THE SIDE SHOW

                                                         THE SIDE SHOW

                                                  HARRY THOMSAS DANVERS

                                   "There's a sucker born every minute!"stormed B.T Barnum.  He was the inventor of the three ring circus, under the Big Top.

                              The first time I went to see the said phenomenon was with my father in Philadelphia. I was about ten years of age at the time and the whole thing was a strange combination of human and animal species; brought from distant continents and flavored with the scent of their own grandeur. It all consisted of straw; sand, dirt and the displacement of all that under the Big Top.

                             I remember it was raining and therefore the area was difficult to traverse. My father had to help me around the mud and we sat in bleachers, which were not first class seats. They were at the top and nothing more than painted, gray planks, the kind found in high school football stadiums in the late fifties and early sixties.

                            It was tremendous; at least for a little shaver like me, for there were three huge rings, of distinctive shows, which I could not watch at the same time.  I tried to concentrate my interest at the most outstanding, but since B.T. had a knack for talent, he had them all blazing with an international flare and I was wont to dart my attention from the lion trainer, to the man on the flying trapeze.

                           I was about to ask my father if he would take me to the side show, when the elephants stampeded. Almost everyone thought it was a part of a novel act, but the truth came out the next day in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  Through the negligence of the trainers, the elephants had gone wild and if they had not steered them through the openings, he might have overturned the bandstand seats and toppled us all over into primordial oblivion.

                            It didn't happen, of course, but the side show closed up after that.  I don't know if it was because of the rain or for the fact that the elephants had to be rounded up.

                           But, missing the side show had always bothered me, even after I migrated to Silicon Valley and made my first million in the computer game. There I met a different kind of three ring circus, but good old B. T. was always present in my mind and I managed to make a killing with a new kind of sucker.

                           Yet the side show continued to haunt me, for I entertained periphial vision of expanding my gains, with congruent enterprises, sustained by the Big Top I had already established; complete with its three rings.

                         Everything went well for a few years, for like the three rings; I had invested in an international spectrum. The Big Top remained strong and active and I was defraying gradual loses from the main company.

                         It was on my seventieth birthday that the elephants stampeded. The Stock Market took a dive and all that I had invested was lost in a minute.

                        I was left with my skivvies and a house on Long Island. I sold my Van Gogh's and Picassos and was left without servants and a swimming pool without water.

                        I realized that this was the main event, but couldn't help but consider what might have happened, if I would have attended the side show.