Cincinnati, Ohio, March 2001

Ok, so clearly I've skipped ahead in my telling of circus stories. This is because my parents are currently on a vacation in Cincinnati. You may wonder about the phrase "vacation in Cincinnati". Really they're on an Elderhostel trip, in which older (though I think my parents would object to this adjective) people go learn something, since they need something to do with their surplus of time as retired people. Anyway, my mother loves to call me at 8am to tell me ridiculous trivia. Fortunately she has not actually been waking me up this week, since I'm in a tech week at work and putting in a stupidly large amount of hours.

So on Tuesday, I called my parents' house to tell my mother to read the book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss (about punctuation - HILARIOUS!!!), having forgotten that they were in Cincinnati. My dad called in and got the messages, so my mother felt compelled to call and remind me that they were not at home. But, of course she had other fun things to say. I guess one of the seminars about Cincinnati talked about how the river has flooded several times in the past, the most recent being March of 1997 while Ringling Brothers (my unit) was in town. That was a popular story that was told often leading up to our visit to Cincinatti in 2001 and recounted by many during our stay there. Apparently the arena, which is right next to the river, flooded up to the 7th row of seats or so. Here are some good photos: Enquirer Flood Photos. The big round building is the ballpark and the smaller, squarish building behind it is the arena. Couldn't find any good close-up photos of the arena, but I think that the flood happened on the Sunday before the show got to town, so they just didn't even get there. Could've been a lot worse if there had been 10 elephants or so stuck in knee-deep water....

Anyway, I then told my mother about my not-so-fond memories of Cincinnati. By this point I was living on the train, so I did not arrive early to set up the animal lot. That job had been given to a team of people who had trailers - Jon Weiss, the human cannonball, and Brian, the head of the elephant department. Once I gave up the job of setting the lot, I usually didn't so much agree with how the lot got set up, but really I didn't spend too much time worrying about it, since I couldn't do much about it.

During the load-in we had a problem with the pie car (the food service trailer). I can't remember exactly what it was - I think they couldn't find a hookup for water, but I'm not sure. Anyway, I do remember that I spent a significant amount of time during the load-in dealing with pie car issues. Our office trailer was parked on the sidewalk along the side of the building under the highway overpass. This was its spot from years past as well and apparently many people knew from experience that there were many birds roosting in the structural sections of the overpass. So we covered the office trailer with a tarp that week :)

Later in the load-in day, the GM and I were sitting peacefully (well, as peacefully as possible) in the office when the whole wagon got jolted. We darted outside and found one of the transportation guys on a Harlan pushing a wagon into its storage place behind our trailer. Turns out he had run into the office trailer with his Harlan. This is the same guy who had.....well I'll leave that one as a surprise for when I tell the Seattle stories, but this guy was very careless and was always doing things like running into 16-wagon with a Harlan (16 wagon is the name of the office trailer - it used to be one of the regular-sized circus wagons and it used to load onto the train to travel between cities. Most of us on the show knew what was stored in each wagon and called them by number: "Go to 55-wagon and get me the bicycle for the clown gag" etc. I still know what was in many of them and I still know a lot of the load order for the train. I'll tell about that stuff later.) Anyway, back to the story of Anthony Lande and running into 16-wagon with a Harlan. We almost fired him that day but for some reason decided against it. I sometimes wish we had, since he caused us further headaches in later cities. Ah well, it doesn't matter now!!!

As far as I remember the rest of the week went smoothly, or at least routinely, which means there were many bumps but they were standard bumps. I'm pretty sure I'm remembering correctly that the loading ramp to the main arena floor was fairly steep (going up from the street) and with a big curve in it. That always makes for a fun time - load-in is harder, load-out is harder, getting animals past each other safely is harder, etc. But I don't remember any particular incidents.

I just remembered why I don't remember any incidents. I left Cincinnati at some point during the week. I only remember that because the airport is in Kentucky. I have no idea where I went (maybe the new American Airlines Center in Dallas, maybe the flooded arena in Houston - can't remember) I just know I was gone for at least 2 days of the engagement.

So, at the end of the week it became time to load out. It was pretty cold and sometime during the 4 hours of loading out at the building it started to snow. That wreaked utter havoc on the loading of the train - the ramps were slick so the wagons had a hard time getting up, the cars themselves were slick, so moving the wagons down the long line of flat cars was difficult. Generally it was a miserable load-out. I'm pretty sure I had forgotten my scarf (or maybe this was the first really cold load-out we'd had - we spent January in Florida and I don't remember right now where we spent February) so I was pretty cold and we were out there for more than the 2 hours that it normally took after the arena load-out was done. We were fighting the snow the whole time. And the flat cars park right next to the river, so there was a wicked wind the whole time. We finally got the train loaded and I got to go home to my train room.

It's a fairly long trip from Cincinnati to Baltimore. We were scheduled to arrive on Tuesday at about 1:30 in the afternoon after leaving Cincinnati on Monday early morning (2:30am-ish). So it's like a 36-hour train trip. Well, I got really sick on that train run. Usually I liked the long runs because it meant more time off without cell signal or email and more time to cook good meals and watch our taped TV from the previous week. On this train run all I wanted to do was stay in bed. I even threw up once and I'm one of those people who will do ANYTHING to avoid throwing up. It was terrible. And we arrived in Baltimore late, so we ended up with an overnight load-in for a Wednesday night opening. It was awful. I'll leave most of the gory details to the Baltimore posting, but just believe me, it was probably the most miserable load-in of my entire time on the circus.

Split weeks suck!

So, in this post (which is long overdue, I know) the problem is that I can barely remember anything from the next circus week. So I'll do a little circus and a little other stuff.

Circus:
After Hershey, PA, we did what's called a split week in Springfield, Mass and Albany, NY. As you may have guessed, that means we played two cities in one week - two load-ins, two load-outs. Painful, really. Truth is, I don't even remember what the arena in Springfield looked like. I can't picture where my trailer was, I can't picture where the animals were, and I have no idea what the inside of the place was like. No memory of it at all. And I don't know the name of the arena either (but it's not the Dunkin' Donuts arena, 'cause that's in Providence hee hee). I do remember that the drive from Springfield to Albany is short, so it's the first time I drove a trailer. I drove the GMC truck pulling the relatively small laundry trailer. The General Manager, Dave Brown, drove my truck and trailer. It actually turned out that driving the laundry trailer was harder, because it's a ball-hitch type trailer (just that little ball sticking out from the back of the truck and the tongue of the trailer sits on the ball). My trailer was a fifth wheel, which mounts in the bed of the truck, so I think, in the end, you have more control with a fifth wheel trailer. Anyway, that doesn't really matter. We got to Albany, and I remember a bit more about Albany than I do about Springfield.

In Albany, the loading area is a downhill ramp. Getting trucks and wagons in and out was not simple. And there's really not much in the way of a loading dock where we could leave anything parked, so we had to unload each truck and then move it out of the way. Yuck. That takes up lots of time and on a split week, there's not much of that to spare.

I don't remember having to do a whole lot with the load-in, but I think that's because I was dealing with the animal areas. The tigers were put in an empty dirt lot about 1 1/2 blocks from the arena. During the show, they'd be put in their transport cages (those small black cages that drive onto the arena floor to get the tigers into the center ring during the show) and be towed by Harlan (that's those little tugs like they use at airports for luggage carts) to the arena. It was not the most ideal location and I got numerous complaints about it from the tiger owner, Josip Marcan. So I spent much of the first day trying to get enough power and water to that area for the tigers and Josip's trailer.

I also spent some time dealing with power and water for the small number of trailers that were able to park at the arena. It was me, the 2 lead horse guys, Jon Weiss (the human cannonball), Sara Houcke (tiger presenter), Angel Quiros (the high wire act had negotiated having one of their house trailers be at the building in each city), and 2 elephant guys. It turned out there wasn't enough power available for all of the trailers, so I ran my trailer off my generator for the 3 days we were there. It meant that I couldn't really go anywhere, because the generator was mounted in the bed of my truck. Also it was loud, but I can pretty much sleep through anything, so it didn't bother me too much.

Reed Fisher, a good friend of mine from Virginia Opera, stopped in Albany on his way to Cooperstown to work at Glimmerglass Opera for the summer. So he got to see my fun tall-man's trailer and meet my new kitty. As I recall, Gandhi was surprisingly brave when Reed visited. Reed probably has plenty of opinions to offer about the visit, so I'll let him put those in my comment book.

OK, so really, that was a lot more than I thought I had to say about that week. Here are the few things I was going to say that aren't about the circus:

1. I've been cooking a lot recently and have realized that I love it. Also, some friends of ours gave us a subscription to Cooking Light for Christmas and I LOVE IT! If you like to cook and have trouble finding recipes that you like, I highly recommend it. Everything tastes great, is low in fat and calories, yet fills you up quite well. It's amazing how much better Todd and I have been eating since we started getting that magazine.
2. I found an online game that I just can't get enough of. It's called This is notpron and it's HARD. But I love it, 'cause that's the sort of silly stuff that I love. I'm only on level 12 and I'm currently somewhat stuck. I know what I have to do and how to do it, but I just can't actually do it (it's called cross-viewing and requires crossing your eyes to make two pictures meld into one, sort of like those old stereoviewers. My eyes just don't want to cross like that). Anyway, I love it too and if you like puzzles and want to learn a bit about HTML and your computer and web searching and lots of other stuff, you should try it.
3. Finally in my list, genealogy is so much fun. I've just gone back to my search after a while away and immediately found a new piece of info that I didn't have before that gets one of my lines back into the 1700's. Of course, it makes it that much harder, since there aren't as many records that far back, but it's such a challenge. I love getting people started on genealogy, so if you have any interest and you want a jump start, I'd be happy to help.