Las Vegas Sun

March 18, 2024

Former member of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus mourns its closing

Las Vegan Jon Weiss: “I want to scream from the top of my lungs how important this art is to America”

Circus Perfromer Jon Weiss

Christopher DeVargas

Jon Weiss, a circus performer formally from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, poses for a photo, Friday May 19, 2017.

Circus Perfromer Jon Weiss

Jon Weiss, a circus performer formally from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, balances a ladder on his chin, Friday May 19, 2017. Launch slideshow »

Jon Weiss has a solid handshake and a personality as outgoing as the green and blue sequin-covered tuxedo jacket he was wearing.

Weiss has been a performer all his life and spent 25 years with the traveling Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Faced with declining ticket sales after it pulled elephants out of the show, Feld Entertainment, the company that owns Ringling, decided the last show after 146 years will be Sunday night in New York.

For Weiss, it is tough to imagine life without the Ringling circus. Weiss was passionate and, if it’s possible, cheerfully indignant about the loss of the institution he loves. After all, Weiss said, Ringling has existed, in various forms since the middle of the 19th century, roughly as long as baseball.

“Imagine Major League Baseball going away,” he said. “Something that’s been here hundreds of years. Well, Ringling has been around 140 years.

“To take away an American tradition that multiple generations have brought their kids to see? It’s unheard of,” he continued. “How many people are going to be unemployed? How many are you uprooting? The circus trains have all been sold already. There will never be a circus train again. It’s crazy.”

Weiss got his start at Ringling when he was accepted into the circus’ clown college after a 1981 audition, one of 60 chosen from a field of 5,000 applicants.

His first major promotion, becoming the human cannonball, was hard one because of his status in the circus. “I was just a clown,” he said. “Not an act person.”

Unlike clowns, performers in acts like the human cannonball and high wire routines were mostly European, Weiss said, and from families with a circus tradition stretching back six or seven generations. Being a clown, a first generation circus performer and an American counted against him.

“I had all the clowns behind me, with their thumbs up,” he said. “But all the act people were saying ‘He’s never going to do it. He’s only a clown. First generation.’”

And though he was given almost no training and probably faced sabotage ­— the aim of the cannon gave him almost no time to position himself for a solid landing — Weiss nailed it on his first try.

Eventually, Weiss’ career grew and he managed operations and produced special projects for Ringling. He was also the ringmaster for many years.

Beyond being a professional home, the circus was the focus of Weiss’ family life. He married his wife Laura, also a performer, in Ringling's center ring surrounded by other performers and animals in 1986. Their two children grew up largely on the road with the circus.

“When my kid was colicky I would bring him out to see the animals at like 6 in the morning,” he said. “The elephants knew my son and they tooted their trunks and looked forward to seeing him. I just treasure that time to this day. I think if I brought my son to the elephants today, they would still remember him by smell or something.”

But those very same elephants were the reason behind Ringlings’ closure.

In the early 2000s, a legal fight erupted between Feld and animal rights groups that accused Ringling of abusing the elephants. Although Feld won the legal battle in 2014, they ultimately lost the war.

After several major cities banned animal performances, Feld decided to remove elephants from the show. The decision caused a decline in ticket sales “greater than could have been anticipated,” Feld was quoted as saying when he annouced the closure.

In his experience, Weiss said the legal judgement in favor of Feld was correct. Nobody, he said, was treated better than the animals, At each stop of the train and after each performance, they were taken care of before any of the human performers.

“I look at it two ways,” he said. “Yes, it’s better to have more space. It would be great if there was more space for them. But that’s not the reality of what they did and it was all that the animals knew.

“It’s just like my kids. They grew up with the circus and that’s all they knew. Did my kids have sports activities like football and did they socialize with other kids their own age? They did not. And did that bother me? Yes. But they had other things, like being with their parents 24-7. So it’s a trade off.”

“And the animals that were performing loved it. When they heard the music and knew they were going out to perform, they loved it. If an animal was sick and couldn’t go out and perform, they flipped out. They trumpeted and got upset. So I got to observe this in a different way than most people do.”

In all, Weiss said he loved performing in Ringling and is proud of the time he was there.

“The people that I met and the people that I worked with I am so so thankful for," he said. "It made me the person I am today. I came from a broken home. So I’m proud and passionate. I want to scream from the top of my lungs how important this art is to America.”

In 2007, Weiss and his wife left Ringling to work at other, smaller circuses and to create a reality TV show that never got off the ground. To pay the bills, Weiss works for a bathroom remodeling company, dealing largely with the customers, something he says comes naturally to his outgoing performance based personality.

Still, he finds himself wishing he was still in the circus. Performing, he says is therapeutic for both the audience and the entertainer.

It’s why he find himself balancing ladders on his chin when he is shopping for bathroom fixtures for his job. And it’s why, outside of work, his life still centers around performing and circus-like acts.

Weiss has a few projects in the works, including a charity effort involving service members. He also spends a lot of time at Trapeze Las Vegas where his kids continue practicing the skills they learned while growing up in the circus.

Leaving the circus, he said was “like a divorce.”

“Emotionally, coming off the road and not having this avenue to perform is hard. It’s like medicine for me. When I’m doing it, my whole demeanor changes. Just being in front of an audience every day, there’s really something to be said about it.”

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