little post of random

[kattahj]

I haven't read the Buffyverse comics and usually pay little attention to them, but when I saw that one was called "Women of a Certain Age", I went to see the review, because it occurred to me that it may involve some older women being non-evil and surviving it, which would mark an important day in the Whedon calendar.

Judging by the review, LOL no

Comments

[eponine119]

I know the circus did operate during WWII - the Hartford circus fire was in 1944.

How the draft might have affected things is an interesting question. I assume the men who worked the circus were not draft-eligible.

[kattahj]

I know the circus did operate during WWII - the Hartford circus fire was in 1944.

I was thinking more of touring circuses in Europe, with the borders closing and circus members being of nationalities from both sides and so on. It seems like it would be a clusterfuck, but I can't tell what kind of a clusterfuck, and I'd like to err on the right side of believability.

[love2loveher]

My grandfather ran away with the circus between tours in WWII. It was in America, and he wasn't a performer, but it went something like this:
He was a Merchant Marine, and his ship landed at a port in Texas. He got in a bar fight or something (These parts of my grandfather's stories involve a lot of mumbling. I think he stole a lot of his shipmate's wives, really) and needed to get out of town quickly so he got a job putting up circus tents in order to hitch a ride out of town. He ended up in New Orleans, where he boarded on another ship, and went back to war.
Though, the problem with fiction is it has to be believable. But In your situation, I would think that it could just as easily be a foreigner landing somewhere in Europe, going through the same motions, and ending up as a circus performer for a little while?

[kattahj]

Yes, so far, it seems like circuses were way more operational during WWII than I had feared, though many of them were largely run by women and old people/children, while the men were drafted.

[eponine119]

Sorry - I had figured you were talking US because of mentioning US-set fandoms just prior.

It does seem like it would be difficult and yet fascinating to see what happened in Europe.

[kattahj]

Yeah, sorry about that, I should have made it clear that it was a different story.

It's funny, in my head, WWII is something that happened in Europe (though not in Sweden) and everyone else was just sort of on the edges. But of course it happened in all sorts of places, that's why it was a world war.

[therru]

Well, aside from the Pearl Harbor bombing, there wasn't much actual fighting on US soil, was there? So I imagine that travelling circuses would have had rather different problems to face in the US versus Europe.

[kattahj]

Yeah, definitely. When I said "all sorts of places," I also meant Africa and Asia and so on.