The Greatest Show on Earth

So I took my daughter to the circus over the weekend (Yes, two posts in one week. I'm amazed too). It didn't go as I expected. Chris Rock explained it very well. His kids are rich, so he has nothing in common with them. They're his kids, yes, but their backgrounds are totally different. Same here.

The sheer notion that we had seats in section 121 completely eclipses the collective weight of any ten happy memories of the circus that I had as a kid. When I was little we sat on the roof of the DC Armory to watch the circus. I didn't even know they had animals there because we were so far away. We walk into the Verizon Center this weekend and, not only are we on the first floor, we actually had to walk DOWN some stairs to get to our seats. Did my daughter appreciate it? Nope. Half the time she was looking back at the poor people up in the rafters. The other half she was running up and down the row.

Then my friend who invited us to go was nice enough to buy my daughter a tambourine that lit up. She dropped that thing like five times. I was so embarrassed. Do you have any idea how much I used to beg for a sword at the circus? I put that thing on my Christmas list to Santa Claus (no joke).

"Dear Santa, I still want Optimus Prime, but in March can you give my mother an extra $20 on her paycheck so we can get a sword from the circus?"

Nine times out of ten, my mother looked at me like I'd asked her to give me a bone marrow transplant when I asked for a sword. She was so good at crushing dreams that she told me I wasn't getting a sword before we even got to the damned circus. "Look, we going to the circus. I aint got no money to buy you anything, because I spent half of my money buying these tickets, so I suggest you eat before we leave. Don't ask me for no sword when we get there, because I'm not buying you one. Fix your face. If you got a problem with it, we can stay home."

Sidebar: One year my grandmother took me to the Armory to buy the sword outside and then turned around and took me back home. I called her bluff on "Do you want the sword or do you want to go to the circus?" I lost. I thought there was no way she'd walk all the way down there to buy the sword and not go in. Yeah, I spent the whole night in my bedroom looking at pictures of animals in my encyclopedia and trying to remember what those animals did at the circus the previous year. Ever so often, I turned off the light and lit up the sword.

Anyway, my daughter didn't bow or kneel or curtsy as a show of gratitude for that tambourine like I would've back in the day.

The final straw came when my daughter asked to leave during intermission. "Let's go home!" WHAT!? At first I thought she mistook it for the end, but even when it started back up she looked at me and said, "Put on coat? Put on hat? Go to train?" Do you have any idea how many birthdays I had to give up in order to go to the circus?

My mother used to act like it cost $300 a ticket to go and I had to negotiate away actual holidays. "Now you know the circus is coming up. We can go, but that means we're not going to be able to go to Wild World for your birthday." The circus is in March. My birthday is in July. Either she picked cotton for a living or I was being played. My daughter is at the circus and I haven't threatened to take away Kwanzaa or anything and yet she wants to leave? Okay.

I know where we won't be going next year.