Tales of a Teenage Carny

Maybe I wasn’t smoking a cigarette while operating a Ferris wheel missing a few important safety elements, but my first job had strong carny overtones. I worked in a theme park where I dressed up in a furry suit and danced for children in 100-degree heat.

Photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash

At 16 my skill set included twelve years of ballet classes and pretty much nothing else, so my summer jobs prospects were limited. Some kids worked for their parents, but unless I wanted to change a tire at my dad’s automotive store, I was out of luck in that department.

Scanning the newspaper classifieds, I found an audition calling for dancers who were good with children. Hoping that since children were mentioned the audition probably wasn’t catfishing for strippers I went and a few pirouettes later I had the job.

I raked in a whopping seven dollars an hour, which was bank in the late 1990s. The money was great, but the job perks were even better. It turns out when dancing in a costume maintaining an internal temperature above 120 degrees your employer has to give you frequent breaks so as not to accidentally kill you. Thus for every show, we performed we received an equal amount of time off to rehydrate and cool down in our dressing rooms.

When you give teenagers free time with a bunch of furry costumes, and you should just assume they will be up to no good. We invented…