About every year in the 1950s and early 1960s a rather tatty, third-rate circus arrived in Middletown and usually set up in a large piece of abandoned farm land not from from my Aunt Ruth's home. My cousins, my brothers, and I spent some time touring the grounds, buying cotton candy and watching everyone and everything. We never saw a performance; we grew up poor.
I do recall, like the rodeo, that when I was very young, I was in the audience, but I was s young that for years after I could never tell if it were a dream or reality.