Minnesota State Fair: Side Show!

My daily awesome for yesterday was going to see the Minnesota state fair's side show at the Midway. When I was six years old living in Kansas my dad took me to see a traveling circus. I swear i remember seeing elephants being used to put up the tent, but maybe that was just Disney cartoons clouding my memories. My father and I went to see the side show and it was incredible and scary. At one point a scantly-clad woman was placed in a box that the magician pierced with dozens of wooden poles. I was bedazzled. I wondered how she'd escaped before all the poles were inserted. What dumbfounded me was when I realized that she was still inside! And for a dollar you could walk around back and see how she'd contorted herself around these piercing poles. My father paid and we were both impressed. At the Minnesota state fair yesterday Rachel and I got to see acts including sword swallowing, a bed of nails, a guillotine act, a human spider woman and a human snake woman. We also got to see the same contortionist in a pierced box act I'd seen as a kid twenty years ago. So I proudly paid for us to go around back to see the scantly-clad woman. Here's a link to a story about them: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2006/08/28/sideshow/