The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(75)
“But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t. I wanted to hear them.”
“Why?”
“I guess I was just curious.”
“What did you learn?”
“That the world is much more mysterious and magical than most of us think it is.”
She’d said this before, when I’d asked, as a small child, if Santa Claus was real, why photographs worked, how cars kept running once the gas light came on. The world is much more mysterious and magical than most of us think it is. This was some basis of her great belief in how the world worked, a foundational mystery and magic that was beyond our capacity to understand but our great duty to explore. If we were ready for it. If we could open ourselves to the terror as well as the joy that comes with that deep unknown. I was not ready. Not then, not later. But she always has been. And maybe however her brain has rerouted in these last years has opened even more channels toward some new, deeply beautiful mysteries, and maybe sometimes when I feel disappointed that her eyes, which still haven’t fully returned to green, are vacant when I’m telling her about our afternoon plans, she’s actually in some dark living room in another lifetime, watching coffee tables shiver through the air and taking in the new map of the mysteries.
CASH MONEY
Day 67 of 150
World of Wonders
August 2013
Short E balances upside down on center stage.
He’s doing a handstand, but his hands aren’t on the ground. They are gripping a bowling ball, trying to keep it steady on the stage as he lifts himself closer and closer to a fully vertical upside-down position. The volume of the cheering crowd rises. He calls himself the human applause meter. Eighty people in the big red-and-blue circus tent clap and hoot and wipe the accumulating sweat from their upper lips. It is ninety-eight degrees. Opening day of the Minnesota State Fair. A little girl in the front row shrieks at the top of her shrill voice for him to go higher. He does. He wears his shoes, leather workman gloves, on his hands, and a black T-shirt with a picture of himself, tongue-out toward the camera. The ball wobbles, but the small jean shorts he wears loose from his waist still hang like a windless flag.
I normally can’t see what goes on in any of the acts I’m not in. I can hear them, but the stage curtain separates the audience from our backstage area, and there isn’t anywhere to go in the tent that offers a view of the stage without being in view of the audience. And, this show is all about illusion.
Or so I thought.
A few hours into opening day, Chris Christ hulks up the backstage steps and into our small metal world. There are a number of fold-out chairs on either side of the container, but there is no way his body could fit in one, and besides, something so regular as a fold-out chair seems too banal for a man who has spent so much of his life in sequins.
He clomps the few steps from backstage door to stage curtain and, in full view of the audience on the other side of the curtain, opens it a few inches. Short E is onstage, raising the bottom of his torso higher and higher into the air in response to the audience’s clapping, both his hands balanced on the bowling ball, and I’ve maybe never heard the audience going this nuts and I can see why through the crack in the curtain that the Big Boss is holding open to watch Short E.
I watch Chris Christ watch Short E for five seconds, then ten, sure that at any moment he’ll drop the curtains and seal the illusion back into its proper layer of reality, where we exist as our characters and not as people in cheap costumes who sit backstage and eat tuna from a can while scrolling Facebook.
But he doesn’t. The Big Boss keeps the curtain parted for the duration of Short E’s act, watching the world’s smallest daredevil and the audience’s reaction to the world’s smallest daredevil and also the audience’s reaction to the Big Boss giant’s face peering from between the curtains behind the balancing man.
“Why’s he doing that?” I whisper over to Sunshine. “Doesn’t he care that the crowd can see him?”
“I’m sure he doesn’t,” Sunshine says. “One crowd, one show, doesn’t matter. I’m sure they were more interested in what Short E was doing anyway.”
Short E is the only performer we have whose natural body is part of his act. All of us—Short E included—manipulate our bodies for the audience. Though the cast has a great display of tattoos and piercings, Short E is a freak performer in the traditional sense—a person with a different kind of body who displays that body—while the rest of us are geeks: those who enact performance and illusion to wow the crowd.
And he is good.
Very, very good.
He speaks into the mic like an announcer at a professional sporting event, with the rhythms and cadences in his speech that clue the audience in on an imminent spectacular spectacle.
Aaron Wollin, aka Short E Dangerously, is thirty-five years old. He is thirty-three inches tall and weighs seventy-two pounds. Story goes: after twelve years as a strip club DJ in Daytona, he retired from one kind of spotlight to pursue another. “My dad was worried when I first joined the sideshow,” Short E says of his first season with the World of Wonders in 2012. He tells me his story in fits and starts between acts, on the folding metal chairs that make up our living area. “He thought they’d keep me in a cage or something.” It was his first venture into performing.