Collegiate "geek" in the '70s (was Re: Synonymy avoidance)

Page Stephens hpst at EARTHLINK.NET
Fri Mar 11 18:18:31 UTC 2005


Out of curiosity how many of you have ever met a geek in the carnival
sideshow sense of the word?

I've known quite a few in my peregrinations around the planet Earth and we
were friends including the man who introduced me to geekery who used to
stick pins and needles through his cheeks but really wowed the audience when
he sewed buttons on his chest although his real specialty was getting blown
up by dynamite.

A few months ago I appeared on local TV show in order to disabuse the
audience of any notion that Sufis had some special religious powers which
allowed them to quickly heal after they had driven nails into their heads,
etc. and the best line I could come up off the top of my head (no pun
intended) was that it had nothing whatsoever to do with religion and magical
healing because they were not doing anything I had not seen in that hotbed
of religious belief the  carnival sideshow.

Geekery if you want to call it that has been a mainstay of sideshows for
hundreds of years and still exists in more mainstream magical shows.

Don't believe me then watch Penn and Teller some time since both of them
play the part of the geek in their performances although Teller is the
primary geek in their act.

When I was in grade school we used to do little geek acts such as sticking
pins and needles through our hands or pouring hot wax on them in order to
gross out our friends.

It looks bad but if you do it right it doesn't hurt any more than sewing
buttons on your chest does if you do it right.

I would tell you how to eat a lightbulb or to set yourself on fire or even
to eat fire except that if you didn't follow my instructions exactly and did
it wrong and got hurt you might sue me.

Just let me tell you that it is possible to perform such feats without
harming yourself, and I will leave it at that.

The easiest feats, of course, are to walk across a bed of hot coals or to
have someone break a slab of rock while your are lying on a bed of nails.

Page Stephens



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