Bad Girl Of The Big Top

The Born Again Back Story of Barnum’s Bad Girl Of The Big Top

Or

The Mad Motorcycle Diaries Of “Kid Kraut”
The Radical “Road Kill” Revolutionary
Cum Grano Salis
And ….

No apologies for incorrect spelling, bad grammar, long seemingly endless sentences, lack of internet know how & a crippling inability to keep things in correct chronological order in this tall tale of two ideologically opposed cultures. A fractured frontier space odyssey about a wild bunch of a different persuasion and the oddball oppositional systems buster who came between them! Mendacity not withstanding. But what the hell … it’s the thought that counts … right?

Fortunately, my literary failings are covered due to the fact that America lacks a language dictator like The Academia Francoise, whose 40 high & mighty members known as “The Immortals” determine what may or may not be accepted into the French Language. No wonder the French are anal-retentive & prone to expelling Gypsies from their midst! To have behavior modification stamped right on your brain & a governor plugged to your forehead SACRE BLEU! You might as well be one of “Pavlov’s Dogs” at “The Annual Bell Ringers Convention.”  But being liberated, in that I’m “Born Again” and come from “The Home Of The Brave & The Land Of The Free -- I’m safe, even from the late language guru William Safire. Not because I’m right -- but because the old poop is dead.

As for the rest of my failings -- I’ll be damned if I’m gonna sweat the small stuff! With all the things that went haywire, off kilter, got derailed, and eventually went totally KAPUT in the confusing conundrum of my disastrous life of no win circumstances -- I’ll leave such debilitating non-issues to the nitpickers of posterity. I have better things to do now that I’ve miraculously morphed into the THE STUPEFYING SUPER SHERO OF AN UNDERDOG WORLD! Sometimes things that don’t make a bit of sense --- is all in the world that ultimately does make sense.

As THE INTERNET POSTER CHILD for all whose destiny it is to make THE QUANTUM LEAP INTO THE ABSURD, I find that losing ones marbles is the only sane alternative to the possibility of going completely bananas in today’s MAD MAD WORLD OF HORRENDOUS POSSIBILITIES! A world too ridiculously morbid twisted and horrid to take seriously. A nightmare reality no longer fit for woman & children to live in because they are the ones who for the most part bare the brunt of the collateral damage created by the male of the species. (Oh boy, here we go again on one of her inane ideological tirades against the left-brain losers of today’s Techtronic E waste world.) A reverse sexist tradition she inherited from the “La Leche League Of Extraordinary Matriarchs‘” from whom she is unfortunately descended. The subversive shape shifters that make up the ranks of those rebellious outlaw gypsy circus queens… who since the days of the Wild & Woolley West to Gypsy Barnum’s Mad Max Millennium have been on a collision course with The Establishment. From their point of view, the modern world is the Axis Of Evil destined to bring mankind’s Inglorious Basterds down to their forgone doomsday conclusion.  A materialistic death culture they equate with being the fouled & forbidden provinces of the uncircumcised philistines of the synagogue of Satan. Certain of my Gypsy relatives spent so much time with Jews in German concentration camps that the survivors have taken to identifying with them even to the point of practicing circumcision themselves.  Not so with the Jews … who won’t allow them space in the Holocaust museum despite the urgings of the famed Nazi hunter Elli Wiesel to “do the right thing.”  Evidently getting brutalized, tortured, & exterminated together is one thing… but being memorialized with them after the final solution is unacceptable to their God Yahweh… who in fact is my God as well. Of course, where I come from they call Him “The Big Top Boss In The Sky!” Fortunately for me --- HE sympathizes with my cultural dilemma, which is an ongoing congenital cluster fuck, in that being half-German, I have to deal with the fact that some of my goose stepping Adolf collaborators, killed both my Gypsy relatives & The Jews with equal military precision. That is, they did so with the aide of a certain IBM computerized punch card sorting system that helped to make genocide a model of Darwinian efficiency. This is what is called American ingenuity.

Then there’s the double edge dilemma, that on Christmas holidays when visiting my beloved Tanta Mina in the quaint and picturesque village of Tritttau, close to Hamburg --- a certain embittered Uncle and former high-ranking member The Third Reich, who like IBM somehow escaped the notice of The Nuremberg Trails, appeals to me “Das Americanish Svinehunt” for reparations. He can no longer personally put lighted candles on the Christmas tree, as was his former designated Holiday assignment, due to the machine gun fire of an American GI. A brave soldier from Pittsburg Pennsylvania who won the Purple Heart for dispossessing my Uncle Fritz of his lower extremities. Tanta Mina always seats Uncle Fritz at the far end of the table at family gatherings for fear he might poison me for being an enemy combatant. Apparently, he lost some of his marbles along with his extremities and doesn’t know the war is over.

Uncle Fritz… somewhat reminds me of my Grandfather Nonno Nesto, the illegal immigrant who rode with Pancho Villa during his infamous invasion of US Territory. Nonno Nesto is still hell bent on the overthrow of The Gringo’s and it’s only the fact that he’s a Chubby Chaser and totally obsessed with Mama Corliani’s Fabulous Flab -- that keeps him from returning to his old haunts “South Of The Border” where he spent his Glory days sharing Tutti Fruity ice cream with the The Mexican Revolutionary.  Despite his celebrated anarchistic past, Nonno Nesto gets no respect.

The dressing room gossip of The Big Top rumor mill have seen to that by their insistent insinuations that he is not the culprit who fathered Mama Corliani’s Cowboy Cosa Nostra. In the yackety, yack rhetoric of self-righteous ratchet jaws… in a process known as “cutting up jackpots,  ” (a disinformation grapevine that circulates non-stop from circus to circus) the malicious midway gossipmongers have perpetuated a vile rumor that there was another sperm donor in the woodpile somewhere. According to various versions of backyard mythology while in the full flush of youth when Mama Corliani was still a svelte vision of Gypsy Beauty to behold, she apparently “stumbled over a rock” and before she could get up --- a handsome member of the famous Cristiani family ravished her. Like Nicholas Cage ravished Cher by mutual consent in Moonstruck! And that supposedly explains their equestrian prowess and matinee idol good looks.

The other version of the not so immaculate conception of that renegade brood of miserable malcontents called The Corliani Clan… was that she had an ongoing affair of the heart & dangerous liaison with Buffalo Bill, the first President of The Showmen’s League Of America to whom everyone in the outdoor amusement business gives credit for originating the first carnival midway. That figures, given that he rode point for the United States Government in a scam called Manifest Destiny. The ultimate sting for which Col. William F. Cody won The Congressional Medal Of Honor. Apparently ethnic cleansing and hacking your way through walls of Indian flesh was a highly esteemed virtue in that era, along with a lot of other wanton slaughter that passed for patriotism. This ostensibly explains the Corliani’s preoccupation with playing Cowboys & Indians & their uncanny ability to scam the suckers in the name of Truth, Justice & The American Way.

Then there is the inevitable Barnum connection from whom Gypsy Barnum gets her name. During Buffalo Bills days of Wine & Roses, albeit with him it was Whiskey & Roses, Cody was taking in so much money at the box office that he put out a truck load of cash for the purchase of PT Barnum’s personal railroad car… an ornate ostentatious bachelors quarters which was decked out with all the amenities of the Orient Express. Cody wanted to impress his Gypsy paramour. He did and when The Prince of Humbug himself personally delivered the plush railroad car that would have been the envy of a Horny Hugh Heffner at any age… Barnum took the money & took Cody’s lover as well. He wouldn’t have gotten away with it if Cody had not been passed out cold on the love seat from his usual nightcap of a fifth of whiskey! Phineas T took full advantage of the situation, declaring his undying love throughout eternity, promising to make his potential new conquest, a bigger star than Tom Thumb and The Swedish Nightingale combined. Thus, The Prince of Humbug deftly managed to get into Emmalina’s egg basket and forever imprint his brand of BS on his lying descendants… The Corliani Clan, for whom TRUTH is whatever your interpretation of the word “is”, is. That’s when a once beautiful, vulnerable and impressionable Italian Gypsy Belle found out that those awful irresistible creatures called men, will promise you the moon, only to give you green cheese when the thrill of the chase is over.

When true love fails, replacement theology suggests “food” as a fulfilling alternative to a broken heart. Albeit “love” did not bloom… M. Corliani instead blossomed into a 300 plus pound Bitch Dominatrix who ruled her Cowboy Cosa Nostra with an iron hand by the strength of The Spaghetti Umbilical she kept wrapped around the necks of each and every member of her large extended clan of in-laws & outlaws. The Magnificent Seventy Five who eventually emerged as a result of the sexual misadventures of a wayward Gypsy Octumom & The Fabled Fruit Of Her Loins.

In retrospect, whatever Cody paid for that overpriced ornate & ostentatious railroad car… It was PT Barnum who got his monies worth and his revenge as well on the Hero of the West for doing what newspaper headlines described as follows:

Buffalo Bill Out Barnums Barnum!  

So goes the the scandal of Weenie Gate And All The Matriarchs Men as divulged by the deep throats of dressing room gossip.  But it’s best to let sleeping dogs “lie”…. because whether on a circus or carnival, trying to separate fact from fiction is like trying to strain the peas out of split pea soup after it has already been cooked to apocryphal perfection.

To this very day, the case of M. Corliani’s hot pants & who got in them is one of those unsolved mysteries for which there seems to be no satisfactory conclusion. However, the cause of all the furor & controversy is a lot easier to explain… I think it had something to do with the MOON.                  

As time passed & Big Mama Corliani’s Clan continued to expand along with her waistline, it seems her opinion of men continued to deteriorate at the same alarming rate she put on the pounds.

Eventually, Big Mama Corliani came to the same conclusion as Big Mama Thornton where men were concerned. When all is said and done, they be nothing but a bunch of hound dogs snoopin round her door!

Big Mama Thornton
With
John Lee Hooker

CONTINUED . . .