The Shriner Circus

I went with my family to the Zurah Shrine Circus yesterday at the Target Center. Kind of a strange experience. Expensive as hell, even with our 'buy an adult ticket and the kids get in free' deal. With all the Ticket Master fees added on, and parking, it came to almost a hundred bucks. There were protesters outside, protesting the way the animals in the circus are treated, and they certainly have a point. But Paige took one of their fliers and didn't really look at it, thinking it was just a flier about the animals in general - not about them leading such dismal lives.  But as we were going in to the circus past the protesters, I couldn't help but think, geez, what buzzkills. Do they really need to be in our faces, the faces of our kids, as we go into this supposedly fun event? But I'll get back to that in a bit...

But so Paige really did enjoy the circus, and I thought it was okay, if a bit long. The concession folks who kept going up and down the auditorium steps were annoying, since they kept blocking our views, and then the intermission was a total 'bend over and open up you wallet' kind-of-a-thing, offering one-minute rides on elephants and ponies in tight, crowded circles for $10 bucks a pop. There were some neat acts, and the MC looked and sounded a lot like Fran Drescher (still not sure whether or not that's a good thing) and there was a tiger-tamer dude who came straight out of an '80's hair band (and was a lot more active than the tigers) and there were the sexy hula-hoop women and rope climber/danglers and motorcyclists-on-high-wires-with-more-women-dangling-from-below.

Zach was okay with the whole deal, and I think he liked some of it. He had a communication device with him that he's trying out - one that he can type onto, or touch pictures, and a voice says the words out loud, and as the circus was going on, he was writing things like 'grrrrrrr....' when the tigers were on stage.

Anyway, circuses have always seemed a little...off...to me. Great fodder for spooky stories, at least. And look, I know that the Shriners do a lot of great charity work, and this is a way to raise funds for that work, so I'm not trying to be an a-hole about the whole deal. But the more I thought about it and watched the elephants and the tigers and the ponies, and the more I thought about the protesters outside, the more I guess I appreciated the protesters. And as we drove home afterward, Paige and Melissa and I talked about the protesters and why they were there, and we decided that the animals in the circus, while they may be well-loved by the trainers, have a kind of shitty life, having to travel from city to city in trucks and then staying for the long weekends in whatever venue they're at for the weekend - in this case the Target Center, which is certainly not full of wind-swept savannahs and trees and ponds of lush water surrounded by quivering game to stalk.

So maybe, in a strange way, the circus with the protesters was better for my kids than a circus without the protesters. I guess that's all I'm really trying to say.