Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1905-03-25

was just the thing they needed. Soon they
had come out with all kinds of acts. They
rode ON tight ropes, on wires, up and down
spiral staircases. They dashed about on
small platforms. They carried human
pyramids while they rode
But the moment the novelty of the
bicycle wore off the demand arose for more
spectacular feats. Then came the class of
performances which dominates the arena
today-the class which consists primarily
in getting fearful momentum by darling
on rubber-cushioned tires from steep
height and then looping loops or leapng
gaps by means of the acquired velocity.
Without doubt no more dangerous or
terrifying spectacular feats than these
have ever been attempted. The people who
do them cut loose from the whole world on
the instant when they start on their mad
flight, and for the four, five or six seconds
during which they are soaring through the
air they are as far from human help as IL
they were already dead.
In the past few years ingenious, wild.
incredible schemes have pressed on without
a break, so that there has hardly been
year when the freak of one season was
good enough to be the freak of the next.
Where Will It Stop?
The circus people themselves wonder
where the nerve of the freaks is going to
stop. They really thought or, rather. fear
ed that it had reached the limit when
Fitzgerald, the one-legged man, rode down
top of Madison Square Garden to the arena
on a bicycle. But If they wondered what
could be found to follow that thriller they
had their pains for nothing. Before the
season was ended dozen plans were on
foot to beat the act.
Fitzgerald himself beat it by going down
the same terrible declivity in the next
season on an automobile. His bicycle act
had been improved on by two men, who
flew the staircase on a single wheel, one
standing on the others shoulders and fir
ing off a pistol as they sped.
Along came another man who rode in
an enormous cage made of Stats set widely
apart. Gradually, his velocity increased,
his wheel climbed the side of the apparatus
till he rode at right angles to the Stats. Be
fore long three men were riding around in
the cage. Then others found that the act
would look more thrilling if the cage We're
lifted high in the air and had no bottom to
It, so that any accident would certainly
hurl the performers outward and downward
like a cannon ball.
Then came the loop-the-loop freak and
the public said that this surely was the
limit. So thought the circus people them
selves. They figured that there might be
some notifications of the thing, but that
the limit of daring mortal injury and death
for wages had probably been reached at
last. Yet within two years the loop-the-
loop ride was lost before the loop-the- gap
ride and in the same arena another rider
was laundering nightly down an incline so
up another and leaping from the end of 1t
over more than twenty-five feet of space to
the up-tilted end of still another.
These things looked pretty hard to beat
and they were. But they have been beaten
again.
In Europe today woman is making what
the program calls "A Flight to the Moon
High in the top of the building is painted
canvas moon. Opposite it is the up-tilted
end of one of these loop-the-loop contriv-
ances. The woman flies along on her wheel,
darts off the very end of the dizzy road and
goes spinning clean across the arena, high
over head, till she strikes the moon which
opens and takes in her and her wheel.
The Biggest Thing Yet.
Scarcely had the people of Europe had
time to grasp at this before Partisan
woman came out with something that was
indeed worthy of being called the biggest
thing yet" So big was it that the Ameri-
can circus promptly went down into its
clothes for 5000 a week for her and
brought her over as it's star attraction for
the season of 1905.
This new thriller freak is pretty
woman. Mauricia de Theirs is her name.
She seats herself in an automobile high
in the air on the top of a skeleton struc-
ture tall as a five-story building. Be