“If you ask me, the circus in always in town …”

                              – guy riding Light Rail, whom no one asked

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Photo Credit: Feld Entertainment

Five pachyderms – bonded trunk to tail – walked west on Fayette Street through downtown Baltimore the other day, hung a right on Eutaw Street and were led to the Lexington Market by a police motorcade. There, the elephants enjoyed an al fresco brunch of watermelon, carrots, apples, bananas, lettuce and Italian bread.

Hundreds of folks and their children were waiting on a bright and windy Wednesday – April 3, 2013 – and it was easily the coolest thing to happen in Baltimore all day. As it is every year, going back three decades in a tradition that Ringling Brothers officials said only takes place in Crabtown.

The elephants were joined by ringmaster Johnathan Lee Iverson, a lady clown on a unicycle (who high-fived kids lined up for the show), jugglers, and a baseball player clown who hit red plastic clown noses into the crowd. It was a mini-circus, staged to promote the big Ringling Brothers show at First Mariner Arena downtown through April 7. And it was free.

“The circus is expensive, it’s very commercial with toys and hats and cotton candy,” said Yvette Lee, 42, a nurse from Essex who came with her grown daughter, Jamie. “This is a great opportunity for people who can’t afford to take their kids” to the Arena.

When Yvette was growing up, her construction worker father would work odd jobs and overtime to take the family to the circus, something a kid never forgets.

“It was one of the fun things we got to do every year,” she said.

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Photo Credit: Feld Entertainment

On a brick wall just south of the market, a handful of Orthodox Jewish boys perched themselves for a good look at the elephants. With their yarmulkes and white shirts, I was reminded me of an interview I once did with Rabbi Amrom Taub of the Arugas HaBosem congregation in Northwest Baltimore.

Rabbi Taub, a Holocaust survivor who died at age 90 in 2007, told me he had never been inside a movie theater – had never watched television – but as a child in eastern Europe would peek at the circus wagons as the performers set up camp before performing in the village.

“I could go

[to the circus] if I wanted to,” he said of his childhood in a vanished world. “But I wouldn’t be praised for it.”

There is, perhaps, a faith stronger than the others, one which the circus brings out in all but the most bitter: a belief in the wonder of childhood.

Kenny Allen, who said he was in his late 50s, took the train over from Washington, D.C. to get a little of that faith back through the simple act of watching elephants ladle fruit into their mouths.

“Once people become adults they sometimes forget to have fun,” said Allen. “You can’t forget to have fun.”