In response to Steve Crawford: I lived in Brazil (in the late 1960's) in a small interior town where people talked for months with great expectations about the circus that was coming to town and would stay for 4-5 days ---an annual event. Anything out of the ordinary was a welcome relief to a town with essentially no entertainment except radios hooked up to car batteries and "Novelas em Retrato" --novels in photographs, which were magazines that told soap-opera-like stories with photographs and dialog bubbles like comic books. In a town filled with about 90% illiterate people, the high school students were in much demand to read the stories to their neighbors. For someone who grew up watching Ed Sullivan and the Sealtest Big Top Circus on TV, I found the circus that arrived quite a disappointment. The tight-rope walker balanced on a wire about 2 feet off the ground, for example. (Even I might have attempted that trick.) There were a few other very bad acrobatic acts, some singing and music, a clown who I didn't find funny ---maybe his act didn't translate well. No animals. But the Brazilians loved it and many attended several performances, which were essentially the same each night. The highlight of the show was the "drama" ---of which I can remember little except that someone repeated over and over the line, "Oh, poor Maria; she is totally bald," which resulted in roars of laughter every time. I admit it is funnier in Portuguese, but not by much. Mothers warned their children that some of the circus people were Gypsies and con artists ---to enjoy the show but stay clear of the circus workers outside of the tent. I remember, at the time, thinking of the King and the Duke in Huck Finn, and that the small towns on the Mississippi in the early 1800's weren't that much different than my small Brazilian town over a hundred year later. The Brazilian movie "Bye, Bye Brazil" is about a small band of traveling entertainers in Brazil at about that same time. (The film is quite good ---adult content.) In the film, the show is not well attended because people are watching TV. Before I left my small Brazilian town, one tavern and the bank president had the first 2 TVs in the city after the electric lines stretched to there from the state capital, so I imagine the traveling circus in that small town lost its appeal within a few years, too. I recently found a website about the town where I lived in Brazil. The 'virtual postcards' on the site show a city I hardly recognize. The first postcard I pulled up was a photo of the town's cell tower. I'm not so sure that demonstrates progress. Carol Peiffer