Fancy Dancers and Rainbows
The Traveling Show is a collection of poems and artwork that ravels together a storyline of the lives of the people who pass through one's life.
In the 1400s, thousands of minstrels performed throughout medieval Europe. As they journeyed from town to town, these roaming groups of entertainers would sing, dance and perform in a Traveling Show.
These minstrels composed the lyrics to spin a story that captivated the crowd with their words and tunes.
They sang embellished tales of faraway or imaginary places, events and legends. They were the storytellers with the road shows of days gone by.
Depending on its size, the Traveling Show would have several actors or could be just a single wandering performer - the one man show.
The streets of Renaissance Europe would be filled with these musicians and entertainers performing both day and night. But, by 1700, minstrels and Traveling Shows became extinct.
Today, the Traveling Show is embodied in the entertainment circuit of traveling celebrities and musicians- roaming between venues or television shows. The Traveling Show spirit is also found in the street musicians who entertain on the sidewalk or in the subway.
Also, the Traveling Show is played out in the scenes and the people who pass through one’s own life. We all encounter people who exert great influence on our own destiny. Through the eyes and words of a minstrel, this traveler’s story is told.
These pages are from a collection of my minstrel stories from the 20th Century.
The people in these poems lived, and died, with their own Traveling Shows as they tried to reach for rainbows. Some never did finish that journey. Through their eyes, I wrote about their travels through life. Through my eyes, they became my own travels.
Each poem is a slice of life and chapter on it own. Most of the poems were shared with the people they were written about as they took their own Traveling Shows on the road. The poems also foretold my story as it unfolded. My comments at the end of each poem are written decades later when I decided to finally compile this volume.
These poems were spontaneously written, usually at one sitting, to reflect on the people, places and events around me at the time. The handwritten copies are scanned from the original writings. The typed poems are dictated through speech recognition software. All of the signed artwork and photographs are my originals. Renaissance images, where noted, are clip art. The poems are placed mostly in date order to reveal the entire story. The reoccurring symbols evolved into their own meanings as the poems progressed.
These pages are dedicated to all of the angels and fancy dancers who helped to inspire these words, and especially, to those who got lost along the way.
Now, I am able to tell my own minstrel story. These are the songs waiting to be sung.
In 1969, at age 16, I started writing poetry and drawing people and places. Over several decades, and about 1,000 poems later, they became my lifeline to the past. Forty years later, they are still beacons to the future. When composed, they weren’t meant to be a continuous story. It just happened. The words developed into their own stories that were molded over the years in symbols and imagery. This volume features a selection of those poems to tell this story.
I wrote about growing up and the lives of the people who passed by as I transitioned through high school, college and the real world. These same words followed me for decades. Unknowing at the time, the poems would develop an unwitting theme, or string of themes, that seem to bind the decades together into a story of more than just myself. Follow the words that weave around those themes as people come in and out of my life and see the reflections of your own life.
Everyone has his or her own Traveling Show. As we interact with the people we meet, their influences on our lives shape the way we grow and how we present ourselves to the world.
