Atherton Family Notes

During our vacation this summer with Tiphaine, we spent a day at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin. We had stopped in Baraboo once a few years ago on the way to visiting Sandi’s grandmother in North Dakota and had made a mental note to visit the museum if we ever got back to that area again. So after the first few days of our vacation, which we spent in nearby Wisconsin Dells, we made our way to Circus World before heading on to Chicago.

The museum is located at the site of “Ringlingville”, the winter site used by the Ringling Brothers Circus prior to 1918, when it combined with its sister circus, The Barnum & Bailey Show. The museum collects artifacts from the heyday of the American circus when enormous troupes travelled by rail across the country. During the summer months, the museum also hosts a one-ring circus, magic acts, a kid’s circus and a training facility for big cats.

The museum is well-worth the effort, if only to see a little bit of the history of the Circus. The indoors sections of the museum host an array of circus advertising, artifacts from some of the old extravaganzas and various other bits of circus ephemera. The kids enjoyed the circus and the tigers, although Tiphaine pointed out that it wasn’t much like Cirque du Soleil — which is true, but what do you expect? — we all got in to the museum for less than the price of one bad seat at Ka.

Tiphaine was also a little taken aback by the performance of “God Bless The USA” at the end of the circus –it was very over the top, but not that different from what we ‘Mericans are used to seeing at a Forth of July celebration — She was surprised by it enough that she had to go back and see it again at the afternoon performance.

Carissa fit right in at the museum.
 
 

Cece with some of the performers.  I swear the Ringmaster must have had his face surgically altered to allow him to smile like that.
 
 

The crown jewel of the museum is the collection of circus wagons they have accumulated over the years and the workshop where teams of specialists restore the wagons to their original glory.  The wagons served as an integral part of the advertising of the circus and at the height of the glory days, were works of art themselves.

The Golden age of Chivalry wagon, featuring two intricately carved dragons.
 
 

The France wagon.  Part of the allure of the circus was the promise of exotic entertainment from all over the world, so the wagons were often themed with the countries of the world.
 
 

A wagon showing Pocahontas saving the life of John Smith.
 
 

Beginning in the 1920s, after the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circuses combined, the shows began putting on huge extravaganzas with themes that were updated every year.  This is a design sketch for the Cinderella extravaganza.
 
 

An example of the over-the-top advertising style used to lure customers into the circus.
 
 

Poor Sadie, we took her to the circus, and they kept her.

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OK, I held off adding stereograms to the first post about the Circus World Museum, but I did take several of them and I’ll be posting them over the next few days.

This first one is a picture of a cannon that was used as part of the infamous human cannonball act.  There are two varieties of such cannons:  one is powered by compressed air, and the other is spring-loaded.  I’m not sure which type this one is.

I like the way this picture turned out.  It looks like it could have been used as a 3D postcard for the museum.

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The stereogram below shows one of the more unique exhibits at the Circus World Museum.  It is an example of a “pony float”, which were popular exhibits at the circus parades that preceded the start of the actual circus in a new town.  This one was built sometime in the 1880′s and shows the prince helping Cinderella try on the glass slipper.

There weren’t very many of these types of floats built and even fewer survive, so this float seems to be an important artifact at the museum.

If you are interested in reading a overwhelming amount of detail about this type of float, when and where they were used and even chains of ownership, the Circus Historical Society has the article for you.

The gilding makes the detail of the picture hard to see in 2D, but it makes a spectacular 3d effect.

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We spent the long holiday weekend near Nashville, TN, at a small Atherton family reunion that has become a recent tradition for us. I’m going to post more about this later, but I wanted to share something quickly while I was thinking about it.

The adults of the group attended the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday night, which was a lot of fun. It is also an interesting experience in that it combines traditional and contemporary country music and a whole lot of advertising (it’s a live radio show).

The last half-hour of the show was hosted by Ricky Skaggs and he brought along his in-laws in the form of the The Whites. The performed a beautiful trio of the traditional song, “Fair and Tender Ladies.”

Thanks to Grooveshark, you can hear the studio version of the song below:

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This stereogram is from the Kid’s circus stage at the Circus World Museum.  We didn’t attend the Kid’s circus — Carissa, Celia and Sadie are probably above the target age (and Tiphaine definitely is!) but the stage is located inside one of the historic Ringlingville buildings, so we ran into it anyway.

Unlike the Cinderella wagon I posted about the other day, the faux circus wagon pictured here doesn’t have any historical significance, but it makes such a great 3D subject, I couldn’t resist.

As Ned points out below, I was wrong about the origin of the wagon depicted above.  I had assumed due to its location  that it was a prop designed for the Kid’s Circus.  Apparently, it was built for use in one of the Ringling shows, but I don’t have any more information about it than that yet.  Searching the internet isn’t helpful, because I’m not smart enough to figure out a set of keywords that will allow Google to find it for me… Searching for “circus wagon that spells ‘circus’” yields lots of unhelpful results.  

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Sandi and I have been talking about this for a long time, and we finally broke down and did it… we bought a digital piano.

Carissa and Celia have both been taking piano lessons for more than a year from my mom, and she has been mentioning (with an increasing frequency, I might add) that the girls needed a real piano to practice on.  Until now, they have been making do with an ancient Casio keyboard — which really hasn’t been too bad for them — but the keys don’t feel like piano keys, and the sound is not that great either.

I’ve been resisting the purchase, mostly because I wanted to make sure that Carissa and Celia were really going to keep playing for a while, but recently, Sandi has started dragging me to Piano Solutions in Carmel on a regular basis.  Plus she had started looking longingly at every piece of junk piano anyone sat at the curb for the heavy trash pickup, and I knew that if I didn’t decide soon, I was going to end up with one of those in my house.  Yuck.

Over Labor Day weekend, we stayed at Chris and Amy’s house in Franklin Tennessee as part of our annual Atherton family mini-reunion.  Amy still has the console piano that she played as a child, and every time Carissa walked by it, she stopped to play for a few minutes.  So I was finally convinced.

Last Saturday, Sandi and I went back up to Piano Solutions again (with a brief stop at Meridian Music as well, just to make sure there wasn’t something better out there), determined to come back with something.  After a lot of hemming and hawing, we settled on a nice Kawai keyboard that had been used as a demo at the State Fair this year.

It’s a nice-looking machine with a high-gloss piano black finish.  It has about 6 million buttons on it and a load of features, some of which are of dubious value — but they are all fun to play with.  Each of the girls has found something they really like so far.  Carissa loves the sound effect pads, Cece loves to try out all of the instruments, and Sadie has sung “The Twelve Days of Christmas” using the goofy “Concert Magic” feature about a thousand times since Saturday.

I even went back on Monday and bought a couple of sheet music books off the clearance rack for myself.  I’m way out of practice, but I’m gonna try.

We’ll see if anyone is still playing it a month or six months from now.  For now, I’m worried that this purchase might be a little like buying a boat:  They say the two best days of a man’s life are the day he buys a boat… and the day he sells it.

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Yesterday marked 11 weeks to go until my birthday, and tomorrow marks the halfway point from the original weigh-in, so today is a good time to report in on how I’m doing.

On July 15th, I weighed 266.8 pounds.
On August 20th, I weighed in at 261.0 pounds.
This morning, I weighed in at 245.0 pounds.

Wow.

I’ve done pretty well since the last weigh-in. Even when we went to the family reunion in Tennessee, I managed to stay on my diet – as my family will attest. In August, I bought a size 40 belt since my size 42 belts were getting too big — now I have to use the last hole on the size 40 belt to keep my pants up.

I do have a confession, though. On Monday of this week, I weighed in at 249.2, so I’ve lost 4.2 pounds this week. How did I do it? Well, it didn’t hurt that I fasted for more than 40 hours between Monday night and Wednesday afternoon. I had my wisdom teeth taken out on Tuesday, a long-overdue operation that has significantly contributed to me eating very lightly since then as well. In fact, I weighed myself just prior to eating my first meal on Wednesday afternoon, andI actually weighed 244.2 pounds then. I didn’t count that measurement, since much of the reason it was so low was due to dehydration, I’m sure.

But now that it’s three days later, I’m putting that weight loss in the bank. It’s occurred to me that maybe I should have had my wisdom teeth taken out one at a time over the course of four weeks. At that rate, they could have accounted for 16 pounds of weight loss! I can’t really recommend that path, however, because I really don’t remember anything that happened between when the doctor started working on my teeth and late Wednesday evening. I was pretty helpless and slept a lot. Plus Sandi says I scared the kids with my general loopiness and by drooling blood on the couch. It wasn’t a pretty picture, and I guess I’m grateful I wasn’t there for it. Ahem.

To summarize, I’ve lost 21.8 pounds now, and have just under 11 weeks to lose 18.2 more. So I have to average 1.7 pounds per week to make my forty by forty goal! Maybe I can plan to have more dental work on Halloween and Thanksgiving…

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