Love

The other night I watched the Cirque du Soleil Love documentary. When I first found out Cirque du Soleil had a show that was centered around Beatles' songs, I was super excited! The Beatles have been my favorite band since I was four years old! I would love Love LOVE to see this performance!!! My roommate and I even entertained the idea of flying out to Vegas this past Spring to see the show, but alas, it was not in our budgets. Bummer, I know. (Someday, it will happen).

My dad bought me the documentary for Christmas last year, and I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that this was my first time watching it. I generally watch movies when I'm going to bed, and in that case, I don't normally pick movies I want to really pay attention to because I'm just going to fall asleep anyways. And then, the other times I watch movies tends to be with friends. And it's just not every day that one of my friends says to me, "Hey Rainie, we should totally watch this documentary about the circus!" Although, I really think they should. ;) (to be fair, some would, but not many)

I was really hoping the ENTIRE performance would be on this dvd because, as I said, Vegas just doesn't fit into my budget right now. But I didn't really expect it to (and it wasn't). But the documentary was super interesting. It followed the whole production of the show. And what do I find out while watching this?! That George Harrison was friends with the founder of Cirque du Soleil, Guy Laliberte. AND that it was old Georgie's idea for Cirque du Soleil to create a show using The Beatles' music.

Now George has always been my favorite Beatle. He's kind of mysterious. He's super spiritual. And his songs are just absolutely beautiful. (In fact, I liked him so much that my mom considered letting me take a day off of school in 8th grade to mourn his death.) And now I find out that my favorite Beatle came up with the idea to collaborate with Cirque du Soleil! Another one of my favorite things!

This just completely solidifies my reasoning that George is by far the best Beatle. It is just beautiful. It is love.

This video completely took my breath away.

Check it out :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGq4k8RMe9o&feature=player_embedded

Circusitis

I think I'm suffering from a severe case of circusitis. Somehow the circus is involved in almost everything I do. I see references to it on TV, I walk into Borders and see a book about an elephant I just read about, Modoc, while driving a song called "Trapeze" by Iron and Wine pops up on shuffle on my Ipod and today I even won Scattegories by using juggling as a past time, wire walking as something you see at the circus, and elephants as an animal. I even have dreams about the circus! When I first got hired at the library, I was hired to index Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus programs from 1919 to present. During this time I index some 4000 plus articles in the database. This is really how I learned a lot of what I know about the circus. While indexing I would see something interesting and read the article. Almost everything I read made me curious so I would look up more information on people, acts and animals. One day I was indexing an article in the 100th anniversary edition of RBBB and I saw a picture of the Wild Men of Borneo. I was really curious about these two fellows and looked up a little more about them. They were two brothers, Hiram and Barney Davis who were in Barnum and Bailey's side show in the late 1800s. The brothers were dwarfs who possessed extraordinary strength. They were billed as Waino and Plutano, the Wild Men of Borneo. There even was a booklet that was written describing their capture. After reading about these gents, I had a dream that I was actually meeting them. The dream wasn't anything special, but I think it was then that I knew that the circus isn't just part of my job, it's a part of me and I love it.

“It is the only spectacle I know that, while you watch it, gives the quality of a truly happy dream.” --Ernest Hemingway on the circus

Well, it has certainly been an exciting week in the Special Collections room.

Firstly, we received a response from our pal, Fred, about our elephant skin! Through Fred (thanks Fred!) we have determined that our elephant hide is one of two elephants, either Vance or Tommy (personally, I'm leaning towards Vance). Apparently back in 1935 the Al G. Barnes circus was performing in Canada. A worker in the elephant department, Jesse Wardlow, slipped in the menagerie and was crushed under the foot of an elephant (Vance). This incident was published as an accident, but it is believed that this was a more deliberate act by Vance. Both Tommy and Vance were determined dangerous and sent to Peru, Indiana for execution. I am kind of curious how one determines if it was accidental or intentional on part of the elephant. Interesting. I'm rather excited that I now have a name for our little chunk of elephant :)

We've been rather busy this past week preparing for the Circus Historical Society convention. We've been rearranging the reading room, hanging posters and pictures on the 2nd and 6th floors of the library (they look awesome!), and I've been plenty busy putting together displays that hopefully will wow the masses. I know they wow me!! Earlier this week, Maureen and Mark went out to archives to pick up a few more of our larger circus artifacts that we can put on display. Some of the items they brought back include a tom-tom, a shield used in Ringling Bros spec acts, three chairs from different seating sections, a tent flap and Mickey King's rigging! All of these items are outstanding, but I really got a kick out of seeing the actual rigging that Mickey King used.
Mickey King is considered to be one of the greatest aerialists in circus history. Of the women aerialists of her time, she was one of the few who performed the incredible one armed plange(Lillian Leitzel being another). The best way I can describe a plange is that the aerialist holds her body horizontally with her arms holding the ring or rope behind her. It's incredibly hard and takes a ton of strength. I was so excited when Maureen showed me the rigging for this. In fact, I think I may have squealed and jumped up and down for joy when I first saw this.
Here's a few links to an article about Mickey King written by our own Steve Gossard
http://www.circus4youth.com/res_det.php?res_id=8
http://www.circus4youth.org/res_det.php?res_id=15
http://www.circus4youth.org/res_det.php?res_id=17


In other news, I, Rainie Themer, am now a card carrying member of Circus Historical Society :) I just got my card and certificate in the mail the other day. I was pretty darn excited. I think I may even get my membership card laminated :)


Well, I do believe that is all for now. I'll leave you with lovely little video my pal, Kevin shared with me the other day (Thanks Kevin!)

Enjoy :)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id4i9iJNHqs&feature=channel

Ladiiiiiies and Gentlemen

For those who may read this that don't already know, I work in the Rare Books and Special Collections Room at Milner Library at Illinois State University. I've been working there for about a year and a half now.

My love affair with this particular room started back in the Spring semester of 2009. My Forensic Bibliography and Archival Editing class took a "field trip" up to the room to view some of the old and interesting items that we have at our library that most did not already know about. Some of these items included circus materials, first edition Lois Lenski books, Japanese Scrolls and books about Lincoln. While there one particular book caught my eye and I was completely enamored by it. I've always loved books, but there was something that completely intrigued me about this one. This book had a wood cover (something I had never seen in person at the time), leather binding on the spine with very intricate engravings and holes through the cover. I soon found out it was written in 1507 (holy cow!), was written in old Latin and used Gutenberg's formula for ink, which I had previously learned in this class was lamp black and egg whites. Because it was written in Gutenberg's ink, the typing was actually edible...to BOOK WORMS. Yes, they actually are real little worms, not just something my friends would call me when they saw me reading under the lights at football games in high school. Needless to say after finding all of this out and spending the rest of the period with this book, I was hooked. I talked to the librarian and found out about volunteering and spent the rest of the semester volunteering there in my free time.


Over the past year and a half (I got hired on after my first semester of volunteering) I have learned so much about our collection. People ask me all the time what I could possibly be doing working in the library all day. "Do you just read and do homework all the time?" The answer is most definitely NOT. There is ALWAYS something to do in the Special Collections room. What has surprised me the most is that I've become very fond of one of our collections in particular. We have four collections (Lincoln, Rare and Fine, Children's Lit and Circus), all of which are very cool and interesting in their own way. But the one collection I have fallen in love with and can't get enough of is our Circus collection. There is so much to learn from this collection and so many amazing stories that go along with it. I have stumbled upon so many interesting items (books, pictures, artifacts...) in this collection, and all of the collections that it has inspired me to write this blog, so all can know about the amazing things I see everyday.

I figure I'll start this off with a bang and talk about the incredible and almost hard to believe item that I found last Thursday. Brace yourselves.
Right now we are in the middle of preparing for the annual Circus Historical Society (CHS) Convention. This year we have the honor of hosting it. I was given the task last week to make a display of anything that I found interesting and that would knock the socks off of the CHS members. I spent all day last Thursday going through boxes looking at artifacts that had been donated to our collection. I thought I'd find things like circus figurines, buttons, maybe some costumes, but I NEVER thought I would find what I found. I was digging through one of the boxes and pulled out an item wrapped in tissue paper (they all are) that was a little heavier than everything else I had found thus far. On it there was a small label that read "no numbered hide." "No numbered hide," I thought to myself, "what the heck could that be? Hide? Like animal hide? No, it can't be. I can't believe that." So I started unwrapping it and by god it was exactly what the label said: a non-cataloged ELEPHANT hide, well a chunk of one. I was shocked. Maureen and Mark (my bosses) were in the fish bowl-esque office. I looked up at them and back down at the elephant skin and back up again and told them they had to come see this. It was this hard, grey and wrinkly chunk of elephant skin...and it still had the hair! And it had this smell...I can't quite put my finger on it, but I suppose that's because I've never smelled dead elephant hide before. It took me a few minutes to calm down a bit because I was so excited, a little grossed out but excited, before I could read the card and examine it a little. According the card, this chunk of elephant hide was donated to Sverre O. Braathen (one of our major donators) by Don Howard who cut the skin off the Al G. Barnes' elephant after it had been euthanized in Peru, Indiana after it killed a person in Canada.


How cool! With that information we may even be able to figure out which elephant is missing a piece of its hide! Mark did a little bit of research and we have narrowed it down to three different elephants, dating from 1917, 1928 and 1935. I immediately sent an email out to a friend of ours who is practically an encyclopedia of circus facts to see if he knew which elephant our hide may belong to. As of now, I am anxiously awaiting his reply.

Until next time,
May all your days be circus days! :)