In Psych Low Pea Dee Awe

I’m no A.J. Jacobs, but I do enjoy reading a good encyclopedia from cover to cover. They often have the same appealing qualities as a fine novel: character development, thematic unity, and the occasional brilliant non sequitur or subplot. Two of my favorites are the Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices by Brenda Love and R.A. Wilson’s Everything is Under Control. The first made me realize that everything from the smell of rotten apples to hairy backs to the color green is a fetish for someone. The second made me realize that I’m a MK-Ultra experiment gone wrong, Ronald Reagan was a robot, and Truth is as debatable as scores in figure skating.

Now I’ve never been much for subjective sports like skating, but I do have a certain fondness and sympathy for the marginalized in society. With that in mind, I’ve been reading Marc Hartzman’s American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Most Wondrous and Curiously Strange Performers and enjoying the heck out of it. He covers the three main eras of circus oddities and sideshow performers: Golden Age (1830s-early 1900s), Silver Age (1919-1970s), and the current rival. So everyone from Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy and Tom Thumb to Michael Wilson, Jim Rose, and the Bindlestiff Family. By the way, Javier and I once left a Bindlestiff performance completely scandalized. Well, I left scandalized, Javier left with a Bindlestiff t-shirt.

Anyway, the book is fascinating. I’ve learned that in Barnum’s day (the Golden Age), many of the performers were real celebrities and earned more in a week (even in the 19th century) than I do now (are you reading this K & J?). That’s not to say there wasn’t any exploitation. For instance, Julia Pastrana, a Mexican woman billed as “the Ugliest Woman in the World,” married her manager Theodore Lent, who seemed mostly interested in her market value. Proof? Well, when they had their first and only child, he was ecstatic that the boy had the same maladies and bodily afflictions as his wife (she was not). Both the boy and Julia died shortly after the son’s birth, and Lent continued to exhibit their embalmed bodies as evolutionary “missing links.” He also married another hairy woman, re-christened her “Zenora Pastrana,” and claimed she was his dead first wife’s sister.

--Jason