Geeking Out about Sideshow Geeks with Nathan Wakefield
Pardon me while I have a strange interlude. But there is nothing else. Life is an obscure oboe bumming a ride on the omnibus of art. Among the misty corridors of pine, and in those corridors I see figures, strange figures. Welcome back my friends to the AP strange show I am your host AP strange this is my show and tonight's show is brought to you by Bosco brand dental floss.
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AP Strange:We're talking about Sideshow Geeks, the history of the Sideshow Geek. My guest is the one and only Nathan Wakefield and his book, The Rise and Fall of the Snake Eaters, Human Ostriches, and Other Extreme Entertainers. Nathan is a fantastic writer. This is one of the most entertaining books I've read in a while. And he's also a variety arts performer with a long history in juggling, more recently things like sword swallowing and he works as an advocate and historian of sideshow and variety arts.
AP Strange:So welcome to the show Nathan, it's a pleasure to have you here.
Nathan Wakefield:Thanks AP, happy to be here.
AP Strange:Well, like I said in the introduction, this really was one of the more entertaining books I've read. It's also kind of gross. It's really weird.
Nathan Wakefield:Just the way I like it.
AP Strange:Yeah. So this Have you always been drawn to like kind of the darker, more subversive of the arts, of the variety arts? Basically what drew you to this subject matter as a book? Because to my knowledge, there wasn't really like a complete history of the geek before.
Nathan Wakefield:Absolutely. Yeah. No, that's very true. I've Yes, I've always been drawn to like the darker and more unusual sides of entertainment. You know, I've been into circus and magic ever since I was a little boy, but I always liked the really weird and kind of shocking stuff.
Nathan Wakefield:And then when I was probably in my teens, I found out what a geek was just by reading about sideshow history and stuff. But what really struck me about the geek act is that it's such a bizarre and extreme idea and I found it mentioned in all these history books but they kind of failed to really go into the deep dive history of it. For example they would have a lot of information about famous sword swallows and how that worked and you know the natural borns, the little people and people born differently and fire manipulators eaters and that sort of thing. Then they'd be like, Oh, and then there were geeks that did this stuff. Anyways, back to this history about Barnum or whatever.
Nathan Wakefield:So I was like, Man, it seems like such a crazy and extreme act that would merit its own kind of historical deep dive and so I endeavored myself to kind of take that initiative and it originally started as what I like to say was a late night rage writing session. I literally sat down one night and said you know what if I were to write about geeks I'd write about this and I'd address this issue and I'd talk about this and I'd answer this question and da da da and I had a list of questions and then I just started kind of going through the books that I found that talked about geeks and writing those and I started going through newspaper archives and all these private archives and deep diving it and pretty soon I was like man I'm answering most of the questions I had independently while also organizing them in kind of a structured historical narrative. If I shift this around and fill in the gaps, I think I can actually write an entire book that's fully works cited and has a very decent historical account. And then as I was going through this, I hit several happy accidents in the sense that I was finding that I was actually correcting certain small bits of sideshow history that was erroneous before.
Nathan Wakefield:So I was actually kind of course correcting on a few topics as well as answering questions that to my knowledge had never really been thoroughly expounded upon before and then also taking the initiative to interview some living show folk that had some knowledge from those days and on this genre that could provide some first hand accounts and primary source information to kind of round it out so I wasn't just regurgitating random sources but I was very happy that it collectively came together as well as it did and it seems to be pretty well received.
AP Strange:Well yeah listen I can tell that you put a lot of effort into the research.
Nathan Wakefield:Mean you said five years. Five years.
AP Strange:Yeah and I mean it seems like with all of the mystery around sideshows, which in part is intentional, it's part of the fun of it is building a mystique about it. It's almost kind of like when you're researching paranormal subjects where you really have to dissect what the truth is and what the hoaxes are and what the narrative finagling is with any of it. So, I really appreciate that you go through and sometimes there really is no answer and you're just kind of saying, well, it's most likely that this is true, but we have these various conflicting accounts. It's up to you to really figure it out.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, that's the nature of showbiz, particularly sideshow, you know, some of it, there there was a lot of hyperbole in in some of those cases and you know, even some some of the news accounts are not necessarily accurate. So, you know, you tell the story the best as you can and let the reader make up their mind.
AP Strange:Yeah and I think that's kind of true of most history but when you're dealing with something this strange it's amplified
Nathan Wakefield:oh yeah oh yeah
AP Strange:so it seems to me that this book almost, well, it seems to uplift the art form of geekery in a way because, like you said, they got like barely mentioned in other books, and it's almost like they were the lowest rung of the sideshow where for the longest time where it's just you have your skilled performers over here and you have your people that were born differently and human marvels I guess as they were described. And then the geek was just kind of, I think in the X Files episode where they have the sideshow performers humbug, I know you mentioned it briefly in the book, but the guy in the museum there says that a geek is neither a freak or a gaffe, he's merely unseemly. Yeah,
Nathan Wakefield:that's a good summation.
AP Strange:But a geek can mean a whole lot of things and you know, nowadays, we mostly just mean nerd by that, but you go into great depth in the book talking about to distinguish the different forms of geeks as it pertains to sideshow, and I found that really interesting, like I had never come across the term glomming before, but now I know that that's typically what people are thinking of when they think of a geek. Mhmm. Yeah. So I don't know if you want to get into any of the distinguishing the different types of what is broadly considered a geek where you break it up into kind of wild men, human ostriches, and various kinds of those. But for my listeners, I don't know if you wanted to get into a little bit of the different categories of geek.
Nathan Wakefield:Sure, yeah. Well, it gets kind of blurry, especially as you go through the different time periods. But in the traditional context, there was really the two classifications of geeks. There was the glomming geeks and then just the normal or ordinary geeks. The general criteria I settled upon to be any sort of geek show was, one, it had to be in the context of some sort of organized performance.
Nathan Wakefield:Two, the intent had to be to shock or disgust. You know, we're not trying to titillate people or impress people with awesome, skillful displays. Three, it was to you use some sort of vertebrate animal in the performance some sort of animal was involved in the performance and then lastly there was a shocking act that typically had some sort of oral implication, in the performance now the ordinary geeks they would do things like to sit in a snake pit or and you know maybe pretend to put a snake in their mouth or like wave them at people pretend to throw them at people and the the gloaming geeks the gloaming meant to grab or snatch there's a little bit of historical debate about what constitutes a gloaming geek, but the thing they settle upon is that those were the more hardcore geeks, the extreme ones, that would actually either eat the animals alive or just rip them apart with their mouths. So that's what most people think of when they think of like a true blue geek it's the gloaming geeks the one that would gloam or grab the animal and just rip it apart with their teeth now if you get beyond that you get into some allied arts that you could say are kind of geek like geek adjacent, you know depending on how you classify things you could say they're also geek, but there's like the human ostriches for example.
Nathan Wakefield:Now those weren't geeks in the traditional sense, but what they would do is that they would basically ingest everyday household objects. Maybe a few of them did live animals, but more often than not, it was non food items, kind of like the stereotype of how an ostrich will allegedly eat anything. So what the human ostriches would do, they were the ones that would eat the glass, swallow penknives, thumbtacks, watches. And then interestingly enough, within them, was two categories. There was the digestive human ostriches and the regurgitative.
Nathan Wakefield:The digestive ones would literally just eat all these things and basically cross their fingers and hope that it doesn't tear them up and then they just naturally expel you know the the whatever they ate. You know what and quit showbiz?
AP Strange:Right.
Nathan Wakefield:And then there was the regurgitative ones who were more skilled and you tend to see them more in like vaudeville and higher end bookings where they actually had the developed skill of stomach muscles so they would swallow objects and then they could safely bring them back up which was both less harmful for their digestive system as well as you you could argue more interesting and skillful to a paying audience to see somebody that can physically eat these things show that they are ingested and then bring them back up it's almost like a magician makes something disappear and then reappear so there was that and then you got into things too like wild man shows where a lot of geeks were wild men and a lot of wild men were geeks but they're not exactly synonymous because not all wild men necessarily worked with animals. So there's that delineation as well. But then you get into more modern versions of it where you get the insectivore act, which is kind of a geek act where you're eating bugs and worms. So you you could make the argument that that's like a more mild, more appropriate version of geek act that you could do now and probably not ruffle as many feathers pun intended.
AP Strange:Right, that does kind of seem like it's one of the last surviving ones. Mean I guess there's still regurgitators out there. Know in searching around found a few YouTube videos of people doing that still.
Nathan Wakefield:There's a couple working regurgitators out there not many but the ones they are really interesting to watch I think.
AP Strange:Yeah and sometimes the size of the objects that are swallowed like you know swallowing a whole lemon or something you wouldn't think they'd be able to do that. Yeah,
Nathan Wakefield:It's that's what really impressive.
AP Strange:Yeah, and then of course, I think you include some that are were using kind of sleight of hand to make it appear as though they ate something, then, you know, and they're like, well, people that really eat the stuff are suckers.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah. Yeah. Mean, it depends. I mean, I I would say, yeah. I would say most entertainers now, you're you're not really going to see much in terms of digestive human ostriches.
Nathan Wakefield:It's likely going to be some sort of gaffed method but yeah it's interesting too how you get into like magic and how you know you can use magic methods to achieve similar effects and yeah so you got people that did both did it for real or did not I should mention too that and this is totally real of the regurgitant or the digestive human ostriches there are multiple accounts of active performers that literally died doing that that it destroyed their digestive system, they had to have surgeries and it killed them. So it's really interesting to see just how far some of these people were going doing that stuff for real.
AP Strange:Yeah, I mean, I was always fascinated by the human ostrich even if I didn't have a word for it or the right term for it, but having seen examples or read about examples of it, I would think how do people not die doing that? And it turns out often they did. Yeah.
Nathan Wakefield:It's wild, and then you get into some people that there was the Frenchman who did it more recently, but I thought his method was really interesting. With him it was more of a compulsion he had pica and so his method is he would eat all these inanimate objects but he would grind them up into like minuscule bits so even though it was clearly not a food it wasn't gonna like shred his insides as much And inexplicably, he lived a fairly long lifestyle with no detriment, but he wasn't even really a performer. It was just a compulsion for him. So I think that's and he ate like a full like airplane at one point over the course of several years. He was featured in Ripley's.
AP Strange:Oh that guy. Yeah. Couldn't believe that he ate an entire airplane.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah. And he would eat bicycles and stuff. It would take him like months or years. But yeah it's interesting because he he did some performing with with that it's some some performing but with him it was more so just you know how he was wired that he had that desire and so he took measures to grind them down to reduce the likelihood that he would have internal perforations. I thought that was pretty interesting.
AP Strange:Wow, yeah because I mean I think of like eating things like glass like that seems like it would you wouldn't be able to avoid the perforation but I guess some people did, you know?
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, glass eating interestingly enough, you still see that to this day for real, and there are techniques to do it for real and correctly with minimal damage. But yeah, the glass eating is a heck of a thing. The one that gets me are the ones that would literally swallow knives. Like not swallow it like a sword swallow and pull it up, but literally swallow it and then let it digest. It's like, how how what goes through your head when you know that is inside you and you're just hoping that one day it it comes out and you're not, you know, going to be going to the ER especially in those days, man.
Nathan Wakefield:That was like, a lot of that was happening in the early twentieth century when, you know, medical science such as it was was not nearly as sophisticated as it is now. So, it's really interesting just that the price they were willing to pay just to whether that be the drawn to showbiz or even if they had some delusions thinking that they could do these things without harm. It's hard to say, but it's really interesting historically, I think.
AP Strange:Well, in some of the cases, it was almost just like pride in a weird way because it was one of the guys that died. It's like he ultimately died because he was at a bar and people were daring him to do it. Yeah, exactly. He couldn't resist the dare, so.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, and some of them they had to get surgery to fix, to have it removed from their stomach, and then once they healed, they went back to it.
AP Strange:Right, So it's
Nathan Wakefield:like, they clearly know the risks. Yeah, you wonder about that stuff, man.
AP Strange:Yeah, And you
Nathan Wakefield:get like social trends, Like it like people like they're seeing these people doing it and so they start emulating it and then they start getting booked and it's like a hot act in like the Dime Museum Circuit and pretty soon it's like its own thing and they're kind of battling like competitors almost like different. It's wild trying to outdo each other.
AP Strange:Yeah. I mean, I liked in the book how you list all the items that were removed from the stomach during a surgery for several of these guys. For some of them, it's like there were seven knives in there. It's like Yeah,
Nathan Wakefield:I thought that was interesting. It's like, let's do an inventory about all this stuff that this guy ate and got lodged in his guts as we take it out and I thought that would be a pretty effective device. So I'm glad you enjoyed that.
AP Strange:Yeah, I mean imagine being in that Operating Room and just seeing all these things by one I'm in the
Nathan Wakefield:just imagining the surgeon shaking their head with each removal, it's like really guy, really?
AP Strange:Well, they must have been fascinated too, mean.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah.
AP Strange:But yeah, probably upset, I could imagine they were upset about it.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, yeah.
AP Strange:Well, mean, seems like some of the early cases that you cover in here, not all of them were performances, but it was almost a subject of interest back in like the seventeenth and eighteenth century with some of these people like the stone eaters and cases like that and gluttons, people just eating an absurd amount of stuff, which Yeah, that was pretty
Nathan Wakefield:it's interesting because a lot of those people, it seemed like the performing was maybe a secondary thing. The showbiz was very secondary. It was more so like a compulsion that they had, but you have all these fantastical accounts about people that did just extraordinary things. I think the stone eaters kind of resonates a lot too because it's before a lot of modern developments of what we see as everyday household objects. So what can be the most kind of primitive, non edible thing?
Nathan Wakefield:You go outside and you literally see a stone and you just eat that. You know what I mean? Just And down so to have people that had that reputation as, you know I'm the guy that just eats these hard objects outside it's really interesting. Then getting into some of the ones that combine that with gluttony and you read about these accounts that some of these are actual medical accounts so sure historically can be a little hyperbolic, but some of these are very legitimate medical journals and you're reading about what they were able to do and it makes you wonder if maybe they were born not just wired differently, but maybe like biologically with some sort of malformation that enabled them to accommodate these wanton desires in a physical manner that some of us now would not be able to. Some of these people were eating like full size animals or eating like just very large quantities of things you should not be able to eat and the fact that they were able to not just keep them down but have such a large quantity with little to no ill effect is just absolutely remarkable I think.
AP Strange:Right. Yeah, I mean, I know it might be a product of starting to get a little older, but I can't eat a big full size meal the way I used to. I can't imagine eating the amount some of these guys are eating.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, it's wild.
AP Strange:And I mean, guess there are disorders. There was one that you mentioned in the book, polyphagism or Yes. Or polyphagy, I'm not really sure how it'd be pronounced, but this character Terar, I don't know if that's pronounced properly. That was one that was particularly grotesque. It just seemed like he couldn't stop eating.
AP Strange:No matter how much he ate, he was still hungry. So it sounded like kind of a sad case, but a particularly gory and gross one.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah I think he's probably the most infamous and like that one there are multiple accounts from doctors that studied him but I I'm just again this is conjecture on my part but I I generally think that he probably had a mental affliction that drove him to that coupled with a physical affliction that exacerbated that because the accounts of him not only was he capable of these large quantities but they would say his torso would actually balloon up when he would eat and then when he was in a fasted state it would be like notably dangling down. It's almost like he had like an elongated stomach or some sort of like abnormality in his middle section that enabled him to just have that capability. So it's just really interesting that
AP Strange:he
Nathan Wakefield:literally lived to eat. And they even had a psychological thing where they said he's pretty much void of any personality or desire. He just is a man who just eats anything and everything that we put in front of him and they couldn't cure them with some of their early tests with doctors. But like you said, it's actually quite sad. Mean can you imagine being born where you just had that insatiable desire to the point where you're literally grabbing living things and then you have an object just trying to quell that hunger to no avail
AP Strange:Yeah, I mean, it seemed to me like maybe some kind of neurological problem where the signal getting crossed and he was not getting the signal to the brain that he was full now or that he had enough food, he just always felt hungry, it was always turned on.
Nathan Wakefield:Exactly. It sounds like you know. Yeah, mean, you imagine if you have that but yeah, it's and that that occurred and I guess to some extent, we will never know what that was but it's really interesting. You know such as it is that's some form of legacy that that individual left behind is that really interesting case I think that's fascinating.
AP Strange:That was one moment that I found really darkly funny in the book because it's just so absurd is is this guy eating a cat. Apparently, what he was observed eating a cat and ate everything but the bones, but then later vomited up the fur. I'm like, the dude coughs up a hairball.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah. I mean, you've gotta have something going on upstairs where you're like, I need to eat this living thing. Wait. I can't eat the bones because they're too hard. Let me just eat everything but the bones.
Nathan Wakefield:Then your body rejects, you know, the hair. It's just, can you imagine watching a grown person eat a live cat like that?
AP Strange:No, I can't. That's insane. Yeah, if I had to see it, it would be horrible. But reading about it was darkly funny. Just the idea that he's coughing up a hairball like a cat would you know.
AP Strange:But I mean that alludes to like the really dark side behind this because I mean with that guy in particular there were accounts of him eating human flesh or or maybe that was just rumors, but it's
Nathan Wakefield:Allegedly. Allegedly. It's hard. Yeah. It's hard to say.
Nathan Wakefield:I think that one is probably more conjecture than every anything, but it you know, we'll never know for sure exactly.
AP Strange:But Borders on the cool issue at that point you know yeah eating cadavers or whatever you know
Nathan Wakefield:yeah that's yeah pretty dark
AP Strange:yeah but I mean it feels like there is a connection with I kept thinking of vampirism because a lot of lot of the glomming geek animal acts would involve, you know, biting the head off and then drinking the blood. So the blood part of it seemed like a really important part of the spectacle, especially spraying blood on the audience to rouse them out of the tent. Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Wakefield:Oh, you think about it. Mean, just we look at horror movies and like blood and splatter that's just such a thing that's just so synonymous with the idea of horror and so to see somebody literally pouring the blood of a dying creature on their body or splattering it around is quite remarkable. Then like what you said with vampirism you know that kind of tracks kind of that same you know the early end with like Brown Stoker and stuff and I think about the character Renfield you know he used to eat like the bugs and the little creatures in the cell because it you know the little lives you know he believed it gave him power and so just that idea of just I'm eating these lesser life forms and it's you know I need to do that I think that's a really interesting idea.
AP Strange:Well, right. I I had didn't make a note of that and had forgotten you included it. But, yeah, Bram Stoker's Dracula was written around the time that these geek shows were originally taking off. So you you kind of make an argument that there may have been some influence either way.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah I mean maybe not directly I don't think it was directly correlative but I do find it interesting that it's you know it
AP Strange:was in the air
Nathan Wakefield:time period yeah something like that
AP Strange:Because I mean, is obviously a very dark side to this in terms of exploitation and I was in various ways and that just seems to never really stop also, but, you frequently make reference to the movie and book of the same name Nightmare Alley. I had been thinking about that when I as soon as I picked up the book, I was I was kinda glad that you mentioned it because watching the Guillermo del Toro version, was kinda it really gave me pause to think about how some of these geek shows probably really were just people, promoters taking advantage of people with addictions and just, or in in the case of the movie that causing the addiction to begin with to keep them in there because if they're desperate enough, they'll geek for you. Do you wanna get into that history of it at all with
Nathan Wakefield:Sure, yeah we can we can get it
AP Strange:because it was inspired by reality for the author right
Nathan Wakefield:yeah yeah he he's he did he was in the service and one of the guys he was in the service with was an old showman and he told them all about that's where he found what geek shows were but it's interesting because when the when the Nightmare Alley book was released as well as the first movie, geek shows were still pretty common. These weren't a period piece at the time. They were like the real time. Obviously, the more recent one is a period piece but. Right.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah it's there was definitely I don't shy away from that there was absolutely some abuse and exploitation with the early geek shows absolutely but I also want to drive home the point that it would be erroneous to say that any and all geek shows included that degree of exploitation. Anything a show is in sideshow, there's a lot of gray area. Some of these geeks were simply playing a character that was common. Some of them were in the business for themselves. And some of them actually had, you know methods where they weren't actually killing the animals it was more of a pantomime type of thing but more often than not there were a lot of animal fatalities but so like I said it's it's a complicated history I try to leave it out there for the viewer to or the reader rather to make their own judgment.
Nathan Wakefield:Absolutely there was some unfortunate parts
AP Strange:of
Nathan Wakefield:it as we find with nearly all aspects of history. Mhmm. That's not to paint the totality of it with the same brush. So you take those things into account and that's something to to think about. But going back to Nightmare Alley, the thing I really like about that is the idea that the geek is both a literal person in the sideshow as well as a metaphor.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah. If you if you don't play your cards right in life, if you really hit your lowest point, that could be you down there at the bottom of the pit, a total alcoholic biting the heads off a chicken for money. You could be that lower form. It's kind of like this metaphor of how low can you get before you hit the point that you are a geek. And I think that's pretty profound.
AP Strange:Yeah. And it kind of bookends the story because it begins and ends in that geek pit. Yeah. Is kind of a metaphor overall for the book because I mean, it is the rise and fall of the sideshow geek because it seems like in the decades after Nightmare Rally came out, probably not directly as a result, but for various reasons, the geek show started to wane in popularity and became less and less common. Ironically, as far as exploitation goes, I had never heard of this, but they used to just kind of make a geek show out of drug addicts or people pretending to be.
AP Strange:Like this is a casualty of drugs on display as like a warning for people.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, how funny is that? But yeah, in those cases it was more so almost entirely playing characters, it was so over the top. Mean, yeah, you'd put, like, a you know, some May 1 kid in a in a wheelchair and say, you're playing a character named Billy. Just sit there and look brain dead. And then you put, like, a snake on him and have a sign behind him and say, this is Billy.
Nathan Wakefield:He did a bunch of LSD, and now his brain is dead. And he thinks this snake is a friend. Don't do drugs, kids. Don't end up like Billy. And so the the drug shows were almost like a collective rebranding of the geek show to get a little mileage out them where it's like, okay, we're using the animals, but we're not killing them.
Nathan Wakefield:And we're trying to present a social good by kind of cashing in on the war on drugs movement to send a positive message. But it was all for the showbiz. I mean, nobody was buying the whole like, wow, this is a great anti drug thing, very educational kids. No, it was all for entertainment to get some more mileage out of the biz. But that doesn't mean that it's not kind of entertaining and kind of historically comical to look back on.
AP Strange:It is, but it's also horribly exploitative in its own right, you know? Yeah. If they're actors, it's just kind of like, I don't know that that's really the direction you wanna go with addiction. No,
Nathan Wakefield:I I don't think that's a very, accurate portrayal to say the least. But I mean, yeah, there's a reason why they didn't last. I think I heard of a couple smatterings maybe in the early nineties, but fifteen twenty years max at with those things going you know they didn't really catch on for the long term for good reason.
AP Strange:Right, right wild and you know that's just one of the many things in this book that I came across that I had never encountered before and I was very surprised by. One that I had been familiar with but still found things to be really surprised by is not only are you covering the human performers here, but I was very familiar with the story of Mike the headless chicken. This is something I had looked into before. I'm really glad that you covered headless chickens in this book because I thought Mike was an anomaly. Thought he was the only one, but there was a whole headless chicken craze before Mike, guess, right?
AP Strange:So I don't know if you wanna talk about Mike and that whole craze and explain So what that
Nathan Wakefield:in my book I had, you know, the the subtitle is and other extreme entertainments. And just in in my general sideshow research is somebody that's interesting in those things, you had been familiar with Mike. And then I just started randomly seeing when I was, like, searching for, like, news stories about, you know, people getting the heads bitten off of chickens and sideshows. I started seeing these other stories about headless chickens, and I was like, wow. Like like you, I thought Mike was somewhat of an anomaly, but I was like, man, there was actually a somewhat common and sought after thing in the early sideshows in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Nathan Wakefield:And I was like, well, this is kind of geek adjacent, but in kind of a comical way. Whereas with the geek shows, the glomming geek shows, the chickens were a prop to be ripped apart and discarded. But in this thing, they still have the heads gone, but they're the star of the show.
AP Strange:Yeah, was it's the opposite weirdest way around.
Nathan Wakefield:Juxtaposition. And I was like, you know what, this is so weird, but because it is kind of a juxtaposition of the subject matter on a book I think I can make the argument that a chapter including this could be worth mentioning in the book so that's why I had a whole chapter about that and yeah it was very much a craze we even saw I believe it was the Ringling Brothers one of their very first exhibitions was a headless chicken and then you had at one point all these farmers trying to replicate that by like cutting off the chicken heads at different varieties and seeing if they could sustain them because they saw it very much as something that they could sell either to Barnum or some other local showman or even exhibit them at a saloon for financial gain. So it was very much a thing and then Mike easily the most popular one and there's there's an entire festival in his home state dedicated to Mike the headless chicken so I was like man this history needs to be told so I opted to include an entire chapter about the whole headless chicken craze as it relates to the sideshow.
Nathan Wakefield:Thought that was
AP Strange:Yeah, and that Like by the time Mike came around, I guess people had sort of forgotten about the earlier craze because there was a gap. It was like a big gap there, So
Nathan Wakefield:Timing is everything. Yeah. Think enough time had elapsed and Mike had enough sustainability that he kind of like was like bringing back the headless chicken thing. He he he he got a lot of mileage. He he got a lot of mileage.
AP Strange:Yeah. It's
Nathan Wakefield:crazy to think too, when he died, it wasn't because he died of natural causes. He choked and they couldn't get his feeder to him on time to keep clear his mucus. In theory, he could have lived even longer and performed even longer. It's wild.
AP Strange:Yeah, yeah. Mean, I imagine if he wasn't on the road, he would have lived a long life because probably the tool that they used to clear the mucus, I imagine it was sort of like a little turkey baster little suction device.
Nathan Wakefield:That Yeah,
AP Strange:probably would have been handy in a home or something like that, but on the train, where is it, where is it, you can't find it, you know. But for the benefit of the listeners, apparently if you cut off the chicken's head just the right way and there's enough brainstem there, it'll just continue living. Make sure
Nathan Wakefield:you feed it. Make sure you feed it and you might have your own sideshow exhibit.
AP Strange:I'm not recommending that people do this. I'm just
Nathan Wakefield:kind I do not endorse that. Why do not?
AP Strange:Yeah. I Just in theory. I did write about this briefly at one point and people were horrified. It was one of the I think it was one of the more controversial things I've ever posted on the internet was talking about Mike because people were like, that's horrible. And I'm like, well, I thought it was interesting.
AP Strange:Seemed like Yeah. Living pretty high on the hog with no head. Yeah. Yeah hence the disclaimer at the top of this episode but in regard to birds with no heads I really thrilled by the entire chapter about Bosco and the derivation of the term Bosco as an act in the circus and its relation to stage magic because listeners know that I'm a big Houdini nut. So this all kind of comes back to Houdini and a magician named Bartolomeo Bosco that did an act of removing bird heads and then putting them back on basically.
AP Strange:Right? So I don't know if you wanna get into the Bosco history a little bit because I found this whole, this seemed like a whole rabbit hole you went down just investigating the term and and where it comes from.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah that's probably one of my more proud achievements with the book in terms of like aligning historical connotations but I definitely take a pretty hard left turn in the book with that particular subject, but I tie it all together and basically it amounts to is there was an Italian magician named Bosco. So yeah, Bosco would he was a very notable Italian conjurer, a magician, and he would do things with the cups and balls he was well known for, and he would also do things with birds, but you know this was a different time period such as it was, and some of the tricks he would do would be like impaling a bird and making it appear and stabbing it on a sword. And another one is he would take birds of different colors and swap their heads. Well, historically speaking, it is believed that the methods he used involved actually killing the birds and swapping them for gaff birds so when it looked like he was ripping off the head he was doing it for real and then just swapping it with a secondary bird that looked like it was made up like that so he was actually killing birds for real in his performances and this led some people to who some people were very much against him Jean Robert Houdin was really disgusted by what he was doing.
Nathan Wakefield:And so many years later, there was a guy that was a snake eater, and he wanted to come up with a term to call himself. And allegedly, what he had done is he heard about Bosco that was ripping these heads off of birds, and he said, Well, I'm biting the heads off of snakes. I'm just gonna call myself Bosco, because I feel that would be suitable. Right. And I know Houdini was really appalled because he didn't like these snake eaters that started calling pretty soon anybody that was a snake eater started calling themselves Bosco or some derivative.
Nathan Wakefield:That was another mystery I solved in my book is there's a few historical accounts of they think Basco was a singular figure. He was actually a character portrayed by many performers because it was such a popular act for whatever reason. But anyways, Houdini was really appalled that the name Bosco, in the performing sense, became synonymous with all these snake eaters when he was actually a fan of Bosco the magician who had passed away by that point. And he thought it was historically unfortunate that the name Bosco became more synonymous with these snake eating people rather than this old timey magician and so it's just interesting to see how that name kind of shifted connotation over the generations.
AP Strange:Yeah, it's all pretty wild. For one thing, outsized influence that Houdini had over all kinds of culture, like his opinions carried a lot of weight. He would write about all the different things he saw and also kind of the proliferation of the name which bore little resemblance to the original performer that it was gotten from, you know? So it's pretty wild. But yeah, I mean, I mentioned this before we started recording, but I had come across the term Bosco being used for like creatures that were seen like seemed like they might be bigfoot type creatures or maybe just some kind of weird wild man, like a hairy wild man and they were referring to it in the newspapers as a Bosco, like the Bosco monster or a Bosco and I'm like where is the what is a Bosco?
AP Strange:I don't understand and now I know. Yeah
Nathan Wakefield:absolutely that's interesting to see the way it kind of permutated again these these wild men so now it's like these wild men cryptozoological creatures that that is interesting.
AP Strange:Yeah yeah But I think you mentioned in the book that Houdini also had a history with Geekery, was very briefly sort of a geek adjacent act in his youth.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah early on he wasn't a geek in the traditional sense but he did work as a wild man which is very similar to geek but he early on when he worked with a circus he was a wild man and he would sit in a cage with like makeup smeared all over and he would rattle the chains and the story goes that he would get he would make things disappear and practice slight of hand, but apparently, he quit because they would throw raw meat at him for him to, like, you know, ham it up with. But apparently, once he got hit the face with it in the eye and he's like, what am I doing? I'm not going to do this anymore. So, right. Yeah.
Nathan Wakefield:Very early and I always wondered too if you know, that experience kind of fueled his contempt for the the wild man act early on or later on in his life when he started seeing Bosco's and stuff pop up but yeah, he he absolutely he he did so much in show business. So, it's really interesting that he not only wrote about it but had a hand in so many different facets of it.
AP Strange:Right. Yeah. And mean, one of his tricks that I've been fascinated by for a long time is sort of geek adjacent with the needles, where he would swallow a bunch of needles and then swallow the thread and then pull the thread out and all the needles are strung up along it.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, I've been researched, interestingly you bring that up, I'm researching that right now for a product I'm working on and I really believe that he was he did not invent that act, but he is responsible for popularizing it in America. And I think that that's why so many sideshows and entertainers now do that, is because he helped popularize that particular act in America and he was one of the first people to really bring that type of that that particular effect to American audiences and he was phenomenal at it. Phenomenal.
AP Strange:Yeah, I think you mentioned somebody in the book doing that same effect with razor blades, which sounds horrible, but
Nathan Wakefield:That's a thing.
AP Strange:Yeah. But yeah, that trick to me was always fascinating even just having read about him doing it because I don't think there's a video of him doing it at all, there's videos of other people that can perform it now, but yeah. But it's I could go on about Houdini for far too long because he's I'm a big fan but as it pertains to like myth making and all this other stuff, a lot of the hocus pocus of it, I found it really interesting that there was a chapter about, the overlap between the geek and wild man kind of thing and pro wrestling, which I kinda knew. I knew there was always kind of like a carny aspect to that's kinda where like the kayfabe comes from and a lot of the things in pro wrestling. And I've never been a big pro wrestling guy, but I know a lot of my listeners would enjoy a little bit of of this connection.
AP Strange:So I don't know if you wanted to speak to a little bit of of how the how the geek and wild man acts kind of influence some of the the wrestling stuff over the years.
Nathan Wakefield:Sure yeah I I got I of all the chapters that was the one that I kind of agonized the most about if I wanted to cut it before publication or not if it was too much of a deviation from the core subject matter and I opted to keep it in and I'm glad I did because like you said there's a lot of crossover between pro wrestling and the early sideshows a lot of them basically started out on the fairgrounds and at street fairs and carnivals and the outdoor amusement industry. They also had a lot of the same bleed over with speaking Kearney, whereas the Kearneys would do that so they could communicate messages to one another without the marks hearing them, just like the pro wrestlers would use that same thing in the ring so they could kind of call out their moves to each other without the audience being privy to that sort of thing. And in doing so, you saw some really interesting crossovers, I think. There were a lot of pro wrestlers in the mid to late twentieth century that had kind of like that wild man type of gimmick. And some of them would do geek like things like eating raw meat or chewing on animals and kind of have that wild man gimmick but you also saw other things too like one thing I found is there's a practice in pro wrestling where to add excitement to a match a pro wrestler might discreetly nick himself on the forehead with a razor blade now it's called blading but it's done to basically add excitement to the match but it is real blood But I found in researching the term it was actually once known as geeking because like a geek at a geek show you would go and they'd rip the head off of chickens and see blood and so when a wrestler would geek himself he would cut himself to bring that blood out for the climax of the match.
Nathan Wakefield:And then I also started seeing a very interesting historical connotation that I had to put in there with classy Freddie Blassie.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Nathan Wakefield:He was a pro wrestler. He was heel primarily, which is a bad guy in pro wrestling. But his his catchphrase that he would is he that he ran with his whole career was he would call his opponents pencil neck geeks. Now you look at it through the lens of like now you assume oh he's probably just kind of assuming the kind of big burly jock that's condescending to like the scrawny like high school nerd but he actually started using that term before it kind of became used as a pop culture term to talk about you know scrawny nerdy people When he came up with that term, it was actually because he went and saw a geek show at a carnival where he was wrestling, and he saw a geek that was this, like, skinny, emaciated guy biting the heads off of animals and hammering nails through his hand. And so afterwards somebody said, Yo Blassie, what'd you think of the geek show?
Nathan Wakefield:And Blassie said to him, Man, did you see that geek? He's got a neck like a stack of dimes. He's what you'd call a real pencil neck geek. And so he started using the term pencil neck geek not from the lens of a jock condescending to a nerd but rather to equate his detractors and opponents as the lowest of the low in sideshow. Some lowly like skinny geek just like biting the heads off of animals for alcohol or low pay.
Nathan Wakefield:That was his intent. And it's really interesting because that's not something you would really think about unless you really dissect it historically and kind of look at it through the way it happened. So I was pretty happy to put that in there because that helped popularize the term because he ran with that phrase for decades.
AP Strange:Right. And reading about it, it kind of led up to the song. Like I had forgotten about that song. I hadn't heard it Yes. In
Nathan Wakefield:recorded a song called Pencil Net Geek where he's singing, how much he needs geeks, it's bonkers.
AP Strange:Right. And it's a Doctor Demento picked it up. So it got a lot of play and it was on it was on one of the Doctor. Demento collections that I had as a kid and I was like, my god, I haven't heard that since I was probably 12. Yeah.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, it's a very entertaining song. He's yeah, it's like a crooner with an acoustic guitar. Just talking about how much he hates a geeks and wants to beat him up.
AP Strange:Right. And you know, he had kind of a legacy through through wrestling I guess he kind of mentored other guys too right so he was
Nathan Wakefield:yeah he was around a long time I mean I remember when I was a kid watching him in WWE he wasn't an active wrestler anymore but he would make several like on camera appearances just as a personality. So he had a very, very long career in the business as a wrestler. And like you said, mentoring people and doing a lot of things. But he he definitely came from a different era.
AP Strange:There's a
Nathan Wakefield:lot of fairground matches and a lot more extreme living.
AP Strange:Kind of the Yeah, the days before the wrestling got all corporatized and turned into like basically two entities.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, before it was known as sports entertainment. Right.
AP Strange:Yeah. Yeah, a wild west back then. But I didn't expect Doctor. Demento to show up at all of the books, so I was very happy to.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, and I dissect very, very much so psychologically, even talking about like everyone from Alice Cooper to Bob Dylan to Gigi Allen and tying them to geek in some way because I think there's certain parallels to be drawn, especially when you look at geek through the lens of entertainment of like, want to be shocked, we want to be horrified, you know? Right. So just having just that really low primal bottom of the barrel, somebody eating something gross or doing something shocking it's just like wow I'm disgusted but I can't look away you know what I mean it's a really interesting thing
AP Strange:well yeah it seemed like at a certain point the extreme had to be pushed and Gigi Allen was there to push it to the next level
Nathan Wakefield:He's a he didn't bite the heads off animals, but he put other things in his mouth on stage.
AP Strange:Yeah. Not pleasant. In a way, I guess you could kind of equate that with like John Waters movies and and divine.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah.
AP Strange:But not quite the same but it would take flamingos anyway.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, it's a good one.
AP Strange:I did think of that because you mentioned the book that the chickens often didn't go to waste because it was costly to, you know, just be killing chickens all the time. So after the heads are bitten off, often that would go over to the nest hall or the nest tent, whatever, and the cooks would would prepare them for dinner for everybody else.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah. And that that brings up an interesting ethical question because a lot of the shows, you know, they weren't killing animals with every show. It was either pantomiming or pretending. And even in the gloaming geek shows, it's like, guys, nobody's gonna, like, you know be pulling dozens or if not hundreds of chickens in a day just to kill them that's not cost effective and so like you said they would do it a few times a day and oftentimes they would just bring them to the cook shack and make stew for the carnies or cut them up and it gets to that ethical question like you go to a butcher they're going to chop the head off a chicken and sell it to somebody so if somebody's effectively doing the same thing but in a theatrical way but still using the animal for food. Yes, you could argue that it's being done in scary way, but it's still coming out ultimately as food that people are going to eat.
Nathan Wakefield:So it's that weird gray area, I think.
AP Strange:Yeah. Yeah. The reason I made the connection in my mind, I guess, is because I had read that when animal activists, animal rights activists came after John Waters for Pink Flamingos, his response was they ate the chicken afterwards. Was movie. Like if a butcher
Nathan Wakefield:counts off the head in in private, it's okay. But if a wild man is the one that moves that, woah, woah, woah. Yeah. But like I said, I do I do understand the argument, but it is interesting to think about.
AP Strange:Yeah. I mean, think that's how I first came into the concept of geeks to begin with was listening to heavy metal as a kid and Alice Cooper story about a chicken getting ripped apart while he was on stage and Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off of a dove in front of a bunch of record executives.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, I like the dove story because a lot of people know the bat story where he did it on stage and I think it was a fake one but the dove one he did be he he consciously did that. I mean, I've heard that he was he was intoxicated but he knew what he was doing. He did that intentionally to shock those executives and so I think that that is a is a really interesting tale.
AP Strange:Yeah, he was just kinda he was just kinda done with their bullshit, I guess, in that room and just needed to.
Nathan Wakefield:He was like, alright, guys. Let me show you something.
AP Strange:It just goes to show that Ozzy would have gotten nowhere without Sharon because she was she was pretty much making all that work for him. But yeah. And I had thought that Screamin' Jay Hawkins did a bit of a geek act in his work too, but then I looked into it and I was like because I was surprised he didn't come up and I was like, no, I guess he didn't. I don't know where I got that idea from. But, I mean, I guess it's similar because he's sort of doing a wild man thing.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah. I think his image kind of correlated to that, so I think that's actually a pretty logical conclusion. You know, he very much had that wild man image and kind of ran with that motif. So, yeah, could I could totally see that.
AP Strange:Yeah, because we had some geeks in the book that kind of did like a voodoo motif like a voodoo crease motif and then.
Nathan Wakefield:Congo, the jungle creep is a really interesting one. I wrote about him a lot in there. Yeah. He kind of kind of did the whole voodoo thing but the thing I like about him was he was kind of in it for himself because he was actually a very well compensated dye museum performer who later owned his own sideshow and so it's interesting to see somebody who just basically made not just a living but a successful like entrepreneurial career as a wild man
AP Strange:right and was generally considered like a like a businessman in the area too like well respected by the community you know
Nathan Wakefield:yeah yeah yeah
AP Strange:yeah it's interesting stuff yeah so I mean it there's this weird balance with the exploitative nature of stuff and just the showmanship and the sensationalism and entrepreneurial methods that some of them use, that it's really you can't it's such a mixed bag, you really can't paint them all with one brush.
Nathan Wakefield:I completely agree, and, you know, that's one thing I try to admit in the book is, like, the geek itself, you know, much like he was a social outcast in the sideshow, I think the very history of it is kind of a social outcast because, like you said, there's so many so many different ways to look at it. It's very, very interesting of, like, exploitive versus you know having a good time versus playing a character versus you know were these people being treated the way they should or is you know there's there's a lot it's a very complicated history
AP Strange:Yeah I mean because obviously there are some very. Very exploitive examples of that get into racial territory and all that and it's a product of the time but also that business model, the show business Yeah,
Nathan Wakefield:absolutely. Yeah, that was a very dark part of the history.
AP Strange:Right, and especially early on, it really was a wild bus. You didn't really have, you know, people could get away with a lot more back in the day.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah. It's it's also wild too. Like, we talked about the the human ostriches, some of which perished from from, you know, eating parts that would gum up their insides like the early snake eaters with like some of those sideshows and like the early nineteen hundreds working with live venomous snakes. Some of them actually got bitten by snakes in the show and either resulting in amputation or death. And the newspapers, as a matter of fact, like, oh yeah, this show happened.
Nathan Wakefield:He got bit and he died. Anyways, it was almost like, oh yeah, this performer died in the show. No big deal. Just throw him, throw him, bury him in the back lot or whatever and move on. It's like, oh my gosh.
Nathan Wakefield:Can you imagine?
AP Strange:Sometimes they were wrong too. Like, they would tell say the guy died and then he'd appear in the next town over.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, this guy actually did we don't think he's yeah.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah. That was one of my favorite ones. He's like, he died. He's like, correction. He's still alive.
Nathan Wakefield:He just doesn't have an arm anymore, but he's back at it. It's like, wow. Like, you lose your arm at work. The next and then the next week, you're back to eating snakes in a pen. Oh, my mistake.
Nathan Wakefield:I'll just try to make sure they're not, you know, venomous this week.
AP Strange:Yeah. Live by the snake, die by the snake. Love it. Well, he did have the one guy that was like a herpetologist and he would do an act where he kind of swallowed the snake like he was a sword swallower and then pulled it back out. So he was never actually eating or killing them.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, that guy was interesting. My favorite story about him in there is, I've mentioned this in one of the later chapters, I kind of tie it back to him, but he actually rose a very interesting legal question because there was reports that a guy was eating snakes at a sideshow, and they cited a thing saying, you know, that's animal cruelty. Well, you can't be eating live animals in this show. We gotta shut you down. And he said, I I'm not eating them.
Nathan Wakefield:See, look. I have regurgitative capabilities. I swallow them. And then when I regurgitate them, they're alive. So I'm not even harming them.
Nathan Wakefield:And they were like, Oh, but you are eating them, but not really, but then you bring them back up. And so it went to court and they had this whole like case about what is eating, what is harming, and yeah, it was interesting to see just actual serious, you know, conversations about how that stands legally.
AP Strange:Yeah, I mean, especially when you have character like this guy that went by the human aquarium.
Nathan Wakefield:Mhmm.
AP Strange:Mac Norton just swallowing frogs whole and then bringing them back up. Yeah. We're usually missing frogs. Yeah.
Nathan Wakefield:He really did that.
AP Strange:And I love the illustration that you included in the book too of him like basically as a human frog. I don't know if it was the same guy, but I think it might have been English Jack actually.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah that was English Jack. Yeah I'm really happy too because one of the things I made a point to include in the books is a lot of images.
AP Strange:Yeah
Nathan Wakefield:I don't think people realize one, the lengths I went to to find these old newspaper images that had not been published in sometimes over one hundred years, and in some cases, two, clearing getting clearance rights from like images that were buried in archives and libraries and academic institutions. So it's pretty cool. Like, actually, here's an interesting factoid. The one picture of English Jack I have in that book where he's leaning against an aquarium, There is a very famous sideshow book that was published, I think in the 90s, that references that very image but never printed it. And so I found out the source of the image that he saw it, I contacted that institution and I was able to get them to clear the rights to send me a digital version where I could publish it myself but to my knowledge that hadn't been seen anywhere outside of public in person viewing and probably close to one hundred years.
AP Strange:Yeah, that's amazing and I think a lot of the photos and pictures in here are worth the price of admission on their own, especially the appendices. In the appendices you include like pamphlets and little booklets that were contemporaneous with the axe in the sideshow that were used either as promotional material or like a souvenir.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, two of those are completely original translations too like the one was I think yeah one was in French and the other one was maybe maybe they were both in French but yeah I actually had those translated so those were original English translations that hadn't been shared previously so I was really happy to include that for greater context.
AP Strange:Yeah yeah because I mean otherwise these things are like usually in private collections you know. Yeah. And if you're lucky you might be able to see an exhibit with it or something but yeah it's here in the book for everybody to see. But speaking of some of the side roads you went on with it too is the goldfish eating craze. I love this.
AP Strange:The college kids just started challenging each other on who could swallow the most cold fish.
Nathan Wakefield:Isn't that funny? It's like that was entertainment back in the 30s it was yeah and it became such a craze but you think about it that was basically what would be social media today but instead of like you know uploading it to YouTube they're doing it and the press is like publishing updates on it every single day like this university did this and now they're talking this and they're talking smack about this and it just
AP Strange:It was a blew Harvard guy to begin with, I guess, right?
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah. Yeah. And it just blew up into this huge thing. It's like, man, this became very And then you got my favorite part of that is when you started seeing like some of the fairground performers, like the some actual geek adjacent performers that were kind of rolling up their sleeves, like, let me show those college boys how it's done. They're going out and doing their own public exhibitions of goldfish eating to try to shut down these know the hoity toity college kids.
Nathan Wakefield:It's like what is going on in the world right now man this is interesting.
AP Strange:Yeah one of my favorite parts about that there was a local connection for me where there was a kid at Clark University in Worcester, Mass that claimed to have beaten the record, but then it turns out he lied about it. Like, he wasn't even around at the time. Yeah. So they he got in all kinds of trouble that had to prove that he didn't actually do that. He was just lying to the newspaper.
AP Strange:I'm like, that totally tracks from my hometown.
Nathan Wakefield:Oh, boy. No, that's funny.
AP Strange:The hoaxer at Clark University. That's too funny. Yeah. That is funny. Imagine lying about such a thing.
AP Strange:Wow. But as far as the regurgitators go, there's one character in here that seemed like he was a particular fascination and perhaps inspiration to you, and that's Haji Ali.
Nathan Wakefield:Oh, yeah.
AP Strange:This sounds really interesting. He was actually, I guess, in a movie or two doing his act of water regurgitation, right? Like the human fountain.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah. So he did something that was called water spouting. Sometimes it was called like a human fountain act, but basically he would drink a lot of liquid and then he was able to expel it, not in the form of vomiting, but rather muscular control where he could shoot it out in a singular stream. Now that act in and of itself wasn't new. You can find people in Europe doing that that predate him.
Nathan Wakefield:But what's interesting is his take on it. First of all, he did other regurgitating things like he would bring up walnuts and stuff. I found one instance where he allegedly did, I think, a frog. Yeah. But the his main things, he invented this human kind of like fire hydrant type of stunt where what he would do was he would have a small structure in front of him that was on fire usually like a little wooden house or just some piece of garbage and he would drink an obscene amount of water, obscene amount of water.
Nathan Wakefield:And then he would drink kerosene, like actual kerosene. Yeah. And because they're different type of fluid on a different level, scientific level, the kerosene would float to the top of the water in his stomach, so then when he would walk over to the flaming object he would do a regurgitating act where he would expel the fluid, but it would be the kerosene, so he would just make the flames bigger and create this giant fiery mass in front of him. Then he'd kind of pause to like show that it was really burning. And then he would continue to regurgitate, only this time he had expelled all of the kerosene, so he was just doing pure water at that time.
Nathan Wakefield:So then he would use the water spot to extinguish the fire that he had just, you know, gotten to be out of control. So he was both fueling the flames and then extinguishing the flames through the same method of controlled regurgitation. And here's an interesting factoid. David Blaine, the American magician, was very taken by that act, and he actually has managed to recreate that act which is incredible because it is so dangerous not even through the lens of like getting burned but just drinking kerosene to the point where you're actually letting it sit in your stomach for a period of time. That is incredibly dangerous.
AP Strange:Your throat too. It's gotta really hurt your throat.
Nathan Wakefield:Oh, yeah. Just going through your mucus membranes and then. Yeah. You know, you talk about fire breathing. People hold that in their mouth.
Nathan Wakefield:That's not particularly good for you but you take it a step further where you're actually having it go down into your stomach. It's wild. But yeah, that's crazy.
AP Strange:So how'd Gale do this often? Or was this like I mean, I can't imagine he was doing several sort of shows a day of that.
Nathan Wakefield:Well, yeah, he mostly did like vaudeville, So, he probably didn't do it as much if he if he would have been doing a sideshow like a grind show but he he performed that act for years and I've heard people argue that they think that that hastened his demise. They think that that probably led to to some extent, why he passed. But yeah, Haji Ali is a very interesting entertainer. And his act, several versions of his act can be found online, several of them. One of them is a movie appearance, and then I found another one recently that was just uploaded where he's actually doing a demonstration for a fire department, which is really interesting.
AP Strange:Oh, wow.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, it's a less formal one. He's doing it outside instead of at like a stage, so it's pretty interesting.
AP Strange:Cool, yeah. Well, that leads me to the question, in researching this book or know, putting it all together, are there any of the particular performers or styles of performing within the geek tradition that influenced you or inspired you to do different things with your act?
Nathan Wakefield:That's a great question. Wow. I would say the in the flavor of it, I would say I very much I perform under the name Nathan McScary because I try to put a little bit of a macabre twist on some of what I do. One of the acts I do is I have cigar boxes. We talked a little bit about those, but I have one version I do where I actually have a taxidermied mice inside of the boxes, and I'm manipulating them, and you can see the taxidermied mice flopping around.
Nathan Wakefield:Now, they were ethically sourced and all that, but just having that kind of shock factor of like an animal that I'm working with on stage, I think some people it kind of grosses them out, but that's part of the attraction. You're giving them some kind of a grossy kind of shock moment. So I would say I run with that. And then I also lecture on the concept of geek. And one thing I've been doing in my geek shows is demonstrating geek technique where I have a rubber chicken and I rip the head off the chicken and spit the rubber chicken head in the audience.
Nathan Wakefield:So it's kind of like, I'm doing it but it's you know with a synthetic chicken so it's not right the same not the same thing it's ethical I guess you could say no animals were harmed during the course of this lecture
AP Strange:right Well, has anyone ever fainted when you when you bit the rubber chicken's head off or
Nathan Wakefield:No. I'm it's it's very much a very, like, cartoony over the top rubber chicken, and that's part of the appeal is that it just looks so absurd that when I actually do it but here's actually an interesting quick anecdote on that. I was I've lectured on the subject at a a variety of different venues and once last year, or no two years ago, I did a lecture on this at a circus history convention. This is a very much old school, very traditional circus history, smaller crowd, and they're very much, you know, an older, more prim and proper circus group that really likes, you know, the traditional trapeze and the clowning acts, and very, very much of an old timey, family friendly audience. And they were very kind to me, but I was definitely by far one of the younger people there and you know most of those people aren't really into the sideshow stuff but they found my lecture very interesting but I was dressed in like a full business suit and when I got on stage and did the part with biting the head off and spit in the audience one of them took a picture of me and posted it in their official Facebook page.
Nathan Wakefield:So you have this really prim and proper circus convention going on. Then there is me dressed in a business suit on there like business stage with a chicken in my mouth going,
AP Strange:yeah
Nathan Wakefield:and they and they put that on their page I was like wow I wonder what their followers think of that but they were a lot of fun to perform with or to lecture with but yeah that was a that was a highlight of that particular year
AP Strange:yeah well I mean I think with this book and it sounds like with your lectures and and your performances you really do kind of elevate some of those stuff that maybe before was not really considered all that highly if at all, know, so it's really nice to have somebody as an advocate for some of this amazing and bizarre history that have gone unknown had it not been So for your I very much appreciate it.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, thank you. That's why I say, know, I like to be like not just a lecturer and a performer, but also an advocate because like you say, it's this stuff could get lost so easily and yes it's weird but man is it interesting so I'm just happy to do what I can to help tell the story help preserve the history and to try to make it accessible to people that are also interested in it
AP Strange:Yeah, yeah, and it's a wonderful resource for anybody that even wants to go further or just use micro focus on one aspect of it.
Nathan Wakefield:Sure, yeah, yeah.
AP Strange:Yeah, it's wonderful. I'm gonna, it's gonna live on my shelf right next to my copy of Ricky Jay's Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women because it's Nice. I think it's that caliber of book so
Nathan Wakefield:oh thank you I was very influenced by ricky j I think a lot of he did a lot of phenomenal research if you especially factor in the research he was doing pre internet it's just remarkable
AP Strange:yeah and his collection was outstanding as well no yeah I understand that's his archive and library and collection of things has been turned into like a public archive at a college somewhere and I guess they have to go through an index everything that's gonna take them ages.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah, I've heard that. One of these days I'll pay her to visit. I've I've heard heard there's some interesting correspondence and whatnot there so right
AP Strange:yeah he was he was really one of a kind well as far as upcoming projects and things you mentioned that you were working on a project Houdini related earlier in conversation, but what do you have coming up?
Nathan Wakefield:Sure. Well, I'd like to announce that I am almost done with my next book, which is going be a follow-up to my geek book. I've been working on it for about three years now and I hope to publish it later this year. I've got just a few more writing sessions to go and I should have a workable draft to submit to my publisher. So this book, it's also going to be Sideshow History.
Nathan Wakefield:It's going to be very similar to my Geek book, only the subject of this one is The Fakir Act. Are you familiar with Fakirs?
AP Strange:Oh yeah, yep.
Nathan Wakefield:Yeah. So, it's gonna be kind of that same vein but about Fakirs because one thing that has long fascinated me is just culturally, the Fakirs as these really interesting, very spiritual people, and then how you started to see some of the physical acts they were doing kind of cross over into a more performative aspect with the dime museums and vaudeville and sideshow and circus. So kind of studying that transition from the spiritual side of it to it becoming more of like a staple in early twentieth century performing. I think that's really interesting. I'm kind of talking about that bridging that historical gap as well as researching and providing biographical information about some of the notable performers during that time period that kind of helped make that its own standalone genre and then I'm researching one European fakir in particular that's fascinated me for almost twenty years.
Nathan Wakefield:It's also going to be kind of a biography of him and revealing information about who he was and where he came from and what he did as well as telling the story of the genre of his act because this entertainer he was European and he came to America in the 1930s and he performed an act that nobody had ever seen before. Mhmm. And he performed in America for about three years. And then he went back to Europe and said I'm going to be back for the Chicago World's Fair with an act that's even bigger. And And you won't believe what you what you see next, America.
Nathan Wakefield:And he got on that boat and left and was never seen in America ever again and nobody knows who he was or what happened to him. Wow. So, I'm gonna tell his story and like again, he had an act that nobody had ever done before and nobody's done since. So, I'm going to tell his story as well as telling the greater story about the evolution of the genre of Fakure in entertainment.
AP Strange:Well, that sounds fantastic. Mean, based on the book that I've already read by you, can imagine that this is going to be somehow even better and more entertaining.
Nathan Wakefield:So far it's led me down some interesting rabbit holes to say the least, but there's a lot of different angles I'm trying to look at it from and a lot of different ways to examine it both culturally and through entertainment and talking to people, but I think it's going to be a really interesting deep dive that I think is really going to have a lot of fascinating information. I'm hoping it's well received and that people find it as interesting as they did my geek book.
AP Strange:Yeah, all right, awesome. Well, far as following you on keeping up with you online or finding you if people want to contact you if you're open to that? Where where should people look?
Nathan Wakefield:Oh, yeah. Sure. Check out my website, nathanmcscary.com. That's my performance website, but I have a little information about books on there. So feel free to reach out to that.
Nathan Wakefield:If you want to check out my publisher's website outside talker press that's their name it's run by a gentleman named Jim Moore he's published my work as well as several other sideshow books that are also really interesting and then you can also find me on Instagram also Nathan McScarrie or if you want to try to find me my legal name is Nathan Wakefield so feel free to look me up and drop me a line
AP Strange:all right excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on. This was just as much fun as I expected it to be.
Nathan Wakefield:Awesome, appreciate you having me AP.
AP Strange:Yeah, of course.