Eye on the Big Top: Mired in Cherry Pie, New Cole’s Renee Storey Could be Spinning Cotton Candy Soon...

The Circus previously known as Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros is finally up and at it, valiantly mired in shorthandedness but moving ahead with long suffering spirits — stars pitching in to drive stakes and lay out canvas. Said Renee Storey to Rosa Ramirez of the Daytona Beach News, the show is still short by about 30 workers, the brown hands waiting for green lights from U.S. immigration officials.

The article, shot my way by Jack Hunter, makes clear what most of us have observed over the years: Performers tossing aside egos between acts to dig in and rig up. “We help them so they can help us, too,” said teeterboarder Oscar Julia Preciado. Bravo, Mr. Circus Everyman!

Joked VP Renee Storey — a lady who, from what I gather, has sawdust in her spine, or spine in her sawdust — she might have to make the cotton candy. Reminds me of the song from A Chorus Line, “What I Did For Love.”

What they do for the big top. I imagine Johnny Pugh up there somewhere on the nerve-wracking advance, facing down iffy city council members hounded by two or three PETA screamers, all for the humiliating cost of a lot license. A trouper to his bones is Sir Pugh of the world-class “with it and for it" class.

Covington Connected: Don sent me a fine New York Times endorsement (I guess) of Ringling’s latest, making it sound like a fast moving spread of this and that. My only wonderment is if it’s another random Feld smorgasbord, although those sprawling samplers sometimes do the trick. This edition sounds like a fast blast.

When liberals embrace animal acts, watch out, World! During a conversation with two ex-New Yorkers here in Brooklyn West (a.k.a.: Oakland), the woman, a self described atheist from Queens, shocked me by sharing what a joy she considers circus animal acts to be for young kids. The Brooklyn man, at his wits end over some law that prohibits him from having or harboring a house cat up in the Oakland Hills, is also seeing the light. But boy, did those two dash my stereotype. They, not I, raised the issue. She, not I, went on and on about the “wonderment” of the circus world to a child. And this from the most liberal region in the country? I only listened, grinning inside. Speaking of delightful four-legged show stoppers, there’s this...

A photo not for your eyes, PETA: We know you can’t tolerate watching an elephant dash your stereotype of what it, according to you, should be up to in the wilds. Well, here’s a Michael Jordanesqe pachyderm in Thailand, 2006, going for the hoop. World travelers Angelina and Noel Andreoni, playing basketball basketball in the lovely country previously known as Siam, watched with delight as Orachi the elephant “dunked their ball,”so reported by the paper still known as the New York Times.

Johnny Pugh: The more I think about your telling me of the time when your big bulls were yelping it up to be back on a lot they hadn’t played for years, well ... well ... the more I think you were not pulling my trunk.

And that’s a Cherry Pie Wrap.