The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus® is on its final tour now, and it’s all on the East Coast, so I am going to miss it. I am feeling nostalgic. Our family attended for several years when our boys were young, then we didn’t. We had plenty of other events to attend, plays, symphonies, Red Sox games,  Scooper Bowl…we lost track of the circus. I got a good-for-life ticket for each boy at birth and didn’t even redeem the second one, which survived the move.

I love the glitter and glitz. Ringling Brothers (RB) is unabashedly big, with bright, swirling lights, sequins and feathers, eye-catching color patterns, hundreds of costumed human and animal performers, all genres of snazzy music, and giant machines. Leading the audience through it all is the ringmaster, always with three names, all but one a man, infallibly able to make my heart pound with his “Greatest Show on Earth!” I believe.

Many of the performers are in families who pass on their skills. The acrobats who squeeze through tiny rings can do so because if you start training at a young enough age, the human body will have the flexibility of a salamander. I have seen tightrope walkers, human-pyramid-formers, people hanging onto spinning ropes by their teeth, unicyclers, even jumprope squads. Some families specialize in training animals, from dogs to tigers, and I don’t mean “Sit” and “Stay”.

All of the acts I saw were gasp-inducing, big thrill events. None of this Big Apple Circus stuff, where a few pigs run in a circle, or someone on a single trapeze shows as much aptitude as half the kids in the playground during school recess. These folks were risk-takers who had pride in perfecting leading-edge feats, and RB under Kenneth Feld had the resources to support them.

Losing the elephants was a big financial blow for RB, and I resent the animal rights people for effecting it. I’ve read a lot about wild animals, and I think that being an elephant in a circus is much better than being one in a zoo: cognitively challenging enrichment is central to the life, and you have more friends to hold on to. If you’re thinking of the movie Dumbo, in which the clowns were drunks and the trainers beat their charges–how Disney movies have changed!–I submit that in my lifetime, RB never was that circus.

As a musician, I especially love the circus band. Talk about a challenging gig! The cymbals must crash when the lion leaps through the ring of fire; the drumroll must resolve to”ta-da!” when the human cannonball lands on the target; the falling tone must end in “splat!” when the last clown jumps from the burning house and bursts through the safety net. The circus musicians and their conductor always have to be in synch with physics and happenstance, sometimes in three rings at once. No sheet music is of any help whatsoever.

I even remember RB’s Clown College, though it closed years ago. If you could demonstrate aptitude for clown college, tuition was free, and for the sort of clown whose act could capture the attention of a big arena audience, RB had a job waiting. The school was created due to career clowns being hard to replace in the 1960s. It closed after 29 years because clowning had moved back into the mainstream of the performing arts, in part due to the school and its graduates, of whom Bill Irwin is my personal favorite.

We still have small, politically correct circuses, and the cautiously animal-free, sexually charged Cirque du Soleil, and maybe some other faint echoes of the Big Top. I haven’t been in a while, but never being able to go again is somehow different.