It was my sister’s birthday this past weekend, and to celebrate, my mother bought the family tickets to see the Big Apple Circus outside of Hanover, NH. Saturday afternoon found us at the Big Top, waiting to see one of the last performances of the season.

I haven’t been to a circus since my youth, a Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey extravaganza in Hartford, I think. (We children best remember that occasion for the Cracker Jacks that were left behind when we went home.) The Big Apple Circus is a smaller affair: one ring, and a performance time of two hours with an intermission.

But what a spectacle is packed into those two hours! There are trapeze acts; clowns; performing cats, dogs, birds and horses (animals, that is, with a natural, working relationship with man); tumbling acts and jugglers. For an hour or two, even the adults were swept away, as filled with wonder at what we saw as the children beside us. Each of us came home with a particular favorite, and throughout that afternoon our conversation kept returning to what we had seen.

Big Apple Circus is a not-for-profit institution. Proceeds from ticket sales help fund such projects as the “Big Apple Circus Clown Care” hospital program, bringing “clown doctors” into hospitals to entertain acutely and chronically-ill children; the “Circus for All” program, which provides economically disadvantaged children a chance to visit the circus; and the “Circus of the Senses” for the hearing- and visually-impaired. Their 28th season (”Grandma Goes to Hollywood”) begins this September in Dulles, Virginia, and continues on until July of next year, when the tour again ends in New Hampshire.

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