. A Wilda's pirate ship and Alf's naval fleet returned side

by side to Denmark. The newlyweds were welcome to Denmark with a lot of fanfare. A message was sent to King Sanartis, who was also pleased with the marriage. A Wilda and Alf went on to have a daughter together, and it was said that she was just as beautiful and fierce as her mother, And when the king died, the couple ruled long and well and all. Our fictional introduction story is the stuff worthy of a Disney movie.

We're about to embark on a different sort of journey a historical adventure into the most legendary real life rogues of the seas. I'm Aaron Mankey, and welcome two pirates.