Children brought me to the Renaissance Faire three summers ago, on the hottest day of the year, an all time record 113 degrees. So hot that the leather armor people did not come to work, and the rest of us, some in mom shorts, and others in laced corsets and tantalizing wenchwear, held the oppressive summer sky from the dusty ground with hats and umbrellas, and long pretend-royal silks on tall poles. The world and the different world that each side saw, Babylon and the Rainbow, or Washed and Unwashed. The Babylonians do not perhaps suspect my circus-world mom shorts costume.

We lined up to see Fantastic Dan the juggler, who, I tell the children, is a great juggler. We scanned the bright yellow painted benches hand-placed in a semicircle, baking in the sun, scootched this way and that in front of the wooden traveling stage (wow a motor, a boat? A plane? A bilge? Makes the Om very on pitch)

But I am there to watch Fantastic Dan get away with it. I can tell by looking at him practicing and pacing behind the wooden pallet stage. bright red curly hair, a fit, rubbery-bandy physique, and the wide-open face of an awake person. He wears ballooning silk knickers buttoned tight below the knee, and a scant laced leather vest with no shirt underneath, to work.  And so it is establish that Fantastic Dan is getting away with it.

We nabbed a spot on the sunny yellow benches and waited for the lemonade gladiator to make his way over.  See now I have to even think about whether I want to change the  vantage point like that. Because we like Fantastic Dan better than we like the scalding painted yellow benches in front the stage. Train my mind to heel. Unless something better comes along.

Dan’s act is type-A, fast-paced, and a little home-made edgy, with real whirling knives that he catches with nimble, freckled hands, one finger wrapped in duct tape. He stacks hats five feet high on audience volunteers. There were water balloons and a unicycle, and not very well-hidden dirty jokes, interjected with the impunity of a carrot top’s grin. For his grand finale, Fantastic Dan Kosak-squats center stage, and spins an old aluminum soup pot on a rod placed on his chin. It’s already a miracle, and then Fantastic Dan catches in his right hand other pots and pans tossed to him from side stage, he catches them in the netherdark of his peripheral vision, respins them and tosses each on the top of the spinning stack on the rod on his chin. He keeps the whole teetering miner’s kitchen spinning with his left hand using a long bamboo stick that has been brought to him by a lovely assistant he also can’t see very well.  and then he starts talking. he explains that he is trying to live his life as free as possible, because he is sure that life is about joy and causing joy, and he says we can bike, and recycle, and stop taking ourselves so seriously, and then he listed the expense categories he has, and asked us to be generous. A big top hat was passed around the benches. It was 113 degrees and I paid up.