Stomp and Circumstance

When I was growing up in Montreal, way back in the early 1960s, the annual visit of the Shrine Circus was a very big deal. Beginning in 1939, the Karnak Temple chapter brought the circus to the old Forum every May as a fundraiser for the Shriners’ Hospital for Crippled Children (as it was then called). Aerialists and acrobats! Clowns! Shriners dressed like “sheiks” and driving tiny little cars! A lady shot from a cannon! But, most of all, lions and tigers and chimpanzees and bears and elephants. I still remember the thrill of proximity as the elephants made their stately way into the ring and the gasps of appreciation as they stood on little stools or rolled on barrels or “danced” in grass skirts or rose on their hind legs to balance against one another. For a child back then, seeing these animals and being close to them, whether at the zoo or at the circus, was a way of loving them. We weren’t aware of the grievous insult to their dignity. And we...