
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, August 2, 1993                   TAG: 9309090284
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

UNDER `THE BIG TOP'

SOMETIME IN the mid-1960s the circus came to Fincastle. For weeks prior to its arrival, red and yellow posters decorated the town's telephone poles. I don't think the posters actually said, ``Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!'' but they might just as well have.

I suppose that's why I went, and why I remember so much of that circus yet: For weeks I'd been tempted by the possibility that I could see, right there in Fincastle, the same things that I'd seen on The Ed Sullivan Show, only this time for real.

Of course, it was a disappointment. A couple of grimy tents thrown up on the grounds of Breckenridge Elementary. The bleachers inside ``The Big Top'' weren't even as expansive as the rickety wooden bleachers on which we sat to watch church league softball games. The trapeze artist, although skilled, was a good many years beyond her prime, and her laddered pink tights were soiled.

Of course, in retrospect, it's easy to say that traveling circuses themselves were years past their prime at that time; no wonder I was disappointed. But that circus could have been the most skilled, the most glittering, the most stupendous traveling circus in the world and still I would have been disappointed in it. For it was, I think, my first experience with the yawning gulf that lies between the world as depicted on TV and the world as it really is: that great, yawning gulf of makeup, trick lighting, camera angles, second takes and edits.

It's not that anything can look good on TV (or in the movies or in the magazines). It's that everything does. The world is not ``The Ed Sullivan Show.''

I wish I could have seen that little circus in another era, at an innocent age, when spectacle still outshone the reality of pudgy old women in dirty, laddered tights.

I think the children who went to the circus that visited Christiansburg in 1882 probably saw their spectacle in the way which I wish I could have seen mine.

I know about this circus from an announcement printed in a contemporary church newspaper, The Home Church. The Rev. Daniel Blain, in trying to turn his Presbyterian congregation's eyes away from temptation, wrote as follows, Aug. 7 and Aug. 21, 1882:

``We are sorry to think that the amount of money that will be spent by members of our church and congregation in going to the circus would be more than enough to buy new furnaces for the church. Will not those who have determined to go reconsider the matter ... ?

``Our boasted civilization has not emerged so completely from the realms of barbarism as we may suppose. ... Many who will take their children to a circus at what is to them a large sacrifice in time and money will take no interest in the support and establishment of a good school for the education and real elevation of those same children. A clown commands a higher salary than a good teacher. A sprightly singer or dancer of doubtful character, or of character whose badness is not in the least doubtful, gains more eclat and grows many times richer than her toiling sister who in her modest purity plies her needle or trains the little ones in our schools for a miserable pittance. An actor whose business in no wise promotes human welfare will grow rich in a season. ... "

Oh, I wish I could have attended that spectacular circus! Sprightly singers and dancers! Clowns! Actors perfectly happy to go through life iwithout promoting human welfare! And all of them of a ``doubtful character'' that I'd never have met in the pews of the Presbyterian church and might never meet anywhere else - if not for the circus!

In protesting so much too much, the Rev. Mr. Blain makes me long for the circus ... new furnaces be damned!

\ Monty Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.

by CNB