The Epic Pencil

What is it about the circus and carnivals that so fascinates us? Is it the color and light all rolled up into an evening of theatricality? Perhaps it’s the clowns, the performers on horseback, or the daredevils shot from cannons. And then there is the gasp-inducing image of bodies clad in silver arcing high overhead. As the song says:

He’d fly through the air with the greatest of ease,

That daring young man on the flying trapeze.

Those lyrics were written in 1867 to extol the exploits of Jules Léotard, a phenomenally successful trapeze artist and, you guessed it, the namesake of the one-piece dancer’s clothing.

For many of us, I expect that our first experience with the circus was going to see the Ringling Brothers, Barnum, and Bailey Circus when we were kids. But Ringling stopped performing under the Big Top in 1957, and I doubt that nostalgia for circuses is tied up in seeing them in a huge indoor arena. Instead, I think it’s the idea of the carnival coming to town in the night, setting up the big top, the midway and being there when we wake, like magic.

It’s an image that’s been perpetuated in movies, like 1941’s Dumbo, 1952’s The Greatest Show on Earth, and more recently in the carnival scenes in 2017’s Paddington 2. 

If you’ve been to a carnival, the memory is stirred up by the scent of popcorn, cotton candy, toffee apples, and more.

It’s reinforced every time you hear the song Enter the Gladiators, also known as Thunder and Blazes, written in 1899 and forever associated with the grand entry of the clowns and other performers into the big top.

With only a few exceptions, that image of the traveling carnival, the amazing, temporary world of the big top and midway, is a relic of the past. But it’s a compelling one that captures us with spectacle and nostalgia. We know it’s an act, but we’re still fascinated and captured by the illusion, not just of what’s going on in front of us but also the illusion of how it must have been in the past. Like Professor Julius T. Sinkbottom’s Magnificent Traveling Menagerie and Performing Phantasmagoria, they appear and disappear, taking their mystery with them.

So let’s put pencil to paper and continue with Phantasmagoria, part three.

Parts of Phantasmagoria were inspired not so much by actual events but rather by the idea of what summers could be, what two friends like Hattie and Shep might do with their time before they got older and needed to work and move on to more adult activities.

It was also inspired by the books I read about other kids and their adventures. My vision for the Shelton’s Cove series is that Hattie’s narrative will be told in a series of short stories about him, and his family, Shep, and other friends, including one of whom we’ll meet tonight. I loved that style of episodic stories, like John D. Fitzgerald’s The Great Brain series, which reveals the escapades of T.D Fitzgerald as told by his younger brother, J.D., in late 1800s Utah.

But there were others that told the stories of kids, who I imagined might be me, and their adventures. There was Bob Fulton’s Amazing Soda Pop Stretcher by Jerome Beatty, The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron, Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy from Mars by Daniel Pinkwater, and one that sticks with me to this day, My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George.

All of these harken back to the Adventures of Tom Sawyer in some fashion. All tell of adventures, and all feel like something that could have happened during summer vacation on the Cape, at summer camp, or among the tree-lined streets on which I grew up.

So let’s put pencil to paper and continue with Hattie’s summer in Phantasmagoria, part two.

Tonight's episode, Phantasmagoria, was inspired perhaps most of all by some of the works of Ray Bradbury. Not his pantheon level sci-fi but rather his stories of childhood, like Dandelion Wine, and those with mystery and menace, like The Halloween Tree with such delightful characters as Tom Skelton and Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud and the amazing Something Wicked This Way Comes. I loved those stories as a kid and still do, both for the stories themselves but also the sense of place and time that Bradbury created. 

Set in the fictional Maine town of Shelton's Cove in 1906, Phantasmagoria is the first story that I wrote about Hatfield McClernand, his family, and friends. It's also the first in a planned series of short stories and novels about Hattie and his ancestors and his descendants, through whom we will experience moments in history, along with love, loss, murder, and more. Or that's the plan, anyway.

So let's put that pencil to paper and get started with Phantasmagoria, Part One.