Preface:

Here, in the nifty nineties, resplendent with gun-toting eighth-graders, drive-by shootings, adolescent pregnancies and the like, it's consoling to know that we have a new social awareness to feel good about. It's called "Political Correctness".

Although I personally regard this title as an embryo oxymoron, it is, nonetheless, something to adjust to and - as the learned purveyors of "Newspeak" will quickly point out - very important to our social equilibrium.

Now, rather than fretting about the drug problem, crime on the rampage or unemployment, you can look smugly at your bathroom mirror image and say, "I no longer call little people midgets, they're "Vertically Challenged".

Uninformed as the sideshow people contained within these pages may have been, they were a reasonably happy, well-adjusted group. For the time slot they occupied in history they were self-sufficient and far better off than their counterparts who were often hidden away in the family attic. Titles did not offend them. Their titles were, in fact, their passports to a better-than-average income.

Pictorial canvases - "banners" in the parlance of the portable amusement industry - have been around as long as accounts of these nomadic entertainment enterprises have been kept. Garish and often crude, these tanbark tapestries have brightened not only the tented establishments that they advertised but, in many cases, out-dazzled the very attractions they illustrated.

Since carnivals and circuses are kaleidoscope in nature, bombarding all senses with a veritable meteor shower of distractions, it is indeed significant that any clearly-defined images linger in the publics' mind, yet the scenes depicted on those huge billowing billboards do just that.

Were those who produced these advertisements merely hacks who cranked them out cookie-cutter fashion in some dingy loft or were they inspired artisans who pondered the effectiveness of each brushstroke? Were any of them sufficiently familiar with the subjects that they patiently oversold to feel a wry sense of lighthearted larceny? Were there any among them who ever experienced the irony of being the subject of his own boisterous broadsides?

A blanket, "Yes" to all of the above paradoxically suggests a banner in itself; "The Truth IS Stranger than Fiction"!

Most of us who have succumbed to the temptation of sideshow banners have, upon entering the tent, been predictably disappointed. Did you really expect Freddy the Frog Boy to be perched in a Disney-Like swamp setting, sloshing his amphibian feet and peering at you through bulging green eyes? Well no, not really, but you didn't quite imagine him as a bored little gnome of a man in a dirty t-shirt either. "Known in his hometown of Ludiwici, Georgia as Freddy the Frog Boy", the sideshow's M.C. had said, doubtless provoking the thought in your mind that folks in Ludiwici, Georgia had very fertile imaginations.

Today, in a world nearly devoid of such quaint things as sideshows, we casually accept the canards pitched at us on television, knowing in our hearts that the washer that never needs a repairman usually does and the exhaustive clinical studies done on Glitz or Glop rarely decrease your visits to the dentist.

Freddy the Frog Boy, you see, was just the Ipana of his day.

And what of those devious charlatans, those cunning crafters of dreams, chortling in glee with each new rainbow that they create for us to chase? Do we execute them with laughing gas? Bury them in a sand hill populated with battery-operated ants? Of course not! Like the banner painters, they provide us with the very vital ability to laugh at ourselves and our fears and foibles.

So come with us in our maintenance free automobile to a land of perfect smiles, green men who await us, seated on their lily-pads, just around the corner.

The doors to the big show are now open!