Americana- It's what's for dinner

One day I was bitching about my job to a co-worker. I was sick of New York and I wanted to be anywhere but "this miserable little island." She said "Big apple Circus is looking for people, you should go out on tour with them." So that's what I did. The Big Apple Circus is a team of very talented performers, and has a long and storied tradition of excellence. This is not one of those stories. The show that year was a Western theme. There was a huge tee-pee in front of the band platform, where the performers entered, and a puppeteer did a back lit shadow show for the audience between two of the ring acts. One of my duties was to hold an incredibly bright light on a stick behind the puppeteer, so the shadows would fall on the tent for the audience to see. At the conclusion of the puppet show, a slumped over man in a cowboy hat rides a buffalo out of the tee-pee. Sounds easy enough, right? Let me back up a bit. The man on the buffalo was the great performer Taso Stavrakis, whom is famous for among other things, having portrayed more zombies on film than any other actor ever, and for turning down the role of Jason Voorhees. (Derek Mears would later say yes to the role, but that's a story for another day.) So back to the tee-pee. Inside are the French puppeteers, me trying to hold the light perfectly still, and behind me are Taso and the buffalo. Now I love animals, dont't get me wrong, but this buffalo and I did not get along at all. I don't know if she just didn't like me or liked me too much, but the relationship was not a healthy one. Every show, Taso would bring the animal behind me for the entrance, and every day the buffalo would berate me with her nose and or horns. Now to be fair, her horns were capped with steel balls, so they weren't sharp, but the thing weighed like 2200 pounds, so anything she did had quite a lot of force behind it. Remember too that I'm holding the backlight, so any movement I or the lamp make translate to the puppets, and look to the audience like an earthquake is happening inside the Tee-pee. So while the backstage crew thought that the molestation of my rear-end that was a result of this love/hate relationship was hysterical, the result was that now I was taking heat from the performers who did not seem to sympathize with my dilemma. You would think that clowns would have a sense of humor. They do not. This went on for what seemed like two forevers. Finally, in one of the cities the tour performed in, my friends and I had some down time, and were driving around looking at the sights, when I noticed a sign for a diner that served alligator burgers. Naturally we stopped there for lunch. Now I have had alligator before, so I was eager to see what other exotic fare this eclectic restaurant had to offer. Ostrich, eh. Bear, been there. Rattlesnake, no thank you. Bison burgers. Wait, did you say bison burgers? I would actually love a bison burger, thank you. And one to go too please. So yes, you are justified in your fears, later that day I plopped myself down next to my shaggy rapist's pen and very deliberately ate a delicious meal of one of her extended family. I think that somewhere behind those dark brown eyes of hers, she knew what was going on, because I never had any more trouble with that particular buffalo.