Gigi.

March 10, Hugo.

The Kelly Miller Circus lot is next to where Circus Chimera's was, in Hugo, on the street where the Carson and Barnes Circus also has its winter quarters, the biggest of all three. The Kelly Miller's lot is beautiful, gently wooded and well-kept and quiet, and it has the look of a full-timers' RV park, if only for the bright red fleet of trucks lined up near the entrance, and the big sign over it. Kelly Miller is an old, small but well-established circus that two years ago was bought by one of the Ringling Brothers heirs, John Ringling North II, and revamped. Last season was its first as the new Kelly Miller and by all appearances it went rather well.
I met "Lucky Eddy" this morning, walking with Dylan and Nicolas out to see the horses and the camel and the donkeys. I play the drums, he said, and here's the rest of the orchestra, pointing to a computer he was carrying. He is maybe in his early sixties, tall and thin, with light grey hair and a Buffalo Bill mustache, an easy manner and an air of mischief.
He is the first person I met at the circus other than people we already knew: Jim Royal, of course, the general manager, who was a ringmaster at the Carson and Barnes Circus when Fridman was working there, and that's how they met; John Moss' wife, Reina, and their two sons, Johnny, nine, and Nathan, five; John Moss, who is not here right now, is the circus' ringmaster and artistic director; he worked with Jim Royal at The Big Apple Circus, and before that at the Carson and Barnes Circus too, where Fridman met him; and Sarah, whose last name I never knew, as with most people in the circus, and whom we remember from Circus Chimera, where, the first year Fridman worked there, she was the girlfriend of Martin, the tent manager and pony-ride guy, and helped taking care of the ponies; she left the year after that. She's now performing a trapeze act and has a baby girl, ten-month-old Grania, "a souvenir from Australia."
I am looking forward to Nicolas growing up hand in hand with Gigi, as Grania is called.