The Golden Age of the Peep Shows, Freak Shows and Side Shows where P.T. Barnums freaks of nature from Tom Thumb to Chang and Eng competed with bearded ladies and sword swallowers and the nicklodeon peep shows flaunting French floosies in lacy racy poses of extreme erotica from gams with garters to girl on girl spankings and pony girls in full giddy up get ups! The sideshows of Coney Island where you could see a hypnotist with two heads saw a woman in half in disbelief, while gluttoning out on a Nathan's hotdog for a nickle. An urban enclave of non-reality where illusion becomes reality as oddities appear to be the status quo of the sawdust world of carnivals and itinerant workers best kept away from your 14 year old daughter who may end up in a trailer doing the tilt awhirl before her first period. Remember...there's a sucker born every minute and has to pay the pipers price to see the wonder of the bamboozling Barnum's bizarre new find...the Egress! Now you see it now you don't!
The first of the traveling shows in the Creep Show Hit Parade was the "peep box" or what was called the "rarity show" in 15th Century Europe. While Columbus was busy scouting out film locations in the America's for Queen Isabella's cinema company of conquest and conquistadores, Peep Shows were popping up all over the European continent. It began as a small wooden box with several holes in it that had a set of pictures, paintings and drawings of course in the early days. The "director" would pull a string and the individual could feast their eyes on a cornucopia of theatrical scenes from Romeo and Juliet to Punch and Judy.
Chinese peeps proliferated in the 19th Century during the heyday of the Opium trade, which may explain a lot of things. A puppeteer ala "Being John Malkovich" would perform for the crowd and the story would end inside the box, so the panting audience on the edge of their opiated seats would have to lay down some hard earned yen as they had a yen to see the stories climax but, cleverly it was only available for viewing in the box through peep holes. It was enough to confound and confuse Confucius. Thank Tao for Opium..roll credits.
Thsoe madcap Americans were among to first to present lewd pics in pornographic peep boxes in the 19th Century. While the Chinese were pre-occupied with opium dream dramas, Americans were hot to trot for tits and ass...that is about as American as Mom's Apple Pie and your best friends cougar mom's in a bikini and thong. During the Great Depression, the peep shows kept spirits up with peep shows with photos and short films of other great depressions in the form of Great Cleavage...there were more people lined up for these shows than all the soup kitchens in Chicago.
Today the peep show is live and in the flesh...you can grab a fantasy booth in certain tawdry neighborhoods of America and for a few bucks sit comfortably while the female or male of your choice performs dance and suggestive performances under your direction. All three dimensional and in color and yes, you may have to keep shelling out the bucks as it is time controlled so if you want the full tilt boogie..you'll have to pay for it. In some cases the peep boxes surround a stage and the performer performs and poses in explicit erotic positions for the patrons and their bulging pulsating pockets. The private fantasy booths are usually in small topless clubs or in the back of small adult bookstores...you can look over the merchandise available..make a choice and get ready to put another nickle in..in the nickleodeon as Teresa Brewer would say..ok so it's not a nickleodeon anymore but I want to use the song lyrics in this.
The performers make tips from their performances and the money is put into a two way slot from one side of the plexi to the other inside the booth, and there is no touching allowed so the plexiglass barrier provides a barricade worthy of barbed wire in the old west to keep the livestock from stampeding or getting out of hand..of course the patrons hand is usually busy south of his own border. There are also couples booths were you and your favorite girl can sit and enjoy a performance by a favorite girl that you both choose, that way both of your hands can be busy at each others south of the border region while you fight over who gets the one on one lap dance!..
In Europe some peep shows perform live sex shows with male and female performers and also same gender couples. One major landmark for the peeps...the Lusty Lady in San Francisco became the first US sex biz to go union..and by 2003 it was bought out by the employees and is now a workers cooperative. Look for the union label and in the words of Mr. Rourke.."Welcome to Fantasy Booth Island!!" Now, about that lap dance...male or female?
Part Two
Freak Out! Freak Show Creep Show Curiosity and the Macabre! by Mike Marino Frank Zappa said it best ..."Freak Out!" and of course in the Sixties there were a myriad of things to freak us out..brown acid...police...segregation...but what really freaks me out and creeps me out is the basic frenetic freak shows that were home to natures oddities and abnormalities and physical abberations. People who could and would pound nails up their nose instead of snorting coke...swallowing swords instead of pharmaceuticals that would make William Burroughs and his stoned adding machines proud. There are those that feast by eating and breathing fire with Godzillian gusto and could create a flame thrower tower of power to light Hemingways cigar before he could pull off a double barreled shotgun blast.
They had werewolf gentlemen, elephant men and bearded ladies with enough tatooes to resemble a Burmese tribal leader. East meets West is not just a Paul Butterfield album in fact it East was co-joined when it came West and was the yin and yang of Eng and Chang who managed to stay joined in holy matrimony while joined together themselves for life...imagine that honeymoon!! Roll over Eng, it's my turn to Chang..to chang is verb! These guys were the Asian doublemint twins gone kink! Then there was the mini-man...Colonel Thomas Thumb who was no larger than a good sized penis or the head of the Elephant Man, John Merrick. You know.."I am a human being.." yeah, that guy. Before the Ramones there were pin heads and before SNL there were cone heads. There were three breasted women, which to me is a waste...two is plenty!
Contortionists shared the stage with exotic belly dancers from Turkey with sheer costumes that if the sun was just right, and it always seemed to be, you could see the shadows of shapely legs and butts that would surely cause a quick draw showdown of an erection hidden only by a fat holster and a pair of stained chaps. But, the imagination had to run rampant and wild with the thoughts of a carnal tryst with a contorting belly dancer no matter what country or planet she was from...the possiblities were and are endless. My dream is to make love to an Amazonion contortionist who can wrap her legs around her head from a sitting position and I can be a pivot point...insert your own visual here. Some would attach themselves to lightbulbs and provide the electric current to light up Broadway or a full string of Christmas lights adorning the Pentagon, while others would escape from straight jackets while chained upside down in tanks of water. All that's missing to really rock the house are a dozen pirhanas to add to the maudlin ambiance and possible amputation of limbs in a feeding frenzy of deranged fish.
These were the "freaks" who inhabited the "freak shows" and the "side shows" They were originally called "sideshows" as these performers would travel the circus circuit that traversed the wagon roads of the old west...the circus would roar into town and the townies lost interest in betting silver dollars on the soiled dove dancehall girl races they would hold for amusement and get ready to rock it under the bigtop with lions, tigers and bears oh my...but as a side attraction were the small tent shows set up outside the big top to attract the rubes to take in strange oddities and performances before the circus got underway...and of course there was a charge for that to whet their whistle and curiousity as they were sometimes referred to as Curiosity Shows...Dodge City, Tombstone, Abilene, Deadwood all the famed towns of cowboys and debauchery were targets for the circus and the local curious citizenry couldn't get enough of beared ladies, dancing girls and near erotic yet slighly neurotic entertainment. Remember they didn't have Facebook or Youtube so the real deal had to do.
Freak shows were prominent in Europe in the 1500's and eventually made their way to the colonies.Everything seemed to culminate to macabre heights during the barstroming PT Barnum days of his American Museum in NYC but before Barnum, there was the traveling freakshow and sideshow that were in ghastly orbit in the gravitational field of the traveling circus. No, freakarama did not start in the United States but has it's roots deep in European History and to me the Godfather of "freaks" would have to be "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" that fascinated the corn on the macabre hunger of freak seekers everywhere.
But it was PT Barnum and eventually the explosion of Amusement Parks that took the "freaks" one step beyond and into the realm of American Pop Culture that is alive and well to this day at Coney Island in New York, New York ...the city that never freaks!