Letting their Freak Flags Fly
(Page 3 of 3)
Mar.-Apr. 2008
by Sacha Evans, from Polite
Oddly, the same medical advancements that have allowed born freaks to correct their conditions have allowed regular people to become “made” freaks—giving themselves forked tongues, claws, fangs, and surgically implanted horns, all of which are common sights at a modern sideshow.
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“The freak shows play off people’s discomfort,” Bogdan continues. “You don’t know whether to be sad or scared or enraged. It creates confusion.”
Samantha X thinks her show’s message is empowerment, not debasement. She says her sideshow helps people look at their own oddities and recognize that the strange and bizarre are not something to fear. Having a genetic anomaly is “not necessarily weird or sick or a disease; it’s just a different way that the body works,” she says.
Back at Coney Island, the sideshow runs continuously for several hours at a time. Audiences simply leave when they’ve seen the same act twice or have had enough “shock and amazement” for one day. Despite the performers’ spectacular lack of regard for their own bodies, there is a subtle sense among the crowd that they’ve seen it all before. They can be impressed or disgusted, but they cannot be floored.
“Are you guys nervous?” the blockhead Donny Vomit asks the people in the front row before juggling a chain saw and, he says, “my balls.” The audience members shake their heads. “You should be,” he says. “I’m drunk.”
Donny encourages alcohol consumption throughout the early-afternoon show “to make it better for everyone.” Finally, the main attraction: Madame Electra, the human lightning rod. Mounting the stage, she is strapped into an electric chair.
As the lights dim, Donny binds Madame Electra and fires up the chair. Behind her, a wheel painted with hypnotic spirals spins; cartoonish blue electric volts shoot up from the top of the chair. Madame Electra squeezes shut her eyes in an unconvincing approximation of pain. The audience isn’t buying it.
The theatrics and amateur pyrotechnics crescendo, and the act reaches its climax. Madame Electra opens her eyes and woozily climbs down from the chair. As Donny presents her to the audience, she wipes her brow, pretending to recover from the greatest shock of her life. Filing out into the hazy Coney Island afternoon, the audience pretends to do the same.
Reprinted from Polite, a journal of arcana, deadpannery, and cultural criticism. Subscriptions: $14/yr. (3 issues) from 427 W. Sheridan Place, Lake Bluff, IL; www.politemag.com.
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