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THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CIRCUSBeneath a mammoth superb firmament pavilionWhere there's life there's mud-- B. HanlonGRANDEST OF THE SPECTACLESTHE CROWNING SUCCESS OF THE AGE!Even the simplest clown manages by gesture and incident to explore the mythology of the self. He too like the saint, extends the dimensions of consiousness beyond its normal limits. His ritual has its own sanctity as it elicits from us all the subtler dramas of our destiny. In the first place, the clown recovers for us the nature of our humanity. In him, in his ludicrous contradictions of dignity and embarrassment, of pomp and rags, of assurance and collapse, of sentiment and sadness, of innocence and guile, we learn to see ourselves. We follow in his bold bluff and crumple in his public disasters. We are, in short, restored to our humanity, delivered of all the real bombast, the pretence of invulnerability, the emperor complex of being above it all. The smirks, the traps, the sudden descent, the shattering realization of reaching beyond ourselves, the startlin disclosure of our absurd weakness, our naked self uncovered in its ludicrous contradictions--all this is part of salvation. It is the tilted topsy turvy halo, half broken, that crowns the clown with a capital C.Samual Howard Miller