Another Day at the Circus-

Another Day at the Circus-  

Kiev, 1997

My boss Martin came up to me at the office.  He told me that he met a girl at his fitness club and they decided to go out for dinner, but the girl wanted to bring her younger sister along and asked if he had another foreign friend that he could invite for a double date.  He then asked me to be his wingman.  

“What does she look like?”  I asked immediately.

“I don’t know man; I have only seen her sister.  Her sister is nice.  She has big tits.  She’s mine.  You will get the sister.”

“Hmm…Big tits you say...Ok, I’m in.  What’re we going to do?”

“We spoke about dinner at the Red Lion.”  Of course, Martin picked one of the most high-end and dramatically over-priced restaurants in the city. 

“The Red Lion huh, that place is very steep and quite poor quality, but it makes sense and I like the sound of it.  Then what, we go to a club or something?”

“I don’t think she likes clubs.”  Martin added in a way that I thought he’d follow up with a suggestion, but only silence came.

“I have an idea, I’ve been wanting to hit the circus, let’s take the girls there after dinner.”

“The circus?”  Martin didn’t understand the idea and it showed.

“Yeah, I heard that it’s a real, traditional Soviet-style circus.  Someone told me that they’ve got a polar bear on ice skates- that sounds really cool.”

“A polar bear on ice skates?”  Martin was totally dumbfounded.

“Yeah!  That sounds interesting doesn’t it?  Trust me, the girls will totally dig it.”

“Let me ask Nastiya and I’ll let you know.”  Nastiya was the older sister.

The next day, Martin said that he spoke with Nastiya and she was really excited about the circus.  I told Martin to pay up for good seats.  By the end of the week, we had secured four front row tickets to the main show.  The plan was coming together nicely. 

When I got to the Lion on Saturday, Martin, Nastiya and her sister, Katya, were already there.  Nastiya was indeed quite a good looking lady.  She was in her mid-twenties, had big soft blue eyes, shortish dark hair and the biggest rack I’d ever seen on a Ukrainian girl before.  She also had a certain poise and elegance about her.  She indeed looked good, real good.  

Her sister, Katya, was younger than I expected at 19 years old.  She was much skinnier than Nastiya.  She hadn’t really filled out yet, had this frizzy curly brown hair and wasn’t put together nearly as well.  Though, she did have her own sizable mammaries.  The main problem was language.  Neither of the girls spoke any English whatsoever, which was typical and usually not a deal breaker in itself, despite my extremely poor Russian language skills.  The problem was that Katya was more interested in the dinner than trying to understand or meet me, so the conversation kept hitting roadblocks.  

We got through dinner and went to the circus.  Once there, we were led all the way down to the front row.  The night felt like it was improving.  There was a circular stage in the center of the amphitheater and we had some really great seats. 

We bookended the girls with me being on the far end, then Katya, Nastiya and Martin at the other end.  I’d never been to a circus before and was excited to see how the Soviets pulled one off.  As the girls and Martin talked to each other as we waited for the show to start, I enjoyed people watching as the place filled up.  There were lots of families with young children coming in, but they were mostly higher up in the cheaper seats.  Our area had some people, but it was nowhere near as packed as the upper rows.  After about twenty minutes, where no one from my company acknowledged or tried to engage me, the lights dimmed and the show started. 

First, lots of clowns came out with music blasting.  They did some slapstick type of humor, falling down a lot and running in circles.  The crowd seemed to like it and there was laughter throughout the audience.  Then they brought out some cats.  Not lions and tigers- house cats.  Normal domestic house cats.  It was strange.  A handler was using a whip to get the cats who were at one end of a long board that was at a steep angle to force them to climb higher and then over a small bridge to another long board sloping down.  One by one the cats were whipped, went up, over and down the other side.  It wasn’t impressive, but the crowd really ate it up. 

Next, some dogs came out.  Smaller dogs, like terriers or something.  They did some jumping tricks and walked a balance beam and the like.  Again, not impressive, but the girls were digging it while Martin just stared with an absent smile on his Slavic face.  I watched the crowd and saw that there was some genuine happiness around me, which was nice to see, especially considering I found it to be quite a banal, bordering on animal abuse, performance.  

Then, some more clowns danced and fell around as the stage was cleared.  After a few minutes, the clowns exited and a handler brought out two black bears in muzzles.  The bears started walking on their hind legs in a circle around the stage.  Again, they were being whipped regularly by their handler (as were the dogs and cats) and with the muzzles, you could see them in agony, drooling and moaning as they ran around almost frantically.  They then had to climb over things and onto a balance beam.  I wasn’t expecting such cruelty, which really turned me off, but our Ukrainian girls were jumping up and down and clapping their hands with big smiles throughout.  I was confused when I looked over and saw that, but my gaze inadvertently shifted to the two sets of the biggest breasts in the place bouncing around next to me, which made the confusion more bearable (no pun intended).    

After a little more time, the bears were led off and the stage was cleared.  The music started blasting again.  After a couple minutes, another muzzled black bear came out riding a small motorcycle or mini-bike with a handler directing him from the center of the stage.  The bear drove in a circle around the stage perimeter and everyone was really loving it and hooting it up.  However, the mini-bike was burning oil, so as the bear kept going in a dizzyingly fast circle, white exhaust was pouring out of the motorcycle like a special effects cloud machine.  The mini-bike was creating a massive exhaust cloud and after a few circles, the bear was driving through thick fumes.  It looked like he was going through hell as the handler kept shouting at him.  My heart felt for the poor guy.  Also, since we were in the front row, the fumes soon consumed us, and the audience around us.  It was horrible, my eyes burned, I couldn’t breathe, all of our clothes would surely stink after this and through it all, the muzzled black bear kept going in a circle hanging on for dear life in the ever-thickening toxic exhaust fog.  The handler didn’t seem to notice or mind the fumes at all.

At this point, I leaned behind our ladies, who were really loving it and tapped Martin on the shoulder.  He looked over and I gave him a big double thumbs-up with a smile, basically saying, “this is awesome!”  At first he thought I was serious and had a look of utter confusion on his face, but he soon realized my sarcasm at the absurdity of it all and let out a deep belly laugh. 

Despite the health hazard and irritated eyes, when the girls heard Martin laugh, they thought it was in response to the performance, so they both started jumping up and down clapping even more enthusiastically.  I remained unimpressed and worried about all the children (and myself) sitting in a toxic cloud of carbon monoxide fumes and a tortured bear desperately stuck on an antique motorbike speeding continuously in a rapid circle.  This whole spectacle was indeed a circus, but in the frenzied, bewildering and confusing kind of way. 

I guess the Soviet circus had decayed along with the Soviet Union for so long, it had lost its ballast along the way, just like everything else.   The ice skating polar bear never came out and the bear on the motorcycle was the main attraction.  When this smoke bomb of a performance finished, the lights came up and you could see that the entire pavilion was filled with the white exhaust slowly climbing all the way up to the rafters.  I’d never seen anything like it before.   

We went out for a post-circus drink, but Katya and I had no interest in each other, so I soon called it night and peeled away.  It wasn’t a good night and I never went back to the Kiev circus again.  Looking back on it now, I’m sure I would’ve preferred the ice skating polar bear over the “smoke bomb bandit” motorcycle bear, that is, if the polar bear didn’t break his leg on the ice or something. 

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