Marcia and I have been on a circus vibe lately, that’s kinda how our minds work. Get on a theme and learn/discover/investigate. A few weeks ago, we got into the circus thing starting with Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen which marks a perfect jumping off point for historically accurate circus mythology dripping with Great Depression era magic and tragedy. If this book were ever made in to a movie, I’m sure the Coen Brothers would be directing.
Next, at the urging of everyone in my family, we read Geek Love. This book has been floating around my parents’ extensive book collection since it was published in ‘89. Geek Love’s emergency orange cover is burned into my memory. Never knowing quite what it was about, I was delighted to find a heart-breaking story about a traveling family of circus freaks and their eventual demise. I’d love to see Geek Love as a movie, although to be honest I spent most of the book wanted to choke the shit of the narrator, an albino hunchback dwarf with an obsessive, psychotically misplaced loyalty. In short, I loved it. A quick check at Wikipedia tells me that Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and Johnny Depp have all expressed interest in making Geek Love into a film. good crowd.
Making it a triumvirate of circus/freak culture, I introduced Marcia to Tod Browning’s Freaks. This movie is practically in my family canon, first showed to me when I was a kid by my uncle Tim, who managed to get a pirate copy on VHS. It was never officially released on VHS and didn’t make it to DVD until 2005 so for years Freaks enjoyed a cult-classic mythology surrounding it’s bombed release and subsequent burial by MGM. If you saw Freaks, you were privileged or at the very least, had a family member obsessed enough to seek out an elicit copy, long before the holy trinity of ebay, youtube and bit torrent. Unfortunately the versions floating around bt don’t have spanish subtitles and there are some spoken parts, not even I can understand. So my advice is get the DVD. It’s worth it. The signature line from the family of circus freaks shown in the film is “gooble gobble, one of us, one of us”, usually done in chanting style. This is sort of like an unconscious running line in our family that silently unifies us and always gets a smile from all, around the dinner table. I could be wrong, but I think that my entire family were circus freaks, in our last lives.
