The glorious and colorful, if not always great, days of the big top live on in Victoria Cristiani Rossi's intelligent new memoir, Spangles, Elephants, Violets & Me.
Victoria shares her life under...vizualizați mai multeThe glorious and colorful, if not always great, days of the big top live on in Victoria Cristiani Rossi's intelligent new memoir, Spangles, Elephants, Violets & Me.
Victoria shares her life under the big top and away from it—from her first year at a convent boarding school when she is six years old to age nineteen when she is hurled from the trunk of a performing elephant before a capacity crowd, teeming with Hollywood celebrities. With the healing perspective of years, she recounts her family's conflicts, triumphs and struggles, and adventures as circus owners, amid shifting public taste in popular entertainment—an era that reflected the best and the worst of times as Victoria grew into adulthood.
Born into the Internationally Famous Cristiani Riding Act Family, from the canvas “womb" of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus of the 1940's, Victoria is an eyewitness to a world now "nowhere to be found." But she captures that world and its era with powerful and lyrical imagery. With respect and frankness, she allows the circus to be what it was, and is—an amazing, complex community, an inventive state of mind, and a place of enduring entertainment and fascination.vizualizați mai puține