The Bluestone Review 2025

Prose

Sideshow Teresa L. Matney & Brian F. Shortridge

Growing up I knew that living in a big city was different from living on Kennel Branch. I knew they had clear water, whereas our water was orange from sulfur. I knew that they had subways and yellow taxi cabs that raced them around the city, whereas our family had a 1970 VW van, which could only get over 35 mph going downhill and still wasn’t quite big enough to carry our family of nine. What I didn’t know was that what entertained us was so different from them. We had television, even if it came from a satellite that took up most of our backyard and had to be cranked into position to change the channel. We watched Days of Our Lives, Dallas and the Cosby Show like everyone else. It was the entertainment that we left the house for that made us different. By the 1980s, big cities became too cultured and sophisticated to appreciate the carnival sideshows that had been a staple of American entertainment for generations. New York City and San Francisco abandoned the performers for the opera and exhibits of modern art, much of which resembled the aftermath of an emergency trip to a gas station bathroom. The people of Appalachia, on the other hand, still embraced the Lobster Boy, Tiny Tommy, the world’s smallest man and the bearded lady. Though, I’m pretty sure my great-aunt Esther had her beat by a whisker. Throughout my childhood the carnival and the sideshow performers would come through the area and our whole community would come out for the greasy food, the completely unsafe rides, and the rigged games that we couldn’t resist. Seeing how the sideshow acts seemed to inspire such a spending frenzy, Eddie Tiller, the owner of Tiller’s Supermarket, decided to hire one of the carnival’s biggest attractions, Jimbo the Wrestling Bear, for a special Saturday event at his store. To build excitement for the event, he offered any housewife who stayed in the ring with Jimbo for more than 3 minutes $100 in groceries. My Daddy was overjoyed. He loved wrassling, he loved bears and he loved putting my Mommy in embarrassing situations.

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