With fire shooting from his mouth, Johnny Meah steps onto the stage and into character.
But nothing in this act reveals Meah’s current claim to fame: he is a respected painter whose banners of sideshow performers hang in such places as the Smithsonian, the Barnum Museum in Westport, Connecticut, and Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, where he’s going through the paces tonight. At 63, he’s at the top of his game.
For Meah, growing up in early 1950s Connecticut, what was thrilling and happening was the circus. “Sideshow performance was the thing that really intrigued me,” he says. A pair of his uncles performed in vaudeville as an aerial act known as the Casting Campbells.
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Meah eventually returned home to attend school–he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design for one semester–but he couldn’t stay away from the circus. He learned to eat fire (“a no-brainer,” he says) and became fascinated with the swords. “You had to have a sword swallower in a sideshow,” he says. Because sword swallowers were in such high demand–due, perhaps, to what Meah refers to as the “unpleasantness” involved in learning the act–he decided to master it.
That winter Hammer traveled to Meah’s home in Riverview, Florida, near Tampa. “Carl showed up. He was a city-locked ex-English teacher, rather starchy, and he’d never been exposed to either the places or the people that I dragged him around to.” Those people were mostly Meah’s friends in the business who were living in or around the retirement community of Gibsonton, Florida, “Carnival Capital of the U.S.A.” Meah estimates Hammer picked up around 50 banners on that first trip.
“People ask what it was like,” he says. “Well, it was like anything else. You go into an office for the first time and you have no idea what the people are like. Once you see their peculiarities, whatever they may be, the next day that’s all gone. Then you regard them on the merits of their abilities or personalities. It was the same with freaks.
