My career blogging about the Globe sure is:
"Circus performers risk much to amaze us all; A frightful accident in R.I was a reminder that danger is integral to the circus. A visit with a traveling troupe hints at why this way of life remains a powerful draw" by Jenna Russell | Globe Staff June 01, 2014
NORTH BRUNSWICK, N.J. — She has performed it once today already, in the early show that began at 4:30 p.m. Now she dons her sparkly costume once again, preparing for the 7:30 p.m. show. Her husband, circus superintendent Jaime Ramirez, 38, braids her hair for her, weaving rope among the strands, taking care to make the surface smooth and perfect. In the braid he secures a ring made of stainless steel. Then Petya Milanova -- an acrobat trained in gymnastics from age 5 in her native Bulgaria, the graceful and easygoing 33-year-old is one of the stars of the Cole Brothers Circus — and one of the few performers in the world practiced in an act known as the “hair hang” -- makes her way to the big top, pausing at the back flap of the big red tent, listening for the booming voice of the ringmaster to cue her entrance. In the center of the spotlit circus ring, she takes her place beneath a dangling metal hook. Someone loops the hook through the ring in her hair, and then she is rising toward the roof.
Twenty feet off the ground, she juggles and dances....
There’s no net. But the fear has long since faded, along with the pain the hanging once caused in her scalp. Even after what happened in Providence last month — when an equipment failure at a Ringling Brothers show sent eight hair-hang performers, including Milanova’s friend and former partner, into a terrifying free fall — she is fearless. The minutes spent aloft seem like a gift: a fleeting, exhilarating reward at the heart of a demanding, unrelenting kind of life.
The night before, 100 miles away in Tannersville, the last show had wrapped after 9 p.m. Then a crew of 60 men descended, pulling the heavy, log-like tent stakes from the ground, packing everything into a caravan of trucks. They drove onto the quiet highway after midnight and arrived here, in a field just off Route 1, at 3 a.m. The crew was at work by 6 raising the tent. Milanova and her family followed in their RV. Two days later they would all pull up stakes again.
Milanova has not seen her mother in Bulgaria in several years. She misses her 12-year-old son, who stays with friends during the circus season so he can attend public school in Florida. The couple misses gardening when they are on the road, so Ramirez keeps a growing collection of potted trees — two dogwoods; a cherry; a fig — and lugs them outside the RV at every stop. They also bring along their dogs: the noisy Chihuahuas, Bonbon and Tequila, and Dexter, their cuddly Boston terrier.
“It’s a good life to me, an honest life,” says Ramirez, “to show the audience something amazing, that not everyone can do.”
Milanova agrees, sitting close beside him. For their children, though, she hopes for a different path. “I think they can have something better,” she ventures.
A long and weary road
The Cole Brothers season kicks off in mid-March and runs for nine months. The 130-year-old circus, one of about a dozen that tour the United States, visits 100 towns and cities in a circuitous amble across the East Coast, pausing for two or three days in each one. The show goes on two or three times daily; it will arrive in Marshfield, on the South Shore, June 16. There are no weekends off, no summer break, no stopping until the run ends in December. The living conditions along the way are spartan. Most crew members and performers sleep in trailer compartments no bigger than a walk-in closet, often with a roommate. The electricity shuts off at midnight. The hot water often runs out.
“It’s basically a nine-month-long camping trip — and I hate the outdoors,” says Elena Sanders, 28, a circus acrobat who studied fashion design at Mount Ida College in Newton and took classes at AirCraft Aerial Arts in Somerville before enrolling in circus school in San Francisco.
The circus seems a throwback, destined for extinction. Surely a spoiled younger generation would reject the schedule, lack of amenities, and modest starting pay. And yet, the current Cole Brothers cast of some 30 performers includes five young Americans trained at circus schools all across the United States. It is a cliché that sounds hopelessly dated — running away with the circus — but it still happens....
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Also see: Circus Trick Turns to Tragedy in Rhode Island
