Ringling Bros

When Robert Dorfman was cast as Feste, the clown in Cente Stage's production of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," the director asked if he could walk on a 4-foot rubber ball.To any other actor, this might have seemed an unlikely request. But Mr. Dorfman, 40, spent the early part of his career as a clown with the Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey Circus.When other aspiring actors were study- ing in conservatories or struggling through auditions, he was wearing a patched tuxedo and performing a flea circus act.So, walk on a ball?

After 10 quiet years as an accountant, Pamela E. Long wanted to run away and join the circus. And when Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus wouldn't have her, she sued.Now, the Laurel woman is balancing on a legal high wire. The circus alleges she is making "audacious . . . and meritless" claims, while Ms. Long insists she is fighting for the rights of women.A federal district judge in Baltimore dismissed her case. Ms. Long says she is appealing the dismissal because the circus' earlier settlement offer didn't include the value of the job's fringe benefits.

It's been a long trip - 31 hours from Cincinnati into Baltimore, another nine sitting in the rail yard by the B&O Museum. At last the doors of the silver Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey train slide open and 15 unchained Asian elephants begin stepping carefully down ramps into the morning sunlight in one more city on the circus trail. The animals trumpet, snort, grope the pavement with their trunks as the crew lines them up to march down Pratt Street toward the Baltimore Arena.Folks from the neighborhood are out with their kids and their cameras.

It's late on a steamy August morning. Forty scholars and their lecturer have been at their studies for a couple of hours. One of the more challenging courses in the summer program at Anne Arundel Community College is already well under way. But there are no desks or chalkboard. The classroom is a gym, and six young people are walking the floor on stilts. Eight more spin plates on sticks, and one weaves his way through the commotion on a bicycle the size of a ringmaster's hat. Welcome to Circus Camp, a five-day, 40-hour expedition through the big-top arts in which comedy is king, the teacher is a clown and the students — county children between the ages of 7 and 14 — will be able to conquer the course material only if they can manage not to take themselves too seriously.

Sean Thomas decided he wanted to be a human cannonball after reading about a man who had broken his back being shot out of a cannon.It wasn't the man's injuries that drew the 24-year-old, of course, but the sheer audacity, the daredeviling it took to join the circus as a human projectile.Mr. Thomas, who arrives in Glen Burnie with the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus next week, fulfilled his wish and now has a job that feels, he says, like getting hit by a car.Twice a day, three times on Saturdays, he's propeled out of a cannon by eight tons of force.

Yesterday, Richard Flint's classroom was a circus. The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, to be exact. After four weeks of learning about the history behind the hijinks, teetering tightrope walkers and airborne acrobatics, the students in Flint's adult-education class - "The Circus: Rings Around the World" - peeked behind the curtains of the "Greatest Show on Earth." The group, which had been taking the course through the Johns Hopkins University Odyssey program, mingled with performers and trainers, and toured parts of the arena before yesterday's shows.

105 years of shows. 90,000 pounds of elephants. And a bunch of shoes, size 28EEEEE. For the clowns, of course. When it comes to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus, an entertainment extravaganza that routinely, without being challenged, bills itself as "The Greatest Show on Earth," the numbers alone tell quite a story. There is, for example, 118. That's the number of performers involved in putting on "Fully Charged," the circus show that will be playing at Baltimore's 1st Mariner Arena through April 1. They include 25-year-old ringmaster Brian Crawford Scott, among the youngest in the circus' century-plus history; 2 juggling Fusco Brothers, Emiliano and Maximiliano, whose act includes juggling flaming clubs in the dark while standing back-to-back; and 1 Sean Davis, a clown with a degree (really!

Gerry Kreml, the advance voice of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, died of Alzheimer's disease complications Dec. 4 at her Catonsville home. She was 91. Attired in a leopard-print coat, Mrs. Kreml swept into Baltimore newspaper offices, television and radio stations with handfuls of circus passes in the 1970s. She would typically begin her greeting with, "Darling. How have you been? It's so-o-o-o good to see you. Wait 'til you see the circus this year." She broke gender barriers as a circus promoter who drummed up business weeks ahead of the greatest show.

The circuses are coming to town! That's right, we're talking plural. Over the next week, both the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and Cirque du Soleil will be landing in Baltimore for extended stays. Barnum & Bailey, in fact, is already here — opening night was Wednesday (maybe you were lucky enough to watch the elephants lumber from the B&O Railroad Museum to 1st Mariner Arena the other day). Cirque du Soleil will be pitching its tent on the Westport waterfront and offering its first show April 7. Of course, in a perfect world, you'd be able to catch both shows.

When Maryland-born Irvin Feld bought and saved the Greatest Show on Earth and combined it with a European import 33 years ago, he simultaneously gave his audiences a circus extravaganza and its headlining animal trainer. Gunther Gebel-Williams was the golden-haired star with a passion for big cats - Bengal tigers, cheetahs, leopards - inside and outside of the ring. The German-born trainer with the jaunty gait performed for generations of circus goers, Baltimoreans among them, and brought his family into the act as well.