Cotton Candy, Freaks & Geeks. Yep, it's Easter time!

The carnival is in town!  This same one came last year at Easter, too, and we had a ball with Pants.  He was the king of the Super Slide and we must return to defend his crown.  I absolutely love carnivals, fairs, the circus--  anything that generally involves a lot of glitter and fanfare, but is actually run behind-the-scenes by a bunch of unseemly carnies. 

I've read too many books about carnivals and circuses, apparently.

I just finished reading Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and really enjoyed it.  It's one of those great immersion books about a second-rate traveling circus, where you feel transported to that time and place.  I didn't want the book to end.  It's set during the Depression, as narrated through flashback by an old man in a present-day nursing home that used to be part of it.  The author did extensive research on the whole Barnum & Bailey era and it is truly rewarding.

Another fantastic carnival-themed book is Geek Love by Katherine Dunn.  It was a book that I happened upon by accident.  I was in college, broke and browsing at Books-A-Million, and caught it's florescent orange cover out of the corner of my eye, buried on the library remainders table.  Cheap entertainment being all I could afford, after reading the flap, this book seemed to meet that description on several levels.

Geek Love is about a family of freaks and geeks (not the cute NBC kind) that travel around as a circus.  This is literally a self-made family, in that the mother and father deliberately breed freaks, through horrifying experimentations with drugs and what-not while the mother is pregnant.  Sounds like a charming book, right?  Well, it sort of is.  I don't know what to tell you.  Read it.

By the way, after years of thinking that I'm the only one that has ever read the book (I mean, the library didn't even want it anymore), I was pleasantly surprised to see it in a hip bookstore window on Magazine Street a couple of years ago, actually showcased.  Apparently, it was an anniversary edition or something and, according to the sign below, was the "in" book of the season among the Uptown crowd in New Orleans.  Well, I'll be.

I have actually seen two real freak shows in my life, and not of the Bravo network variety.  I was really little and don't remember many details other than at one there was a five-legged goat (he had a limp fifth leg growing out of his shoulder area) and at the other there was a "World's Tiniest Woman," which was, in fact, an incredibly tiny little person sitting on a tiny sofa on a raised platform in a tent.  I remember being disappointed at both.  I was picturing the fifth leg being functional and the tiny person being pocket-sized.  I think I was seven.

Needless to say, I'm fascinated by all things carnival.  We'll be going tonight, however, not for the elusive freak-show, but for the omnipresent Super Slide and the all-important cotton candy.  Nothing says summer is on the way like the call of cotton candy, corn dogs, funnel cake, and twinkling lights on the death-trap carnival rides.

I love being a rube on the Midway.