Big Top Turns Tables On Reporters (2-25-00)
(Credit: Canoe.ca)
Story and photos by Doug E. Bell -- Canoe Reporter
 They make it look so easy. They make it sound so good. The romance and exicitement that is life in a circus.
A close-knit community of performers, in Toronto this week with the Canadian-based Garden Bros. Circus, allowed a handful of reporters to try out the view from inside the centre ring - and from up on the trapeze platform, and from atop an elephant, and from a bar hanging beneath a motorcycle racing up an inclined cable.
It was a dreary February afternoon, dull, drizzly skies smudging the city's outline. The SkyDome's hulking concrete foundations promised little relief. Inside, the building appeared empty. No footsteps echoed. An exploratory cough went unanswered. Huge, muffling curtains had been hung to block the view down to the stadium's floor. Left with little choice, I pulled back the corner of one and received an overwhelming bombardment of the senses describable only as pure circus.
The sound of caliopy music and laughter. The glitter of spotlights on rhinestones. Strong, satin-bedecked bodies perched high on tiny ledges. The smell of popcorn, motor oil and manure. It was enough to make even the most jaded reporter feel like a kid, if not act like one.
 The assemblage of media-types were doing their best to appear cool. 'Trapeze. Does that have two 'e's?' one reporter asked, notebook trembling in hands still sweaty from a climb down the narrow, swivelling, steel-cable ladder which the Flying Cercece family scales as if equipped with jet packs.
Another reporter replied casually, when asked how it felt to ride on a bar hanging below a motorcylce as it raced up a cable to SkyDome's 300 level, "Oh it was great. Yeah." Then he proceeded to try and walk away before he'd been freed from the loops of the safety harness. The other reporters laughed, which was okay - they were next.
When John and his wife Tina perform this act she does somersaults on the under-bar while the entire rig, motorcycle and all, spins around the cable - held onto it by nothing but two worriesomely thin metal guides. I'm glad I did not know that when I was clinging to the slippery side-bars and rapidly ascended through that big, empty space which makes up the majority of SkyDome's interior.
 John stopped near the top of the cable. He leaned over, way way over, (taking the bike with him and thus sending me way way over the opposite way) and said, "Pretty high eh?" I shook my head yes. I wasn't too scared to talk, I just didn't want to exhale in case the displaced air upset our equilibrium. He kick-started the motorcycle again (catching it on the first try incidentally and thereby proving there is a God because he couldn't possibly have known I was simultaneously praying for him to do just that) and down we went.
As I was relinquinshing the perch, Tina she was wisely towelling off the side-bars to which I had been clinging, and then she and John zoomed about halfway up and proceeded to pull off two flawless triple loops and return to earth in about the same time it takes to say, 'Oh It was great. Yeah' and then wobble past a group of reporters.
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...AND HERE, AND HERE: The author filling out the 'I-can't-sue-if-I-die' form
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RIDE IT UP WHERE?: The author checks out the view from the trapeze hanging below John Winn's cable-climbing bike
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CAN WE TALK ABOUT THIS?: The author after being looped tightly into the safety harnesses
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