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| Topic: Sideshow Magic... |
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The Ten-in-One has become not just a part of American popular culture, but a stock symbol for the interdependence of illusion and reality, pleasure and pain, revulsion and awe... Even now if the spell works, if we are lucky or stoned or drunk or blessed simple, we see what we are supposed to see: not some poor unfortunate approximately embodying the myth after which his affliction is named, but the myth itself...the animal hybrid skulking at the edge of the jungle, the Giant taller than the Ogre whom Jack cheated of his harp and hen, the Midget smaller than a mustard seed. If, however, the spell does not work or is broken, we awake to the moldy stench of old canvas and the squish of filthy sawdust under our feet. And looking up, we see the hostility and boredom in the eyes of those we thought were there to be looked at, not to look back. It is at this point that we hear behind the camouflage of words and music the silence of the freaks. And then we cry out “hoax” or ”fake” though we mean it is all only too real; or we laugh, as we do at all failed magic, and at ourselves for having dared believe in it. L. Fiedler |